Rooting your EVO/INcredible/Droid in 2011

There are some slight changes to the way we used to root the EVO et. al, but not TOO different. I did notice some confusion with the instructions so generously provided by ZanzDroid in the IRC Chan. #unrevokedtest. But I did add a few for those who need even more complete directions in a hope to get these to be fool proof. So, here they are again, but with my own additions:

(PS: If you see or recall the separate “unrEVOked Forever” root, ignore it. UnrEVOked3 INCLUDES unrEVOked Forever. PSS: You MUST go to the IRC channel to get the links to some of the files, as it is a security measure that someone can explain to you one day. You can get there by following this link and creating a log in: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=unrevokedtest)

1. Install HTC Sync on your PC (from the “HTC Sync” diretcory on your sdcard), or the URL below. This will also  install required HTC Drivers.

          a. [i486Girl added] This is a NEW thing from last year, where HTC Sync was the devil and you were told to not have it, or uninstall it if you did. Now, the HTC Drivers from the HTC Sync program are utilized by unrevoked3 so you are instructed to INSTALL it, then UNINSTALL it.

-You can also download it from: http://www.htc.com/www/supportdownloadlist.aspx?p_id=312&act=sd&cat=all

 2. Uninstall HTC Sync from your computer. This will leave the HTC Drivers on your computer.

3. (Lynix and Mac users, ignore this step, and skip to step 4) Install the unrEVOked modified HBOOT Drivers. Follow the directions here:

http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.p…not a good link here, for reference only. Go to the IRC channel listed above to get it.

4. Boot into NORMAL running mode (how you typically have it sitting in your purse or holster), and CHECKMARK these two items:

Turn on USB debugging. (Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Development)

Turn on Unknown sources (Menu -> Settings -> Applications)

4b.. (Windows users only) Go to your “Device Manager” and find the “My HTC” driver. Right click on it and select “update driver”. When windows asked you to find the driver itself, do NOT let it. Instead, tell you YOU “have disk” or “will look for it yourself, and point it to where ever you extracted the android drivers you downloaded (if windows tells you the drivers are already updated, you failed to tell it to let YOU chose the driver files. do it again). You can simply point it to the “Android USB Driver” folder, as it will know which individual drivers to use within that folder.

5. Plug your phone into the computer in NORMAL running mode and choose “Charge Only” on the phone (someone also suggested to check mark “remember this”)

6. Run the reflash-package.exe (make sure you run it as Administrator if you aren’t already an administrator in Windows) or as root (Linux/Mac) (again, get the link for this reflash exe file in the IRC channel mentioned above).

6b. An unrevoked3 splash screen will come up and will do the rest. It will tell you what it is doing, but you should see “pushing Recovery” immediately, and from there it will tell you what else it is doing. It will reboot your device at least twice. Wait until the unrevoked3 splash screen reports “Done” before unplugging the phone.

My EVO got run over by a car. Now to unroot and go back to stock ROM.

And so I went almost a year without having to use the warranty service. I wasn’t too upset though, because I had temporarily lost it (which is how it got run over) and was just happy to have gotten it back in my hands given I did the stupid thing of removing the security feature to prevent access by anyone who woudl happen upon it. This was my warning, even though I kept thinking I would do it soon.

Amazingly, the screen was throughly shattered, but the touch screen still worked. I could swipe through the app drawer and other screens as spiffy as I did when the screen was not spidered with shatter marks all over it. However, I removed the Invisishield screen protector from it and could feel the edges of each of the hundred cracks as I ran my finger across them. Also, I could hear a quiet static ‘crackling’ sound as my finger ran across each crack.

So, now I had to unroot the phone in order to send it back to Lockline and have a new one shipped to me. But I didn’t have a whole lot of time to search for the best method, and it ended up taking me two days to find the correct one.

First, you will find that you will the Sprint RU file (which is an EXE and requires you to connect your phone to your PC and run it from there), or an equivalent .ZIP file re-packaged by a cook somewhere to work from your SD card and not require the problematic communication between your PC and phone. I recommend the second method because of the issues I just explained with the EXE file. I was instructed to download HTC Sync, then simply run the EXE and all would be fine. If you can do that, more power to you, but if you have to do the SD card method, here’s how.

