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On a cloudy and cooler than usual Friday afternoon during which I was feeling lazy and had nothing better to do, I decided to try and brick flash my T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone, with the ROM from the newly announced HTC Hero, covered many times in this blog over the past two days.  There had been a leaked early version of the HTC Hero ROM floating around the interwebs for some time now, and the hacking community has put in quite a bit of effort to make it work on the G1, and by and large they have succeeded.  There are a couple of major “gotchas” – Bluetooth doesn’t work, and the LED notification lights don’t work, but this is not a fault of the ROM customisation process – according to the hackers, the original leaked ROM didn’t work either for these items, a sign that the firmware is still in development.  But never mind, given the opportunity to try a new firmware with a fancy user interface, I always jump at the chance anyday and anytime.

So, here are a few pictures of the custom firmware now running on my G1.  You will notice there are seven homescreens that you can customise/configure to your heart’s content – and this is something that other manufacturers can definitely emulate.  Why squint at tiny widgets with nano-sized fonts, when you can have a huge easily readable widget that occupies an entire homescreen?  If I can muster up enough motivation, I may even do a video in the next few days, time permitting.  In the meantime, enjoy these shots I took of my (mainly) beloved G1 running the beta HTC Hero firmware.  Oh, in case you’re wondering, battery life still sucks.  And performance is a little slow; hey, what do you expect when a ROM which is supposed to run on a device with 512Mb of RAM and 288Mb of ROM runs on a G1, which only has 192Mb of RAM and 256Mb of ROM?  What the hackers had to do was to move the applications on to the SD card (again, something not supported on the stock Android build) to make room for RAM which is critical for system stability and performance.

Thank goodness for a community called XDA Developers from where I got all these goodies.  In case you want to try this out on your own G1, here are the steps, at 30,000 foot level:

1. root your device.
2. update device radio firmware.
3. update device bootloader (HardSPL).
4. flash custom firmware, in my case, I used JACHero 1.8bv4 from here.  There are at least two other custom firmware which incorporates the Hero firmware, I think, so I may try them later when I have the time.  I’m a keen flasher now.  No dirty thoughts on that, please.

Oh, and due to the Hero firmware, my G1 is now no longer a “Google Experience” phone as the base Android code has been so heavily customised by HTC.  Looks like I’ve got to scrape off the Google logo on my G1’s battery cover soon 

Pictures

Lock screen (what shows when you turn on the device, you need to swipe down to unlock the screen)

Notification bar

Programs

Adding a widget to the home screens

Selecting a widget layout

Calendar and weather widget respectively, these update automatically when you are connected to the internet.

System information

This version does not have the Twitter widget working, so I am going to flash another custom Hero firmware version on to the G1 later; I will update with a new post if I am successful later.

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