The Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) has got to be one of the most anticipated Android phones of 2011. There are already plenty of excellent reviews of the SGS2 (some listed at the end of this post), so I will not write yet another post to review the phone. What I’ll do, instead, is to share my experiences with the SGS2 coming from a Nexus One user. There are big expectations of the SGS2, because it succeeds the Samsung Galaxy…
My Nexus One is over a year old now. My mobile contract is up for renewal. The Nexus One’s hardware specifications are still pretty good, even considering the second Google flagship Nexus S. But there’s always room for improvement, like faster CPU, more memory, longer battery life, more megapixels, etc. Perhaps, even more hardware like adding a front-facing camera or NFC, things that only became standard expectations on the Android platform much after the Nexus One was launched.
There was a problem with my Nexus One. After reading so much about HTC Singapore’s service, I was quite apprehensive about claiming the warranty repair service for mine. This is particularly since my Nexus One is unlocked, as I’ve read so much online about how other people had a very hard time claiming warranty for defects that could not possibly have been caused by rooted software. My experience, however, was quite different, and I must say that I’m both surprised…
I finally got around to baking Gingerbread. Not the edible sort. But Android 2.3, based off Cyanogen’s git repositories, for the Nexus One. With the final CM6.1 already released, and Gingerbread sources also available publicly, much development attention has already turned toward the upcoming CM7. My nightly automatic builds of CM6 from git repositories have started to stagnate (i.e. little material changes)… so I thought at some point I should start to dip my feet into Gingerbread too.
You probably already know that I’m building my own ROM. Nothing really fancy. It’s just building from other people’s sources, picking things I like. There are two main things I want to make better on my phone: Improving battery life, and improve user responsiveness. Battery life is easy to understand. Just make the phone last longer without recharging. User responsiveness, on the other hand, is often confused with performance. I don’t need a fast phone (but fast, of course, is…
I’ve been using the original HTC nylon pouch to hold my Nexus One. It’s the pouch that came with the Nexus One. While the pouch does protect the phone very well (yup, I’ve dropped the phone twice already), my main complaint about it is that its exact fit makes it difficult to take the phone out of the pouch, and quite impossible to do so with just one hand. The phone became very inconvenient to access when I had only…
It’s not so much about being able to listen to FM radio that I’m excited about. In fact, I don’t imagine I would do much of radio listening. (Perhaps it might be because I couldn’t previously, and now that I can, maybe I might start doing so.) It is about this newfound FM radio functionality on the Nexus One that was not marketed to have such a feature, and until today, I couldn’t use to listen to FM radio. It…
I was preparing to write a preview of CyanogenMod 6 (CM6) before it became officially released. But alas, by the time I got around to it, CM6 is now officially released. The pre-release alphas, release candidates and nightly builds have been circulated around for quite some time now. I’ve been following the development and for the last several days, noted that activity, in terms of updates, had been slowing down. Seemed like things were winding down for the final release….
I’ve been struggling to build CyanogenMod ROM from source for my Nexus One. It’s actually not very difficult once you’ve figured out how to do it. That’s the biggest hurdle: figuring out how to do it, because it is not easy when the various guides on the Internet are often incomplete, inaccurate, or just simply out-dated. So, I’ve decided to put together what I’ve learnt into a how-to guide for the benefit of other like-minded users. Of course, given that…
No, it’s not the dessert. Well, actually it is, but it isn’t the real thing. So there’s nothing to worry about. I suppose only Android users will understand what I’m talking about. Yes, that means I’ve caught up with the bleeding edge again. Android 2.2, in the form of CyanogenMod’s 6.0.0 pre-alpha2, is finally in my phone. Oh, I’ve been trying various builds previously for like just 10 minutes or so before I revert. But now it’s working quite well,…