 

 

First, you are likely rooted by Unrevoked FOREVER, and thus your radio is set to S-OFF. You need to get that back to S-ON before you try to unroot. Unrevoked has created a zip file specifically to do this, and you can download it here: http://downloads.unrevoked.com/forever/current/unrevoked-forever-son.zip

When you apply it, you want to reboot into recovery mode and you want to see the text “S-ON” at the top line of text. If it still says “S-OFF”, don’t panic. Just re-apply the unervoked-forever-son.zip patch until it does say “S-ON”. it may take two or five times to ‘take’.

Now, find PC31IMG.zip. Most the sites that are hosting it (RapidShare, 4Share, etc. for example) make you wait a couple of minutes unless you pay for quicker access. Go ahead and wait, it’s legit, or pay them to get instant access.  Here is a link to 4Shares 90-second wait:

http://www.4shared.com/get/5U4M4eVi/PC36IMG.html

That link may change after a while. Not sure, but if so, just search for PC31IMG.zip and grab it.

Now, get that PC32IMG.zip to your SD card however you wish, but make sure it’s on the ROOT of the card. Now, when you boot up your phone, boot it up the reovery way by holding down the ‘volume down’ while holding down the power button, and don’t let go until the white 4G screen disappears and you can see the BOOT screen.

Some say the EVO should see the PC31IMG.zip file and ask you if you want to load it (hit yes if so), but I had to go into the Recovery menues and select “apply zip from SD card” and selected the PC32IMG.zip file.

Now, the screen should be white, and will list a few lines quickly, the first two saying something akin to “PC31IMG.* not valid” or something alarming like that. Don’t worry. It’s the last line you want to see saying “Updating” (or it may ask you if you want to update with the PC31IMG.zip, in which case you say yes).

It will do that a while, then eventually it will ask you “apply updates?”, say Yes.

Then it will reboot eventually to the standard symbol of a phone with an arrow pointing into it. It will do that for a while, then reboot into the stock image.

Now, I had to walk away from my phone once during my first attempt, and for some reason, it didn’t take and booted into the Cyanogen7 mod I was running before. So I re-did all ths steps, and that time it worked.

 

 

 

 

 

EVO 3D. Like? If not, leave this site immediately.

What’s there not to like?

Having been a Sprint customer since 1999, I was aware that they never had the cool phones… it was always Verizon, T-Mobile, or At&T that would be the carrier slated on the RSS feeds I’d get about upcoming phones. I felt like Sprint was always dropping the ball (and their losing market share seemed to back my suspicions).

 

Excited? Better be, or leave this site immediatley.

But Sprint FINALLY came into the respectable spotlight last June (2010) with the release of the uber-powerful and uber-capable EVO 4G, the best phone of all the carriers, and still one of the top few. Now, scheduled for about a year later (June? ohpleaseohpleaseohplease), they are to top the EVO by releasing the EVO on steroids… the EVO 3D… now, to be honest, the ONE thing that is lost is the 8MP camera, where most phones have 5MP. That has been downgraded to a 5MP, but TWO of them in stereo for 3D. I’ve seen it argued before that anything above 5MP’s is not necessary, especially in a phone, and to be honest, I have loved the 8MP of my EVO. But I think I’d be okay trading it out for 3D capability with dual 5MPs. Also, there *might* be something about using both cameras to shoot two different parts of the picture (interlaced, perhaps) which in effect would make a 10MP picture. But I don’t want to get my hopes up. However, at the very least, it will allow the user to shoot 3D film. Now that’s just cool, even if not applicable to anything we can think of right now.

But everything else is an upgrade.. the 3D screen will make it so you see 3D without having to wear glasses.

This is an awesome technology I witnessed once in a Naval flight simulator at Whidbey Island AFB. I was amazed then and am still amazed how realistic the runway looked without glasses and in full 3D inside that simulator, even though I was staring at a wall no deeper than 3 feet. So, I already know how this 3D is going to look and can’t wait.

The OS will be Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which is an awesome upgrade from the EVO 4G which was OTA’d up to 2.2 (Froyo). This won’t be *as* exciting for me since I root my phones as soon as I get them, and I’ve been running a Gingerbread ROM (Cyanogen) for the last couple of months and so I’ve already been through my exiting “oh this new feature is cool’ phase with it.

The processor is going from a single core 1GHz to a dual-core 1.2GHz. That should have obvious performance increase, which will be pretty cool given the current single core 1GHz is quite alright in the spiffy-quick department.

