Some people have asked me to review my experience with Nexus One as a user in Canada.

Here be my first impressions.

See the updates below if you want to keep your root.

I just received the following text from Rogers, and as it claims my data access has been disabled. Since I am running CyanogenMod I never had the 911 issues that the stock Rogrers firmware experienced.

    Rogers/Fido Safety Message: URGENT Reminder 911 Calls HTC Dream
    software update: Mandatory software update is now available to help
    ensure 911 calls are completed from your phone. Please go immediately
    to rogers.com/dreamsoftwareupdate on your PC to download.

    In order to help ensure 911 calls are completed internet access was
    temporarily disabled on your phone at 01/24/10 6:00AM EST. To
    reactivate internet service, please complete your software update
    immediately. Upon completion, internet access will be re enabled
    within 24 hours.

    For users of Macintosh and Windows 7, please call 1-
    888-764-3771(1-888-ROGERS1) for update instructions.

    We apologize for the inconvenience but we prioritize customer safety
    above all.

So I called rogers to get it straightened out and get my data access back. However since everyone in the country that has a Dream or Magic got their service cut… you can imagine I wasn’t the first one to call and complain. When the automated system told me that I would have to wait for 30 minutes I hung up. My time is a bit more important than that.

Ben Selinger wrote about his experiences and it seems to me that Rogers doesn’t want people with phones they don’t control as customers.

Well, this is one more strike for Rogers, and one more reason to leave. Let’s hope WIND is all that it’s cracked up to be.

This is not as smooth as [rooting the G1]{rooting-g1}, and comes no where close as [my second attempt at rooting the G1]{simple-rooting-g1} (ie the easy way).

WARNING: I’ve said it before, but this time I want to stress it… this may brick your phone! Until I figured things out and found the right pages I had a non-booting phone.

I finally got my [Cupcake to build]{baking-cupcake}. The next step is to try to build something far tastier… naturally that something has to be the Cyanogen Cupcake/Donut blend.

Grab a coffee, sit back, and read on to find out how to build your own CyanogenMod Android ROM from Cyanogen’s Git repositories…

I’ve previously written about [how to root an android phone]{rooting-g1}, and mentioned that there was a better way which I had not tried yet. Well, I did try it today.

The procedure written by Zinx from ZenThought exploits a recently found bug in the Linux kernel (see CVE-2009-2692).

Today I wanted to see if I could build a bootable image for my Tmobile G1.

This post has been updated a few times. I had a hard time building the master branch. The cupcake branch built, but failed to run. Next I tried android-sdk-1.5_r3, this seems to boot but the phone is not really functional. Next attempt was to build cupcake and not change the kernel. Duh!

I now [have]{into-android} a [sim-unlocked]{sim-unlocking-g1} [rooted]{rooting-g1} T-mobile G1 phone running Android. I’ve installed the Cyanogen v3.6.8.1 firmware on it, and upgraded the recovery image to Cyanogen’s pimped out version.

I am really impressed with the cell phone and MID aspects of the device. But I bought it so I could do some hacking.

All right… so what else can I do with this thing? It sounds logical that I now write a Hello world application.

One of the phones I picked up on eBay was SIM-locked (see my [previous post]{into-android}) and I had to go through the process of unlocking it so I could use it on my local cell network.

WARNING: It worked for me, but it may not for you. This may very well brick your phone! In some cases you will only have 3 chances (in others 10) to unlock, failing to do so can damage your SIM card or the phone.

Still here? Let’s get started…

In my continued quest to learn more and start hacking on the Android phones, I’ve recently rooted my Android based HTC Dream (aka Tmobile G1) phones.

I’ll start by explain the terminology. There are two ways in which the phones can be unlocked:

• so called rooting, which I describe in this post, involves replacing the bootloader so that the phone can use community generated firmware images, aka ROM’s.

• there is also unjailing or unlocking the phone so that it can be used with any SIM card on any GSM network; and I’ll talk about that in due time.

I am a late comer to the Android craze. I got to play with one recently at the Linux Symposium in Montreal, and I decided I have to get one. I ended up picking up a pair from ebay – one to hack on, and one to carry in my pocket.

I’d like to work on the core platform and not so much the apps.

Anyway, my storey is boring so far.

Below are the interesting links I found so far while researching the platform.