[clug] Acer beTouch E130 (Android 1.6) smartphone

[Daniel Pittman]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 19:17, Robert Edwards <bob at cs.anu.edu.au> wrote:
> On 06/01/11 16:36, Mike Carden wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Daniel Pittman<daniel at rimspace.net>
>>  wrote:
>>
>>> For which device?  As far as I know the HTC Magic on Three Australia
>>> has not received a vendor upgrade past 1.6
>>
>> Really? Can you suggest where can I find 3's release of 1.6 for my
>> Magic? I'm still on 1.5. I don't see anything on 3's web site.
>
> I can think of at least two reasons why getting anything much more
> advanced than 1.6 working on this device might be hard.
>
> 1) Android is NOT Free Software (although it is built upon the Free
> Linux kernel and the Open Source Sun/Oracle Java runtime (with mods)).
>
> Here is yet another example of where using non-Free software will bite.
> Because it is not Free Software, there is no reason for the vendors to
> release the source code of the drivers etc. for their Android devices.

*nod*  For what it is worth, Qualcomm are probably the biggest
offender here in terms of both volume and the reluctance to open
specifications for their hardware.  None the less, the community treat
this like other closed vendors on Linux and have reverse engineered
the drivers for these platforms.

> So, although 1.6 may be available for your Magic, without access to the
> vendors sources, it is unlikely that you will be able to get anything
> much newer running on it.

Actually, the drivers have been reverse engineered, and CyanogenMOD
runs 2.2 happily enough on the machine.  The fancy 3D gallery is a bit
slow, but otherwise it works pretty well...

> * I still have my eye on what Symbian are up to with their efforts to
> open source their code base.

I am pretty sure that they are dead as a dodo, even if the corpse
isn't kicking any longer.  Even the move to Qt rather than their
baroque (but highly appropriate) C++ custom stack doesn't seem to have
helped.

Regards,
    Daniel
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✉ Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net>
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