All in all, though, the timing will be perfect, as since I am a “premier” customer with Sprint (which means I have been a customer longer than 10 years and/or my bill is over $100/month), I get to upgrade my phone at the New Customer rate (and all the perks) once per year. I got the EVO 4G on June 4th of last year. Here’s hoping the EVO 3D is released June 4th or earlier this year.

So really, what’s there not to like?

ROOTING your EVO (Desire, Incredible) and avoiding confusion.

First, let’s get the inevitable questions you will have *after* rooting out of the way:

1. To confirm you have root when done, look for the Ninja icon on your apps list, called “Superuser Permissions”.  If she’s there, you’re rooted. She looks like this:

2. Also, when you click on the Ninja, you’ll see a blank screen titled “Superuser Permissions”. It is SUPPOSED to be blank. As soon as one of your apps need superuser (root) permissions, it will show up in this screen.

3. When you attempt to use any app that needs the Internet, you will likely have spotty Internet Access for around 20 to 30 minutes after you root your device. Some apps will access the Internet fine, others might give errors. This is okay, and is due to the provisioning functions still occurring with the network.

4. Wi-fi tethering? Yes, this will now allow you to have the HotSpot feature free of charge (I know this because I just tested it tonight using two laptops connected to my EVO’s wi-fi sharing it’s 4G connection, and made a voice call while they were both doing speed tests [Sprint’s 3G technology cannot do simultaneous voice and data, but 4G technology does l), but you do NOT use the actual HotSpot app provided by your carrier. Instead, you can get the android-wifi-tether, located here:

ANDROID WIFI TETHER: http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/downloads/list  I am using the latest version (even though it is deemed ‘experimental’, it’s quite stable) which is the version dated Sept. 5 and is titled (Wireless Tether for Root Users 2.0.5-pre9 *** EXPERIMENTAL *** ). It’s a direct install to your phone. Files that are in .apk are direct installs to Android phones, like EXE’s are to PC’s. Once installed, just look for the green icon called ‘Wireless Tether” near the bottom of your applications screen, and  use it like you would before. You have a 4G hot spot for multiple devices and the ability to make and receive simultaneous voice calls while sharing the 4G connection.

5. Remove bloatware/Sprint apps?  Yes, download Titanium Backup, and go into it’s settings and set it to “Chuck Norris” mode. Then use the uninstall apps feature in it. The first thing you should do, however, after installing Titanium backup, is to click the ‘Problems?’ button at the bottom of the initial app screen. That will install the latest version of BusyBox to make the app work with superuser access.

6. And here’s a rooting issue that has arisen a few times in the unrevokedtest IRC channel:

If you are getting an error similar to “Main Version is Older!”, this is your fix: Depending on your phone, you likely have a zip file (left over from a prior rooting attempt/process) on your SD card that you will need to delete.

For EVO’s, that file name is PC36IMG.ZIP

For Desire’s, the file name is PB99IMG.ZIP

For the Incredible, the file name is PB31IMG.ZIP

If you have another model, try looking for a similarly named file onyour SD card, and delete it. Then restart the unrevoked root process.

And here are the instructions on what you need to do BEFORE starting the rooting process:

If you don’t already have the files, know this: The files you need are listed at the top of the IRC channel, located on the web at http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=unrevokedtest (Or in your favorite IRC Client at irc.freenode.net, channel unrevokedtest). You will need the actual unrevoked3 (3.21) file which is named “reflash.exe” and is downloadable from the link in the channel that starts with http://www.joshuawise.co…. (by request of the DEVs for security reasons, I will not post the full URL here, you must go to the IRC channel to get it).  The other file you will need is the Android USB Driver file (also listed at the top of the IRC page) that you can download here: http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/windows_hboot_driver_install

Once you have those two files, follow the pre-root steps I have listed a few paragrpash down, lest you doom yourself to frustration and find yourself back in the IRC channel asking “Why isn’t my phone rooting?”. 

7. How risky is it?  It’s not. Really. It’s cake. Brickerage reports are nil as of so far. Most issues are with the users diving in too fast before reading a tutorial like this).  But I will tell you this.  Running the test build is very basic and arguebly just one step. It’s the 5 or 6 things you have to do in advance that is confusing everyone. So, here we go:

If you have an EVO with Froyo 2.2, this will work for you fine.

If you have any other HTC (Desire, etc.) running Froyo 2.2, likely it will work for you as well.

