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Use this link at SDX, will save you time later for making 2.1 feel like home.

SDX-Developers Official Android DE03 (2.1)

I’ve got it all installed with all my own tweaks, so far so good. Will know in a day or so how it all shakes out compared to the leaked pre-release versions.

** So far, I’m seeing better wi-fi lock and faster GPS lock, noticeable so far.

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I’ve had a minor annoyance since I first got my Samsung Moment. The buttons on the body ‘wake’ the phone if carried in my pocket or in a sleeve case and this kills the battery. Batt life can be just a few hours as a result.

I’ve been poking around at various hacks people have done and came accross a key layout hack. I modified the button assignments so that nothing will wake the phone aside from sliding it open.

Easy fix and makes the phone more complete for me. This is the advantage of having platforms open if not at least “opened” where people can tinker and exchange ideas.

Thanks SDX …again

SDX post I made as a HOWTO

Here’s the gory details in a diff output for anyone running 2.1 on their Moment. The principle will be the same but the name of the key layout file will vary with your version. Your phone will have to be rooted and you will need to understand editing and moving files on and off your phone. _Do_A_Backup_ of the original file so you can undo the change if you want to.

The file is in /system/usr/keylayout/ The diff is showing you from which lines I removed the WAKE_DROPPED statements to disable waking the phone with those buttons.


diff s3c-keypad-rev0040.kl s3c-keypad-rev0040.kl.orig
19c19
< key 17 VOLUME_UP
---
> key 17 VOLUME_UP WAKE_DROPPED
28c28
< key 25 VOLUME_DOWN
---
> key 25 VOLUME_DOWN WAKE_DROPPED
89,90c89,90
< key 248 CALL
< key 249 ENDCALL
---
> key 248 CALL WAKE_DROPPED
> key 249 ENDCALL WAKE_DROPPED


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A LOT has changed with the hacking of the Samsung Moment since I last posted any updates.

SDX Developers is the site for keeping up with the pace of things. Don’t take anything I note here to be current, things change sometimes more than once a day so I may mention something that turns out to be not such a great idea for your phone. If you are interested in playing with all of the mods, start your reading there.

I just finished installing what seems to be the leaked Android 2.1 beta release for the Moment. It ships currently with 1.5 on the phone, so hopefully this adds yet some more stability to the phone and some new and interesting features.

Right now I’m just running the more or less ‘stock’ image without any fancy ROM mods to it, to get the hang of anything that is different.

Immediately the thing I notice is that the built in gmail now supports multiple gmail accounts and also Google apps accounts….this in itself is worth doing for me. I can now have all my G* accounts aggregated in a common interface. If only gmail itself had account aggregation for the web interface…..

Some nice cosmetic updates for the calendar widget and a few other things are immediately obvious too. They aren’t as hideous as they were with 1.5.

I’ve only had it installed for an hour or so at this point, but no immediate instability issues are obvious. There is an organized bugs report on the SDX site, so definitely have a good look at that. Evidently one of the worst is that streaming of media seems to be broken for people. I really only SMS/email/phone for 99% of my use with Twitter/FB and web browsing, and all of that is working for me so far.

I still haven’t found a particularly great case solution for the phone. Aside from belt cases, which I personally hate, slip cases seem to mash down on the buttons and kill the battery dead in 3hrs of being in my pants pocket. I’m still using a microfiber sunglasses soft pouch to carry it around in. It’s really not that bad as the cloth is handy for cleaning the screen, though it looks a bit goofy to pull the phone out of a baggie all the time.

So onward SDX goes with 2.1. It will be very interesting to see what they can do with the performance of the phone once Samsung releases the sources to the kernel so they can get fiddling with compiler optimizations. So far, if anything, the phone might even be a bit more responsive with the version I’m running compared to the 1.5 hacked release I had on previously. So things are good.

Android at this point is pretty solid and a lot more addicting than I’d imagined it would be. As it gets cooked a bit more, it should be really something. For now though, it’s still a bit of a ‘hobby’ to fiddle with. For a business type user, I’d still say stick to your Blackberry if you really need it to ‘just work’ without any other level of understanding.

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Only new to me, but this thing really impressed me. This is Slide Keyboard an alternate keyboard for Android phones. I was going to do an alternate layout for AnySoft Keyboard (which is also a great alternate, better than stock) but stumbled on this. Perfect

You tap any given key to select the center character and to select the alternate quadrant characters, you just swipe in that direction. It’s perfect for vertical mode one hand typing.

