I Can Haz Android (on an OpenMoko Freerunner)

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I have been assimilated. Or at least my OpenMoko Freerunner has been! It’s now running the Koolu port of Android 1.5 “Cupcake” on it, and with a *very* helpful hint from Damian Spriggs on the OpenMoko community mailing list it’s able to make and receive calls and SMS’s. For the record you need to get ADB working and grab a root shell on the phone. Then you can use the sqlite command line utility to set the “provisioned” flag in its DB.

# sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
SQLite version 3.5.9
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> INSERT INTO secure (name, value) VALUES ('device_provisioned', 1);

I’ve also found a rather nice application called VCardIO for importing my contacts exported in VCard v2.1 format from KDE’s Kontact addressbook. Now we’ll see how it goes over the next few days!

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14 thoughts on “I Can Haz Android (on an OpenMoko Freerunner)”

  2. Indeed. Still using it as my daily phone, which is promising.

    Issues so far:

    1) Android Market doesn’t work (it’s not open source so isn’t available).. There are other places though.
    2) The calendar application doesn’t work (disappears immediately it tries to start).
    3) Doesn’t support WPA2 Enterprise (802.1x) networks, but you can (apparently) edit the wpa_supplicant config script instead.
    4) Answering the phone seems a little clumsy, but that might be user error.

    Nice points:

    1) The SMS interface is really nice, IM like really.
    2) The Road Trip ring tone is loud, so I should hear this much better when it rings now 😉
    3) A number of Android apps I’ve found seem to work nicely (the ones that don’t tend to require features the Freerunner doesn’t have).

  4. How does it go with battery life? I tried the Koolu beta7 from here

    http://trac.koolu.org/wiki/Releases

    about a month ago, and everything seemed to work fine apart from the battery draining completely after about three hours. Guess it wasn’t suspending properly. Not super practical :-). But yeah, otherwise Android is really impressive.

  5. The 1.5 cupcake alpha I linked to seems to suspend just fine, I get over a days out of it I reckon at present (not as good as Qt Extended was doing, but better than you were seeing). There is no explicit suspend operation, it just does it itself at some point after the screen blanks (so don’t forget to turn that on!).

    There’s also another useful feature under the Settings->Applications->Development called “Stay awake” which tells it not to suspend when it’s connected via USB (and hence charging).

  6. How do you find the speed? One thing that irked me about Android was the framerate being a little too slow. That and I couldn’t get anything GSM related to work 😉 but I might give it a try with what you wrote.

  7. Speed is not great, but I can live with it. I’ve found that turning on the vibrate & sound feedback for clicks seems to help a lot.

    I don’t know if the speed issue is due to the lack of acceleration for Glamo due to its details not being available, poor optimisation on the Android side or the FR being underpowered (or a combination of all 3).

    Oh, and GPS seems to work too!

  9. Well I found out this afternoon that Android doesn’t appear to have the necessary AT commands to enable echo suppression on the Freerunner, so the people I call (and who call me) have that nasty echo to deal with. 🙁

    Never had the buzz problem with any distro, so I’ve never had it buzz fixed.

  10. Aha, but apparently Michael Trimarchi’s images have:

    #ifdef HAVE_TI_CALYPSO
    ret = at_send_command(ATch_primary, "AT@ST=\"-26\"", NULL);
    ret = at_send_command(ATch_primary, "AT%N0187", NULL);
#endif

    Will have to find some time to try and get his version working (no where near as easy to install as the Koolu one sadly).

  13. Pingback: The Musings of Chris Samuel » Blog Archive » Android on my FreeRunner

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