Tag archives: htc

Ice Cream Sandwich on the HTC Desire

I got my HTC Desire back at the beginning of 2010, my second Android phone because I liked the Hero so much. It came with Froyo and HTC made a Gingerbread update available in 2011.

The Desire only has 512MB of flash memory, when HTC made the Gingerbread update they repartitioned the flash to make more space for /system and less for /data, one problem with this is that there’s now only 147MB available for /data.

Because on this I’ve always had to run a tight ship app wise on my Desire, HTC bundled Facebook and Flash with their ROM, these took up a lot of space on /data.

I stumbled across this thread over at xdadevelopers, Sandvold and others have been working on getting ICS working on the Desire and as it turns out they’ve done one hell of a job!

Ice Cream Sandwich
Ice Cream Sandwich

I grabbed the latest ROM from http://www.sandvold.as, rooted my phone with Revolutionary and set to work.

A few minutes later I had ICS on my Desire, it’s still very much in beta but it’s running Android 4.0.3 with pretty much full hardware support and it has more free space in /data, but wait, this is where Apps2SD comes to the rescue!

Apps2SD makes your phone think your SD card is part of the internal storage and essentially extends /data onto it so everything to do with an application and system caches can be stored there! So as long as you have a class 4 or above card in your phone it really does help extend the life of the Desire.

A few issues…

It’s beta and it seems to have a few issues but nothing to stop me using it every day…

  • After A2SD has been installed the ring and notifications tones are fairly quiet.
  • The camera shutter sound is always on, even when the phone is set to silent.
  • Sometimes when you press and hold a key on the keyboard for the pop up shortcuts you have to move your finger well away from the character you want to select to actually select it.
  • No video recording or panorama in the Camera app.
  • No USB mass storage mode support, ICS is supposed to support MTP on Windows but that doesn’t work either. You can however reboot to ClockworkMod recovery and enable USB mass storage mode there.
  • Sometimes the Screen Lock enables itself immediately when you put the phone to sleep even if it is set to lock 2 minutes after sleep.

Dropbox

I remember being at college and having to carry a plastic box full of 3.5″ floppy disks around with me. Every so often fluff from the deepest, darkest corners of the earth would infiltrate the shutter and… Abort, Retry, Fail? Shit, all my (hard) work consumed.

A few years pass and USB flash drives arrive on the scene, although they started out expensive, slow and lacking in any great capacity they we’re much more durable than floppy disks and as time went on physical size decreased, storage space and speed increased exponentially.

So for the last few years I’ve been carrying around a 16GB OCZ Rally2, it’s battered and I’ve lost the plastic cap that keeps the USB connector free from dust but it works and it’s quick. Then one day I was walking to work and I found a USB flash drive on the pavement, I picked it up and wondered if I could reunite it with its owner. Plugging it in to a virtual machine in a sandbox I tried to see if I could identify who it belonged to, it had a few Word documents on it but nothing that would help me identify the owner.

I started to think about all the personally identifiable information I had on my flash drive, my CV, letters to my bank, job applications, all things I wouldn’t really want people to read if for whatever reason I mislaid the drive. Looking around the Internet I decided upon the not so elegant solution of creating an encrypted partition on the drive using TrueCrypt, it did the job but I had to rely on being able to install TrueCrypt on any machine I needed to access the encrypted files from.

Recently I stumbled upon Dropbox, a web based file hosting service. They offer a freemium service that gives 2GB of storage which can be increased by referring users to the site and they’ll double the referral bonus space for users registering with an academic email address (this also works for .ac.uk addresses).

Once registered you download the client app, install it and choose a place on your computer to display a shared folder, anything you drop into the folder is synchronised to Dropbox and it appears on any other machine or device you have the software installed on.

What I really like about the service is just how many Operating Systems and devices are supported, I can share files between my Mac, my Windows 7 PC which dual boots to Ubuntu and my Android smart phone. The connection is over SSL and all the files stored on Dropbox are encrypted.

A few years ago, this type of service just wouldn’t have been practical, we’ve got a 20Mbit Internet connection at home and I’m lucky enough to be connected to an academic network at 155Mbit at work so moving files about is virtually seamless. I carry my smart phone with me everywhere so I can grab files on the go plus Dropbox can be accessed through any web browser if you don’t have the rights to install the client.

I don’t have to worry about losing my flash drive, damaging the USB connector or just how long the flash memory chips inside it are going to last, everything is stored on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and it just works!

Not only does Dropbox let me keep private files, I can share any of my files with other people, I can create a Public folder that anyone can have access to and I can even upload images to galleries and give people access without them having to have a Dropbox account.