My thoughts with Cyanogen 6.1 on the HTC Desire
For about a month I have been trying out the 6.1 release of the popular cyanogen custom roms on my HTC Desire. My first thoughts were that it was incredible. The amazing ease with which you could modify the settings to the n th degree was an eye opening experience. I loved how anything I wanted could be customised. And I mean anything. From the colour of the battery icon to the tool bar to the fact that you could make the phone vibrate slightly when your call has been answered. Or the way that you can change how your Launcher looks and how if you want you can have root access to the file system.
All this was a door into the exciting and unknown when I tried this ROM. Coming over from a Sense UI platform where these things weren’t possible was an amazing experience. This all goes without mentioning the massive speed increase and the consistent batter improvement that I am enjoying. It really unlocked the full potential of my phone.
But unfortunately I don’t think it does the same for Android.
This may be controversial since Cyanogen is (and quite rightly) consistently rated amongst the highest contributors to Android, but my experience of Android has suffered more than it has gained since I loaded this ROM.
Amongst the issues that I have are the poor camera application compared to the Sense version. It looks horrible. Absolutely awful. The sense version had lovely transparent menus and was fast. This one is slow (if it works at all) and has an ugly metal coloured strip randomly blocking the focus view. Also the dialler is pathetic compared to the Sense version. The best thing about the Sense dialler that is lacking from Cyanogen 6.1 is the ability to start typing half the name or a partial section of the number and get the app to automatically as you type narrow down your search results. This seems like a much better way of doing things than the Cyanogen dialler. In that version you must either know your contact number in its entirety or scroll all the way through your phone book to find the name. For example if I wanted to call my friend Jack then I would either have to memorise his number or scroll all the way to the letter J till I find his name. In the Sense version I simply start typing Jack and before I press C it has found the entry for me. After all this is what the text message app on Cyanogen does so why not the dialler? Next is the god awful gallery app which is so slow that it is almost useless. It doesn’t even animate any gifs that you may have.
These things aside the two most annoying aspects of this move have been the inability to move apps to the SD card and then expect them to work correctly (facebook, whatsapp, twitter, swype) and the continual lack of space on the internal memory.
I never had any issues with internal storage on the Desire. It has 512 MB which would seem quite adequate. However I am constantly left with a message telling me that I have 14 MB left. When this reaches 11 then Gmail doesn’t sync. What is worse is that you can’t free up space on the internal drive because it is locked. Sure you can ADB into the phone and clean up some apps that aren’t needed but that doesn’t free up enough space.
There are other options mentioning removing this security and applying a different partition table but these are all destructive and strike me as a workaround to a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Perhaps the Desire shouldn’t have had Cyanogen if it doesn’t support the ROM size? But I can forgive you for arguing that once in the land of custom ROMS one can’t make that argument because there is always a hack or workaround for it. But no where in the Cyanogen 6.1 installation instructions does it say that you will run out of space so flash the modified table partition first and that if you don’t you won’t be able to use your phone like you intended.
Either way I have to do something destructive to get this working again and when I do I’m not sure I’ll pick Cyanogen again.
But that is the beauty of open source. We are free to do this. And who knows in the future I’ll probably try the next Cyanogen build again!