I was a little disappointed to find that it still required quite a bit of “underground” knowledge and bits if you wanted to Jailbreak the device (‘rooting’ it’s called on Android) in much the same way the iPhone requires various tools to Jailbreak it. So I stuck with the stock build that HTC provide, it’s nice, but a bit cluttered with unnecessary stuff bundled in (e.g. a terrible Twitter client, forced to sync Stocks etc) so last week I finally decided to root my phone and put a custom ROM on there.

I’m a pretty geeky type, and generally know what I’m doing in this area (if I do say so myself!) but I still found the whole topic madnedingly confusing at first. A minefield of jargon, tribal knowledge and outdated info. But I waded through it. The easiest way to root the device these days is to use unrevoked this is pretty much a simple download and one click method, as long as you install HBOOT drivers. The what? Yeah the problem with all of this rooting/hacking lark is the crazy amount of techo jargon. So what does it all mean??

• HBOOT is a special boot mode for all Android devices accessed by holding; down-vol + power on, from here you can access…
• Recovery Mode. Another special boot mode, used to restore the device in the event of problems. Using the unrevoked method above will replace the standard recovery mode with a new one called ClockworkMod. This lets you do all the fancy fiddly stuff like flash a new ROM and format/wipe things.

So with my device rooted, I needed to pick a new custom ROM to flash my device with, this is where the real fun starts. The ROM is like the OS for the device, putting a new one on there can change everything about it, from look and feel, down to how it operates. There are hundreds of the damn things! For the HTC Desire you have two main choices, Sense based ROM or a ASOP based ROM. More jargons!

• Sense is effectively HTC’s customised version of Android. With a different skin, look and feel and some different apps. The changes go deeper than that, but more later.
• AOSP- Android Open Source Project. ROMs based on this will be “as Google intended” clean, without clutter, with out skin changes. In essence very similar to what you’d get on a Nexus device from Google.

The primary source of ROMs and in fact all info on this topic generally is the oddly named xda-developer forums. There will be threads and topics for every possible device out there (not just Android). The place is massive! The one stop shop for the HTC Desire is this very helpfull topic(a topic indexing all the other main topics) I decided on a AOSP ROM (I wanted rid of all that clutter right?) and settled for Oxygen. It was great; looked snazzy, was really quick, and didn’t have gazillions of unnecessary apps and crud pre-installed. And thanks to A2SDI wasn’t going to run out of room for the apps I actually wanted on there. OK what is A2SD? Well a lot of Android devices leave very little room in internal memory for installing apps, the Desire is particularly bad with only about 120MB! Google have made improvements in later versions of Android to allow apps to be installed/moved to the SD card, but it’s still not perfect. A2SD seamlessly behind the scenes installs apps on the SD card using magic, but it does require you to have a ext2 partition on your sdcard. Yet more jargon! In simple terms (unless you’re a Linux user and have experience of non Windows/FAT32 filesystems) this is an extra hidden area on your SD card, which you create with an app called ROM Manager. It’s painless to do.

Oxygen seemed super great; for a while. Then the problems started to appear, mostly due to connecting and syncing to Exchange:

• No means to set the passcode lock timeout. A security passcode/PIN is enforced when I connect to my companies Microsoft Exchange server, it would be nice NOT to enter it every time I switch it on
• No means to move email to another folder!! What!?
• No means to search the corporate directory (the GAL on Microsoft Exchange) which I really missed
• Other stuff I’ve forgotten!

In the end there were enough niggles for me to give up and switch to a Sense based ROM. What I’ve learnt is these aren’t problems with the Oxygen build but rather the base apps/system which Google provide are quite poor in places. HTC Sense adds quite a lot more to the system than just a bit of shiny reskining. For example, proper Exchange support, that works!

So I’ve switched to Alex-V’s ROM This gives me all the advantages of Sense, but also cool shit like A2SD. At first I removed a whole heap of the HTC apps from the system (deleted from /system/app/) things appeared OK but I started to notice the sync system getting ‘stuck’. So I’ve reflashed the ROM today without mucking about with it and it’s solved my sync issues.

Wow I’ve prattled on for ages! In summary, rooting and flashing your Android isn’t as hard as it sounds (no really!) but I think if you need to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server or work in an corporate environment you’ll probably not get the best out of it, and I’d advice to stick with what comes with your device.