If you rooted with unrevoked on 2.1 before, then accepted the 2.2 OTA update (which removed the root access) , you can still do this. I know because that is what my situation was.

Step 1: Backup, not because your phone gets wiped (it doesn’t) but more because it’s just a good idea whenever doing anything more intense to your phone. Unrevoked3 does not erase your phone settings.  If you don’t want to search around for a good backup app, use the free Miq by Best Buy Mobile from the app store. It’s apparently a company that gives you seemingly unlimited space to back up your pictures, call logs, text messages, etc on their servers.  That’s what I use and it hasn’t balked at my loads of pics and data I’ve been syncing.

 Step 2. Uninstall HTC Sync (if you have it installed).

Step 3. Set phone to enable “USB Debugging”. On the EVO, that would be accomplished by going to: Settings, Applications, Development, USB debugging (make sure it is checkmarked).

Step 4. Install USB drivers (Mac users ignore this step) . How this is accomplished is to expand the USB drivers file (mentioned above) somewhere you will recall. Then put your phone in HBOOT (For EVO’s you to this by turning it off, then turning it back on by holding the power button and volume-down button at the same time). The phone will display some scrolling text, do an SD check, then settle on a menu with options. You then select ‘HBOOT” from those options (on the EVO, you hit the volume-down button 4 times to highlight the HBOOT option). Then plug your phone into the computer via USB. Your computer will then ‘recognize a new device” and will ask you if you want to have Windows look for the drivers (the answer to that will be no), or if you would like to browse for the drivers (the answer to that will be yes). Then browse to the location of the USB driver files you extracted. You need only point to the “Android” folder as Windows will pick the right sub-folder to install the drivers. Once windows tells you that your device has been sintalled, confirm this by looking in your Device Manager. There you should see something akin to ‘Android Phone’ listed. If so, move to the next step:

Step 5. Root (run the ‘reflash.exe’ file aka Unrevoked3)!  A splash screen will open bearing the Unrevoked3 logo, like this one:

Under that logo will be some tiny text which will tell you everything you need to do as it does it’s magic, and will tell you what it is doing while it is doing it, just to keep you in the loop while it’s rooting. Follow any instructions it gives you and in about 4 minutes, you’ll be rooted. As mentioned above, to confirm you are rooted, look for the Ninja icon in your apps list.

Your phone will hang at some spots, but be patient. However, if more than 10 minutes, there was a problem. The beauty of it is, you can just restart the root file and try again. The root program will stop if it can’t root your phone for some reason, and return you back to how it was before you started the root process.

Follow up questions that seem to pop up a lot:

ROMS, ROM Manager:

What are ROMS? Well, all phones ship with their own ROM that the carrier and manufacturer devised for you. It’s the entire interface and coding behind everything your phone does, and can be set to not allow wifi-tethering, for example. but custom ROMS are awesome, because a dev or dev team took the original factory ROM and tweaked it, added useful apps, opened up previously off limits areas, etc.  and then wipes the factory ROM clean and implants their new version of the phone. Typically, the whole phone interface looks the same, or maybe the Dev team will put their own wallpaper up (that you can change,of course), but most of the differences are all the apps they add in for you and other functionality.

It’s a nervous chocie for some, because they realize they won’t get support from HTC if they run a ROM from a dev team. That’s not muchof an issue. In short, the dev team is much more obliged and chomping at the bit to fix any issues that arise, more so than the manufacturer who may or may not get around to providing an update. That’s enough for me to do it, and I did. Right now I am running OMJ’s ROM for EVO. I’m liking it so far.

But here’s the cool, so cool, thing. It used to be when you wanted to install a new ROM on your device, you had to go through the somewhat tedious process of connecting your phone to a PC and flashing it that way. But happy days are here  indeed. Enter: ROM Manager (available on the market, free version is all you need, paid version is donate and get a few nice add ons). ROM Manager allows you to install a ROM *from the phone!!”. That’s right, straight from the phone without  having to connect to a PC. Furthermore, it allows you to swap back and forth, or between three, four, or five ROMS, saving each one as you switch, so it picks up where you left off when you tried out another ROM.  I will say it takes about 5 to 8 minutes to wipe “save” your current ROM, wipe it, then install the next ROM, but c’mon! This is nothing short of awesome!

