scruggly phone

I'm sure the G1 was a shining trophy of progress the day they first came out. But the one that arrived in the mail was beaten up, scratched, and eewwww.. slightly oily. I am the proud third owner of this cell phone that I bought off ebay last week. I got it just for development. And thank god, because I would hate to have to use it.

After a bath in windex, I plopped in the battery and fired it up. It wouldn't do anything without a sim card. It was stuck on an emergency dialer screen. I scrounged one from a pay per use phone I had lying in a drawer ( great for when the in-laws visit from Japan). Now it wanted me to sign up for a google account - and wouldn't let me get passed the regisration screen until I did. I had no cellular connectivity and it wouldn't allow me to setup the wireless connection. So I was stuck. I briefly worried that I had just purchased an $80 paper weight, and an fugly one at that.

Thankfully there are an army of people who have blazed this trail before me. There were online instructions on how to break into the phone without a cell account. For me it ended up being a long series of steps which was a combination of a bunch of different sites. I should probably list them all, but I don't have the energy. Basicly I had to downgrade the phone to RC29, then type in a code to enable adb connections - 'setprop persist.service.adb.enable 1', then fire up the wifi settings from an adb shell:
am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings
Then setup wifi, go back to the phone registration and then complete the registration so I had access to the phone.

Now I had a 1.0 android phone with no attachment and no contracts! Yay. I needed to get to 1.6. This guide did the trick for me. An hour later and 4 flashes to the eprom and I had a usable phone at 1.6! I need it to be 1.6 because that's the earliest version of Android with OpenGLES support ( as far as I know ).

After that I downloaded my app and installed it on the phone. Fired it up.. and waited... and waited. Slowly the first menu came on screen. I hit the play button about 4 times. It was just slow to react. Slowly the screen changed. At about 1 frame per second, the bad guys dreamily came down from the top of the screen. I was now Flash and could issue 100 fireballs per each step of each guy. Clearly there are performance problems.

I was wondering how capable this device is. I downloaded the game Replica Island and I've tested on different phones and I know the author paid attention to performance. The game played fine. Maybe 20-30fps. And it was doing at least as much rendering as we. So clearly I'm going to need to do some digging. Good thing for me, the source for replica island is hosted on code.google.com!