Adventures with Android

After months of dealing with an increasingly sluggish and downright buggy Verizon HTC Rhyme, I finally took the leap and got a used Galaxy Nexus. First off, I think it's beautiful. The rhyme isn't exactly a high-end phone, so the small, unexciting screen isn't particularly surprising. By comparison, the circa 2011 Nexus is a work of art. My first impression of the AMOLED screen is great. Dark blacks and luscious color saturation (though I have found it to be annoyingly shiny -- screens shouldn't be mirrors!). It even has a barometer!

One big motivation for a phone upgrade (asides from the cracked screen and aforementioned lag) was being stuck at Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). As a technologist, I don't consider myself an early-adopted. I prefer to let others sort out the confusion of initial releases, and pick out the gems that emerge. But Gingerbread is well over 2 years old, and a lot has happened since then. The Galaxy Nexus (I have the Verizon CDMA model, codename Toro) is a skin-free, pure Android device. Which means that I am now in control of my phone's Android destiny!

How to go about this? I hit the web and cobbled together a cursory understanding of the Android/google-phone developer ecosystem as it currently stands. First off, there's xda-developers, a very active community of devs and users. There's an organizational page for information on the Galaxy Nexus here that helped me get oriented. This post made installing adb and fastboot a snap on ubuntu 12.04 (precise). There's also some udev magic from google under the "Configuring USB Access" section here that I followed, perhaps blindly (though http://source.android.com is a good primary reference...).

Next, I downloaded ClockworkMod for my device, rebooted my phone into the bootloader, and installed and booted into ClockworkMod:

## these commands are from computer connected to phone (via usb cable)
## check that phone is connected.  this should return "device"
adb get-state
## reboot the phone into the bootloader
adb reboot-bootloader

## in recovery, the phone should have funny pictures of the adroid bot opened up... reminds me of Bender.
## the actual file (the last argument) will vary by device
fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.3.5-toro.img
## boot into ClockworkMod 
fastboot boot recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.3.5-toro.img

This brought me to the touchscreen interface of ClockworkMod. First, I did a factory reset/clear cache as per others' instructions. Then I flashed the files listed here (with the exception of root) via sideloading. There's an option in ClockworkMod that says something like "install from sideload". Selecting this gives instructions -- basically, use adb to send the files, and then ClockworkMod takes care of the rest:

## do this on computer after selecting "install from sideload" on phone
## the ROM, "pure_toro-v3-eng-4.3_r1.zip", varies by device
adb sideload pure_toro-v3-eng-4.3_r1.zip
## repeat for all files that need to be flashed

I rebooted into a shiny new install of Jelly Bean (4.3). It's so much cleaner and more pleasant than my old phone. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Android Backup service auto-installed all my apps from the Rhyme.

In the process of researching this, I got a much better idea of what CyanogenMod does. I'm tempted to try it out now, but I reckon I'll wait for the 4.3 release, whenever that happens.


I also found http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader, which offers the prospect of unlocking and upgrading the HTC Rhyme, though I haven't found any ROMs that work for the CDMA version...