Android on the Tilt

corey    Computers, News     android, kaiser, tilt

Since I’m making a post, might as well make some more…

I was browsing around on the XDA Developer’s forum to see if there were any new ROMs for my ATT Tilt (HTC Kaiser) and stumbled across an Android build. Interestingly, it actually shuts down WinMo6, boots up Linux, and then launches the Android platform. Of course, it doesn’t actually work very well (yet) but it’s a start! Supposedly they got calling and contacts to work, but it basically just freezes on me.

After some digging, I flashed my phone with the L26 Diamond ROM with WinMo6.1 and a few other goodies added. And, in the process, I lost all of my Outlook contacts – of course. (Stupid WinMo – why do you have to try to sync contacts with Outlook and then delete them if they aren’t in the local copy of Outlook!?). I may switch to Android (if I can get it working) just so I don’t lose my contacts randomly throughout the year. Until then, I’ll use NS Contacts Backup to backup everything.

Tilt This!

corey    Computers     android, cellphones, htc, tilt

I picked up an AT&T Tilt last week, though I was really hoping to get it before we left for Japan. The phone is capable of a couple of nifty features: GPS, connects to Wifi networks, 3G High Speed Cellular Data, and the 2100Mhz cell band (which is used in Japan for GSM phones). I had hoped to at least get to use the wifi capabilities so we could check email (and maybe even make a phone call or two using Skype), but that didn’t pan out as the phone was released the week before we left – not enough time for the stores to actually get any in stock.

Anyways, so I have this Tilt thingy. I did some serious reading over at XDA Developer’s forum and picked up the ROM used to flash your phone back to the original Windows Mobile setup HTC (the manufacturer) had rather than the messed up garbage AT&T gives you. The HTC ROM has a nice touch-screen graphical homepage that makes it easy to get to the basics that Windows Mobile has to offer.

Since HTC is one of the manufacturers who joined the Google Open Handset Alliance (a joke? We’ll see), I hope to eventually get a ROM that loads and runs Google’s Android phone OS. Windows Mobile works but, eh, it’s Windows and it already erased all of my contacts once.

All in all, a nice set of features in the hardware, but I think I like the Blackberry OS that my wife has on her Blackberry Pearl better. Windows Mobile is very serious/business-like – certainly not aimed at the same market as, say, the iPhone which is very much a “smart consumer” device. But I will say Opera Mobile seems to run pretty darn well on it (though I’m starting to think Opera Mini is going to by-pass Opera Mobile soon).