Active day: Android on my Titan

Boy, it sure is fun to be irritatingly right, huh? On the topic of yesterday's post on security: Exhibit A. Yes, I know that's OS X, not Linux, but it illustrates my point exactly. Install code from random third parties, have your system completely compromised. This could have happened in exactly the same way on Linux. Believe me yet? Had a pretty fun day today. I installed the latest Android image for my phone, courtesy of the great work done by Martin Johnson on Android for the HTC Vogue (otherwise known as the HTC Touch), and the modifications of his work by Magister for the HTC Titan / Mogul, which is the phone I have. It's really drop-dead simple - you download a zip file from Magister's site, unzip it onto the root directory of the phone's micro SD card, run a .exe from said zip file from within Windows, and it boots up Android. The latest version is really pretty functional - pretty much everything important works, the only bugbears for me are outgoing SMS doesn't seem to work and external headphones (via the mini-USB port) don't work yet. Aside from that it's pretty much all there for me - I may use it exclusively for a while, if I can work around the SMS issue somehow. Although I've written before about the fact that I really like the Titan as a device and I don't mind Windows Mobile as an OS, Android definitely feels nicer, and this edition of it isn't as heavily tied in to Google as the one you get with the T1 (i.e. it'll actually run without you feeding it a Google login). The dialer, the contact system, the email app - they're all pretty well laid out and thought through, the general flow of using the phone is pretty smooth. The browser's terrible on the Titan - I think it has less memory than it really needs - but there's an easy solution to that - use Opera Mini for Android instead. It's a great browser. Other than doing that I took a bunch of old clothes to the local thrift store, picked up my tennis racket from stringing, went for a 3k swim and went out for dinner. Still enjoying my holidays!