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So I put this off for a while and I’m a bit late to the game for getting an Android based smart phone. I decided on the Samsung Moment for a few reasons.

I’m a Sprint customer so for an Android phone I was limited to two choices at this time, an HTC Hero or the Samsung Moment. The Hero is a bit slower, but generally has a reputation for having a slicker default theme/skin to the OS. The Moment is faster as it is a newer generation of CPU and runs at 800MHz and has a generic 1.5 release of Android on it as stock.

The biggest deciding factor for me was that the Moment has a slide out keyboard. As I do a ton of texting and email, sometimes more than a page of text at a time, a ‘real’ keyboard was important for me.

The fact it has a more generic Android release was also a prime motivator as the phone manufacturers love to promise timely updates as the OS is updated, but seldom deliver. I figured sticking to a platform that supports the generic load would make installing hacked releases a lot easier in the long run.

For the highlights as I usually do, I plowed into any available material I could find on the Moment and Android in general. I already knew there was quite a lot of hacking on the kernel and OS in general going on so I dug in to figure all of that out.

So far, I’ve modified the kernel and base OS in a few ways and have come up to the following configuration.

Stock Sprint CL14 release of the firmware which contains numerous patches and bug fixes. Modified Zeffie Kernel ZE13.2 and I’ve installed SetCPU from the marketplace to overclock the phone.

The performance with this latest update is indeed noticeably faster. I have the profiles configured to throttle on-demand with max speed while plugged in at 1600MHz and 1066 for when the charge is over 40%. I also set the throttling to 800MHz if the battery temp gets high and lowered it quite a lot while the phone is ‘sleeping’.

Only time will tell how the stability is and battery life is overall with the ramped up specs, but initial impression is that it’s stable. I’ll know more about battery life in a day or two.

I came from being a pretty dedicated Blackberry user and had already made the mistake of trying the failure of the Samsung Instinct, which had a completely miserable OS with a lot of bugs and an unusable user interface with horrific lag to touch screen input. Luckily Sprint got me back on a Blackberry Curve with less drama than it usually takes to get customer service from them .

Initial impressions of the Android system are rather incredible. I’m a very heavy SMS and email user and this phone is really great for this. Gmail ‘native’ is supported in a push form for a single Gmail account and this syncs not just the mail but all my contacts from Gmail as well as my Google calendar bi-directionally. Perfect. I’d run Google Sync on the Blackberry so wiping it and firing up the Moment just brought all my contacts back automagically.

For corporate mail, Sprint includes Moxier Mail to interface with exchange. This also worked perfectly and is in push mode with the corporate Exchange server. I get my contacts/mail/calendar all through this app.

For my remaining other gmail and assorted email accounts, there is a POP and IMAP capable app also installed and I have that set to poll via IMAP for my other accounts. This too is working very well.

For SMS, the stock client is fine, but I stumbled upon Handcent SMS which delivers a whole pile of enhancements vs the stock Android client. You can customize all manner of notifications and interface colors and layouts. Highly recommended.

All the apps can be installed simply by using the Android Marketplace which can be searched/surfed via the phone, or you can alternately use Androlib to do some searching from your desktop.

A LOT of really decent free apps are out there…which is great. The Blackberry store was pretty awful. Almost nothing free was decent for the Blackberry.

Other apps that I’ve installed.

• Where – Uses GPS to locate local stores/shops/movies etc and has other location based features
• Mechanic – A file browser, app killer and backup utility
• Crickets – Makes cricket sounds
• Google Shopper – Can read bar codes and book/album covers
• WiFi Buddy – Scans and manages wi-fi connections
• Seesmic – A _great_ twitter client
• S2 Calendar Widget – Option to the built in calendar widget
• Assorted other widget toggles – single button widgets to turn on off silent mode/GPS/Wi-Fi etc.

The list of apps to try is just about endless.

I would tell you NOT to get into hacking your Android phone unless you are willing to deal with the consequences. As I was writing this, my phone locked up, likely due to the CPU clock settings I’m still fiddling with. To me, this is part of the fun. If you are an appliance type user, don’t even bother doing this. You can lose your data, and possibly do permanent damage to your phone….so if you do this…don’t come crying to me.

That’s enough rambling for now.

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