When you download ROM Manager, it will look a little confusing, but you’ll first want to back up your CURRENT ROM, so you can always go back to it if you want. In fact, if you have enough space on your SD card, you can launch several ROMS and save them all.

But there is one important note: At first, you will get errors that Recovery is not possible, etc. This is because the new rooted phone is still working out the provisioning of Internet services, etc for up to a half hour after you root. So be patient. The functions inside ROM Manager will eventually work.

Hope that helps. I want to give a great big shout out and blow kisses to the unrevoked dev team. You guys are the greatest!

-Please comment below if you see anything in this post that requires a correction.

Old school thievery using “Mabell” technology.

Apparently, an avant-garde scammer thought he could fool a Walmart store clerk, by telephone mind you, to give him the numbers from cash cards, then activate them, and bring in $11,000 dollars.

And apparently, he thought correctly. According to the report, Police are still investigating. One would hope.

I’m thinking the level of stupidity that this required to pull off hints to the clerk being involved somehow. I mean, Walmart employees aren’t THAT stupid, are they?

Read source:

http://www2.nbc4i.com/news/2010/sep/06/suspect-steals-11k-phone-call-walmart-ar-224321/

EVO battery drain? Your root caused it.

…or so some are saying. I did notice that I was indeed getting all the errors others were complaining about, and I had indeed rooted my EVO before getting the 2.2 update. My boyfriend did not root his EVO, and his phone is working fine after the 2.2 update.

Now I will say this, however, for all those smug commenters on various web sites blaming us ‘rooters’ for being *so* irresponsible to do such a  ‘drastic’ thing and we deserve what we get, here is my response: Go back to playing with your iPhone. Just because we give ourselves and are applications deeper access to our system, the worst thing we will have to face (provided we are indeed capable and know what apps can be trusted and which cannot) is to re-set the device. No big deal, we power users can do that, and we’re pretty much at peace with that possiblilty. And I have no problems “admitting” the obvious, as if that’s such a tough thing to do… that HTC released an update that did not factor in the end users who rooted their phones. But that has nothing to do with the EVO being shipped with these issues BEFORE a user ever rooted their device. 

I had not yet rooted my EVO when I first bought it on opening weekend, and when I downloaded Advanced Task Manager, I was able to see non-essential and, quite frankly, worthless (to me) apps like Nascar and SprintTV and AmazonMP3 Store, and about 6 other apps, all running and spawning at will, sometimes without provocation and at other times when I would merely check a text message, or scroll to a second home screen, or perhaps just look at the phone. This was also happening on my boyfriend’s EVO, and it certainly drained our batteries within a few hours. Advanced Task Killer helped this tremendously, and we both were able to get a pretty decent battery life out of the EVO albeit still much shorter than advertised.  Er go, the EVO, or HTC, or Sprint, has some explaining to do regardless, root or no root.

But I’m not so dependent on my root just as of yet so I am about to reset my phone (after I backup my 400+ contacts) to the factory settings soon after this post, then accept the 2.2 update. I will publish the results in this post under ***UPDATE***:

***UPDATE***.  Friday, Aug. 6th, 2010 5:49am EST.

So apparently the factory reset…..isn’t. But close enough I suppose. It erased every bit of data in my contact lists, etc. but mainained the 2.2 kernel. So I suppose I cannot get it back to 2.1 if I wanted. Then again, I might have to play with the boot menu and the 2.1 image may still be in there somewhere.

Nonetheless, upon a brand spanking new fresh install of 2.2, no less than 20 apps were running. Here’s a picture of my EVO’s screen looking at the running apps through the Advanced Task Killer app. It took two pictures to capture both pages of them:

My apologies for the dark pictures, but you get the idea I’m sure. If you’re being specific, that’s FM Radio app partially hidden at the bottom of the 2nd pic and the Voicemail app at the top.

Now, can anyone explain why a fresh Froyo install should have 20 applications running, none of which I launched or used and most of which I will never use? keep in mind this list doesn’t include the services that are running even deeper. Furthermore, killing those apps doesn’t stop them from working. For example, I can kill Gmail and still get email and notifications of new email.

Task Killer is the only thing that saves my battery right now. I have it set to kill everything when the screen turns off, and then I have the screen set to turn off after 3 minutes of no use.  I hope I don’t have to convince anyone that this is unnacceptable. Do I?

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EVO 1.47.651.1 update breaks root. Images.