There is a LOT of freeware out there for Windows Mobile, however you could spent months trying stuff out, installing, un-installing etc. So what I’ve done is collated what I consider to be the best software, utilities and games available. I’ve kept the list all freeware and opensource, enjoy…

Essential Windows Mobile Freeware

Special mention needs to go to Pocket PC Freewares, which is my main source for software.

For now I’m going to use this new one in the office room and keep the old Squeezebox 3 in the living room, the old unit has a screen on it, so it acts most of the time (when not playing music!) as very expensive clock, date & weather display. The core functionality of the two models, apart from the screen seems identical – the sound quality remains as good as it ever was.

Again I’m bowled over at the generosity of Logitech for sending these out. Thanks guys!

Well this is where it kind of falls down. Don’t get me wrong the “core” Sat-Nav features on TomTom are excellent; I’ve never had any issue with these. But sadly the extra features they tout are where it’s really lacking (yes this is yet another of my “unhappy gadget” posts!):

• iPod integration – Don’t think they’ve completly thought this one through. The iPod plugs into the same hole as the TMC aerial, which means you can’t get any traffic info whilst using the iPod, not good. Secondly the iPod doesn’t charge while attached to the TomTom, and lastly the screens to control the iPod are too hard to access meaning lots of screen tapping while driving just to do something simple like skip tracks
• FM Transmitter – Too quiet, simple as that. Combined with the above iPod integration I had hopes that I could do away with at least one gadget in my car (the Griffin iTrip) But it’s not going to happen.
• Phone integration – I have a Windows Mobile 6 device as my phone (HP iPAQ 514) sadly TomTom can not use this device for a GPRS connection as TomTom only supports the older Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Network) mode of connection instead of the newer PAN (Personal Area Network). To be fair the blame probably lays more at Microsoft’s door for removing a feature still in common use. The reading and sending of text messages also doesn’t work with my phone.
• Hands Free – The hands-free feature still works (thankfully) with my phone – I’ve only used it a few times but the volume is very low, at both ends of the call, and I’ve had calls cut out on me for no reason. I’m in two minds whether to go back to my old (but reliable) Bluetooth headset.

None of the issues are major problems – but when added together it really detracts from the appeal of the device. Verdict: it’s a nice sat-nav device but pretty poor at everything else.

I have to say how cool it is to receive something like this for free!

• Menu randomly resets to the system defaults, hmmm annoying as the defaults suck.
• Doesn’t sync playcounts back to iTunes, meaning I can’t submit what I’ve listened to, to last.fm. If it does sync, it gets it horribly wrong and thinks I’ve listened to one song 47 times or some similar crazyness.
• Can’t hide compilation artists from the main Artists list or the cover flow, a clear 100% regression from the previous generation of iPods, which all had this feature. God only knows why Apple removed this incredibly useful feature.
• Horrible screen saver that kicks in after a minute, which means you can’t take your iPod of your pocket to see what you listening too, without pressing a button (not good when driving)
• Cover flow sorts by artist not album, yeah that makes sense… at least give me the option.
• The menus are sluggish, and performance isn’t great moving around the user interface.

So all in all it’s a bit of stinker, I’m not the only one that’s unhappy, the Apple and iLounge forums are awash with complaints and bug reports (I’ve not even suffered the random crashes that many have had).

There is nothing here that couldn’t be fixed in a firmware update, Apple have released one already (1.0.0 -> 1.0.1) which was rushed out to fix the random crashes, I’m really hoping for another update and soon.

If I had know all of this before I impulsively bought the thing, it would have been a different matter. At least it looks nice…

With the supplied aerial I get zero signal and a channel scan predictably resulted in no channels found. This surprised me as I live in an area with very good digital TV reception. I plugged it into the main rooftop aerial (not exactly “portable” but it was a test), re-scanned; this time it found some channels but couldn’t display any picture and all I got was some stuttering audio.
If this doesn’t work even through a rooftop aerial then what soddin’ good is it?? – None. Avoid this like the plague, this is toy product that basically doesn’t work, I’ve seen better engineering fall out of a Christmas cracker.

Update – luckily I backed up my iTunes library files prior to the upgrade; I’ve uninstalled 7 put 6.0.4 back on and copied over my backed up DB. It’s all working like a charm.

Click here for the jscrob2 website

Update [14th June] – the above link is dead, but I found another site with the plugin download