I have posted in the past that I am not a huge fan of my phone, so I read Martin Hinshelwood’s experiences with putting Android on his HTC HD with interest. I have tended to leave my phone as a consumer device i.e. it does what it does, I tend to not fiddle too much as long as it will make calls, sync email and allow me to get the cricket scores on the BBC website, the essentials of life. However, I had a spare SD card and a bit of time. So it was off to the Diamond2(Topaz) XDADevelopers forums to see what I needed.
The process as follows:
- Download the July 2010 Froyo 2.2. build XDANDROID.2.2.AOSP.29.7.10.RC2.1.7z
- Download the Sep 2010 XDAndroid 2.2. update XDANDROID.2.2.AOSP.3.9.10.RC.2.2.system.7z
- Download the current kernel htc-msm-linux-20100830_123544-package.tar.bz2 (without this you get no sound)
- Unpack these with WInRar, basically use the July build as the basic directory structure but replace the system.ext2 from the Sep file and zimage and modules from the Linux downloads. The details of the installation process are on the FAQ on first page of the Diamond2(Topaz) XDADevelopers forum
So does it work? Yes, the issues I had were as follows
- I had to go onto settings, wireless and networks, mobile networks and select my network operator. This got me phone services working. But I then also had to (on the same menu area) select the Access Point Name (APN) and pick the correct one for my provider, it was defaulting to the wrong one. Once this was done I also got 3G data working.
- I seem to have similar battery issues to other forum users, you can’t trust the meter and as the operating system is running on the SD card it draw power faster
- Clock seems to loose a bit of time
- It is not 100% stable but not too bad, again in line with other user experiences, the phone can go into a deep sleep that is hard to exit.
I will give it a go for a few days and see how it goes. It is not as if I cannot switch back to WIndows Mobile 6.5 with a reboot if I get problems.