So while traveling through Wisconsin about an hour ago, my boyfriend’s and my own EVO notified us of the 1.47 update. He documented it as I drove by taking pictures with my EVO of his EVO of the step by step process. He also quickly downloaded a benchmarking app to compare before-and-after performance. Images with captions below. However, as discussed elsewhere, it does indeed break the root access  for tethering. But don’t fear, I am sure developers over at XDA are feverishly coding a work-around for that potentially life-changing annoyance.

The update takes about 6 to 10 minutes total. Some screens seem to hang possibly making the interested user who is watching the process (i.e., power users) try to re-boot. Don’t.

Here is the first pop-up after the initial notification that I clicked on:

After acknowledging the initial notification, this is the first screen.

After clicking OK, it takes you to this screen:

Second Screen showing a progress bar.

Then you will be taken to this minimalist screen.  It appears to hang, as there is no animation or progress bar. But it is working in the back ground. This goes on for a minute or two:

Appears to hang here, but all is ok.

The images were taken in a moving vehicle so please pardon the grainy/blurry shots.

The EVO reboots at this stage, and then returns to this image where the progress bar is really just an animation of a ‘completed process’ with a grayish candy-cane like spinning spiral along the bar. It spins like this for another minute or so:

Spinning candy-cane bar.

The EVO reboots again, but this time with the familiar HTC tones and pixelated Sprint imagery and the “4G” splash screen. However, the EVO hangs on this 4G image for about a minute (the two fingers being held up was my boyfriend capturing a reminder for us when we reviewed these photos that this screen stayed on for 2 minutes:

This screen hangs around for a couple of minutes.

Then this is one more reboot as the HTC finally boots to whatever your normal boot up screen is (in this case, it is his normal live-wallpaper background and slide lock. It is NOT a part of the upgrade)

After the 4G splash screen, settles in to your normal boot up screen.

And then once we opened the slide lock to see our main screens, we were welcomed with this congratulatory screen. However, after doing some benchmarks, we are not sure what we are being congratulated for. Perhaps that our phones didn’t get bricked as some have reported:

I did use Wi-Fi at a relatives home a short while later and was able to upload these pictures and several others (for a total of 24 pictures for a data total of about 40MB) in about 10 -14 minutes (I walked away for a few minutes before it finished uploading, this the time span). I am not sure if that is an improvement as I have not used my relatives Wi-Fi with my phone before this test.

I will post this now, but will edit it shortly (in an hour or 2) showing the before-and-after 1.47 update screen caps and stats for this particular EVO. I wansn’t too impressed, but then again this update wasn’t necessarily supposed to improve performance like Froyo is supposed to to.

Let me know if you had any issues with the EVO 1.47 update.

EVO Battery drain and the Apps that cause it (maybe).

I’ve had and power used the EVO for a week now, and I still love it, but there are a couple of things potential buyers and current owners should know. First, and foremost, the battery and the applications that plague it.

I am still toying with the settings, but if I the ability to control how apps run in the background is not natively configurable, Google will have to provide a patch that does allow a user to ‘set it and forget it’ where they can configure apps to “close (for real) upon exit”.

The battery life is horrid, absolutely horrid, on the EVO. But it may not be the battery that is the problem, and instead how Android keeps the apps running and opens a slew of ostensibly related other apps when just opening one app. For example, your Facebook app will also require your Internet control app to run.  Often, very often but interestingly not always,  other clearly not needed apps spawn such as “MP3 store”,” Sprint navigation”, ‘Voice dialer”, etc, simply by opening the Internet Browser, or Facebook App, or even simply scrolling over to another home screen on your phone (not accessing the Internet at all!). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So this is just my hypothesis, but the notorious battery drain everyone is complaining about *may* be related to the plethora of apps that spawn when you don’t need them, and stay running on the Android OS after you have closed the initial program that absurdly caused them to spawn.

