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| 2009-11-04 - Android, Smartphones, and AT&T | | Posted by admin. | 
Android, Smartphones, and... AT&T?
Most people complain about AT&T's (3G) coverage, Customer Service, or their rates. I actually have a VERY sweet deal with AT&T, so I'm not going to complain about any of that. The problem that I have is that they are absolutelty married to the iPhone, and will not offer any Andriod (Linux) smartphones. At least until later this year, maybe 2010. Thankfully we can make our own choice, and buy an unlocked phone. That is exactly what I did. Now I'm too cheap to spend $500-600 on a new one, so I bought an HTC (T-Mobile) G1 from eBay, unlocked it, and popped in my AT&T SIM card. T-Mobile's 3G uses a different band than AT&T, so the cellular network is limited to EDGE, but I'm actually cool with that, for now. The G1 is available with the right radio, from Rogers (Canada), but it costs about $300-400. I paid $150 for my T-mobile unit. This will tide me over until AT&T offers their own Android phone, or I can buy another unlocked phone with the right radio, at something like $200.
The beauty of Android is that it's Open Source, so I can change the particular version that comes with the phone, if I want. I fully intended to run Cyanogen's Hero ROM on this phone, but I haven't done that, yet. I may not do it at all. My G1 came with bone-stock (1.5) Cupcake. On the second day, as I was boning up on flashing ROM's, Google sent me Donut (1.6) Over-The-Air. Wow! I was really surprised, since I didn't get the phone through T-Mobile. I had assumed that the OTA updates came from the provider, but they actually come from Google, if you initialise the phone with a Gmail account, as I did. Donut does everything I need, and the performance is very, very good. The Hero builds can run fairly snappy if you take all the right steps, but the Hero UI was developed for phones that have more internal ROM for the OS. The G1 was the 1st Google phone and it's limited to 192MB (internal). Although Donut was also developed for 288MB ROM phones, it was repackaged for the G1 by Google, and it works as if it was intended for it all along. We will have to wait and see if Eclair (2.0) will get the same treatment (I think it will). In the meantime I'm happy to toddle along with Donut.
Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, anybody else hungry?
  
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