A new OS for your Android mobile?


Just been sent a link to this interesting open source news – that I have an option to replace my current Android OS on my T-Mobile G1 with a firmware alternative called CyanogenMod. That doesn’t happen every morning! Note that the controversy about including Google apps, which appears to have been resolved..

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for four families of cell phones—HTC Dream (marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US, and Era G1 in Poland) and HTC Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G in the US, DoCoMo HT-03A in Japan and Vodafone Magic in the UK, Germany among some other states.), the Motorola Droid[2], and the Google Nexus One.[3]

CyanogenMod is a community-based distribution of the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android-based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones, including support for FLAC Lossless Audio, multi-touch, the ability to store and run downloaded applications from the microSD card, compressed cache (compcache), a large APN list, a reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, as well as other enhancements. CyanogenMod was also the first mobile OS to incorporate BFS as the task scheduler, a change that has been merged into experimental branches in the official Android source tree.[4] CyanogenMod claims to increase performance and reliability over official firmware releases.

Testing out a new Android app


Forgive this short post I just wanted to check out how easy it is to publish from the Denmark Arms watching Kilmarnock vs Celtic using the new Android app for WP. Once I’d got the xmlrpc.php trick sorted it seems fine!

Yes, I did add the image above from the comfort of my PC!

Chrome is the new black?


oh yes, believe the slow-burn-hype, Google’s Chrome is only the new OS *you’ve* been waiting for;-) http://poprl.com/jW (..”The elephant in the room is that Google is an OS.”). Part of the drive to market the new Google Android phone perhaps?

Microsoft’s Gary Turner, writing on the ICAEW’s IT Counts social network (soon to launch to the public) gives an insider’s view of the elephant:

- Google as / with its own operating system – is a four year old (plus) debate/theory/point of view/reality. Neither news nor an elephant.

- The definition of what we mean by “operating system” is starting to change for users, and radically changed long ago inside the research and development teams of Microsoft, Google and anyone else with chips in the game.

- Parking code / value inside the guise of a browser vehicle is an interesting way to deliver your future-OS/whatever/foundation play to an audience that still thinks of the web in terms of browsers and websites.

- Software and tech companies are often smarter than they get credit for/disclose in advance.