And how did I see these plethora of apps running? That’s another issue that is not too terrible, but Android does not ship with a few apps that I find are essential to using a smart phone. One being a task manager. Granted, there is one but it is buried a few layers deep (i.e.., no direct shortcut in the “apps” page) and it does not show you all the apps that are running. In that regard, you must go to the Android Market (app store) that IS wonderfully pre-installed on your device, and download a task manager. I down loaded the free “Advanced Task Killer” for this job, and it shows me all the apps that are running. Imagine my surprise when I first installed it and ran it to see 15 apps running in the background! 13 of which I was not currently using and had finished using hours before! Advanced Task Killer easily killed all the apps (except itself, of course) and runs terminally resident at the top border of your home screen for easy access. I have almost trained myself to religiously click it and wipe all running apps every time before I begin another application on my device for maximum performance of the app, and to prevent batter y drain. I have to do this each time, as I am flabbergasted at the long list of apps that spontaneously spawn just by looking at my “friends feed” app, for example. Another important note about killing all those apps is that it doesn’t prevent you from using those apps or even cause you to lose functionality (other than dynamic web form input or the last web page you were on, but we expect that to happen when we close our web browsers) when you killed them, nor does it turn off your Internet connection, ability to receive email, text, Google Talk, etc. notifications, when you kill the all these apps.  It is this reason that I do not understand why Android keeps these apps running in the background.

Once I spend a whole day on the beach where I have religiously killed every app other than the one I am using not only after using them, but AS I use them and killing all the ‘piggy backing’ apps that spawn from launching it, I will know if this is the sole cause of the heavy battery drain.

Fortunately, I am always near some form of electricity (car, home, work) but as I write this, I am on my way to a cruise ship and will in my cabin very little, and on a Caribbean beach a couple of days during said cruise. This is where my battery drain will cause me frustration. I will use those beach days to get 100 percent consistent with my Task Killing practice and see if the battery is able to maintain a respectable life span. If so, Google will indeed have to send out a patch.

About the Android Market, I spent all day perusing *just* the “free apps” section and found everything I needed for my initial repertoire of ‘power using’ apps I had enjoyed on my former Windows Mobile phone. The paid apps section provided decently priced ($1-$3 typically) apps as well as more advanced functionality of some of the free apps. I think I downloaded 35 apps in one 30 minute session when I first got the EVO. “Advanced task Killer” was one of these apps, and when I ran it, every single app I had just downloaded and installed (did not run, mind you) was still ‘running’ in the background. It was the first time and only time I experienced the normally zippy fast EVO to lag as I used it. Killing all those apps fixed that.

And finally, the Qik application is very cool but there is one thing you need to know. The app that comes pre-installed is NOT the app you need to video call someone else who has the same app. They don’t tell you this anywhere in the main paged of qik.com. Instead, they give you a “tutorial video” that gives you a cute tech girl explaining how wonderful the Qik video calling application is, then she proceeds to “make a call” but the video skips past showing where she clicked inside the application to initiate the call. This was intensely frustrating for me, because I was specifically watching that video to figure out where in the Qik app I could find the video calling ‘button”.  I was scanning her hand movements to see how she initiated that video call, then bam, it skips that part and just shows her ‘office buddy’ receiving the call in another part of the building. The video calling page even tells you to simply “pick from your contacts, and initiate the call!”. Turns out, you need to go the Android Market and  download and install over top of your pre-installed qik app the version that DOES allow video chat.  Thanks Qik, for causing me to burn 25 minutes figuring something out that you could have just “said” on your intro page. Furthermore, you were demoing the EVO 4G as the device you were using!

One thing I also want to add to that ‘tutorial’. They depict the video quality during their “trial” video call to be absolutely superb.  This would be because they were using their office Wi-Fi or true 4G network to make the call. If you are still on 3G, expect it to be very pixilated and only useable if you and your calling partner sit very still while chatting. That’s how my test went.

Aside from these issues, and a few I will blog about later, I do like the super fast response of the EVO and  I recognize a lot of my enthusiasm is because I am new to Android and very happy that the Android app store is huge enough, and growing, to allow me to do almost everything I was able to do with my old Windows Mobile phone.

HTC EVO 4G in hand

I didn’t quite realize when the guy at Radio Shack told me he would hold an HTC Evo back for me after the official launch day (Friday, June 4th) until Monday when I would get back from a trip, that he was doing me a great favor. My only commitment was a verbal promise to actually come get it (I believe he was supposed to charge me a $50 deposit, but if so, he waived that). I had assumed the Evo’s would sell well, but that I’d be able to find one SOME where on Monday. Obviously that was a bad assumption, but lo and behold when I called that Radio Shack guy back on Monday, he still had mine setting aside, after they reportedly were sold out everywhere in the U.S.

