[Noisebridge-discuss] Seeking advice -- new Android phone with good physical attributes?

[Rubin Abdi]

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John Magolske wrote, On 2012-07-20 13:19:
> That was my impression. Question -- when you say "...versions of
> ICS" (Ice Cream Sandwich), would those all be installed via
> CyanogenMod? I'm a little foggy on how all this works...

Cyanogenmod is a series of roms sort of blessed by the Cyanogenmod
group. They tend to offer very similar features and are updated around
the same time, but all built and maintained separately for certain
"supported" devices.

Right now during Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean development, CM9
and CM10 are mostly on the horizon releases. There are silo groups of
folks working on builds that Cyanogen will eventually sanction as
officially supported releases by them.

Most of these builds you can find if you dig around the XNA forums.
Cyanogenmod's wiki is still references their stables builds which is
CM7, somewhere around Android 2.3.x.

> No MicroSD? No mounting internal storage via USB? Ouch! Taking a
> quick look, I see the Galaxy S II does have MicroSD...will have to
> see how much of a hack community is behind any of the Galaxy
> phones. Taking a look at them in the T-Mobile store, I saw one of
> them did not have a notification LED (forget exactly which one),
> and another did.

Also a note, buying out of contract is neat. You can get service on
T-Mobile's network for cheap through a company called SimpleMobile...

http://www.mysimplemobile.com/

And it's all out of contract. If you port your number to Google Voice,
then you can have the freedom of switching from carrier to carrier
whenever a good deal sprouts up without having to worry about dragging
your phone number along.

> A factor that plays into my leaning towards a Samsung Galaxy S II
> is that this phone is supported by Mozilla's B2G effort (HTML5
> based mobile OS utilizing the Android kernel):
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G Very interested to see where that
> project goes.

I would wait another 6 months before basing any buying off of
Mozilla's efforts to throw themselves head first into the mobile OS
market.

- -- 
Rubin
rubin at starset.net
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