And boy am I happy. I’m loving the spiffy speed, and with the promised Android 2.2 update coming soon, should be 2 to 5 times spiffier. This thing is simply an iPhone with no restrictions, with a few trivial to substantial features the iPhone doesn’t have.  The iPhone has a few things as well, but to me they are not as important nor as substantial as the fact that I own this EVO, not Dan Hesse (Sprint), Eric Schmidt (Google), or Peter Chou (HTC), and I can install anything I damn well please on my new EVO. There is a known-by most toggle in the settings for the Android to “allow” non-market app installation (imagine that, Jobs), but in a day of perusing I’ve not be wanting an app I haven’t found in the Android Market, and I haven’t even left the “free” apps section yet.

If you are thinking about getting en EVO,  it is you for whom I am writing  this entry.

First let me say that this is not an anti-iPhone entry. the iPhone, as I’ve always said, has had that silky smooth superior to all other phones screen for years now. But my issue, as well as the issue with most power users, is the fact that you are forced to limit your entertainment and utility of the iPhone to what Apple decides for you. That’s a huge huge huge deal to me and so it would be very difficult for iPhone to surpass my intrigue with the EVO. With the EVO and Android, I can enjoy what I did with my HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile device. That was that I can imagine any kind of thing I want my phone to do (within reason), and some developer somewhere already made that app, and so did several other developers trying to out-do each other for bragging rights, resulting in various types of the same app that do several other things.

To give an idea of how ridiculously superior this kindof OS is to the iPhone OS, imagine if you will, someone writes a WinMobile app that uses your phone’s GPS to track a point where you are, and continues to track your steps until you tell it to stop. No need to imagine that, because it happened, by several devleopers all over the world, typically for geo-cashing or bike travel. Now, imagine a few years later some one makes a very simplified version of that, removing most of the features and just allowing it to record the GPS location of where ever you happened to be standing at the time you hit the button. Imagine they coded it for the iPhone, and called it “Find My Car’. Well, that happened and the guy raked in $400/day on that sub-$5 app.

Let me summarize if that was too confusing. A utility that has been available for *free* with a ton more features for another popular phone OS gets stripped down to just saying “You are here!” and sold for the iPhone and iPhone users pay out $400/day to this developer. By the way, that’s damn near the Holy Grail for the vast majority of basement developers out there.

Anyway, so it seems to me that if the iPhone is all you need and you are lack of want for further utility, ever, than maybe it’s for you. Otherwise, it is not.

Things you should know:

Installing “third party” apps (that is, apps not ‘approved’ for the Android Market) will require a simple setting change. I left it restricted at first, but just learned that Audible.com had created an Android app and I love my audible.com listening. So I changed the setting and the app installed perfectly.

In that same regard, installing third party apps typically requires you download or copy the file to your phone, then click on the file from within the phone. I looked in vein for a way to browse the files on my EVO until I finally Googled “‘how to” and “browse files” and “Andriod” and learned there are no natively installed file browers with Android (???). Nonetheless, I discovered a commonly referenced free file browser on the Android Market and it installed perfectly.

HTC EVO, here I come….

The HTC EVO is finally here, and I’ll be putting one through its paces. Being a long time WinMo user, being able to do just about any damned thing I want or need with it and then some, this Android device has a high bar to hurdle. But I think it will do fine.  Mainly because any apps I lose making the switch will be over shadowed by the 1Ghz snapdragon processor, huge screen, and..well.. it *is* android after all. Which means there will soon be if not already a vast numbers of freelance developers making any app I desire, like I enjoy with the WinMo.

HTC Evo comes equipped with a kick-stand for hands-free viewing.

The only issue I have is the $10 fee for unlimited data, which I already have on my HTC Touch Pro WinMo that I am NOT paying any extra for, and I am not in a 4G market.  Then, there is the $30/month “hotspot” feature, which I must admit is pretty cool even though I have the same hotspot ability on my HTC Touch Pro, and that is, unlike on my Touch Pro, you will be able to use the hotspot feature *and* talk on the phone at the same time. This opens up a big thing here… I will no longer need my Sprint 3G data card that I pay $60/month for. The only thing with that is the phone must be plugged in constantly to avoid battery drain if using it as a hotspot and as a phone at the same time. The data card I currently have is USB, so obviously it is always plugged in.. but then again I don’t use my data card for anything other than bringing in the 3G signal.

I’m certainly curious how it will work out for me. Let me know if you find any advantages or pitfalls for this flagship device.