I'll put that theory to the test this evening, once my new Galaxy Nexus arrives.

There's a simple menu-driven MS-Windows app to unlock it, root it, upgrade it, enhance it, whatever.. Sounds dumb simple to me, but we'll see how it goes in reality from a VMware image.

EDIT: Here's a link to the app again.

Cheers

Darnit! I didn't have it so easy. It took a good deal of work to get mine done. But that's just what happens. The longer these phones are out the better the tools to mess with them are.

I will say, though, that I had a tool which was supposed to make everything a series of clicks, but it turned out to be MUCH harder than that because something didn't work in the process and I couldn't find any information as to why. Mostly to do with drivers not installing correctly, I think. Then again, my current system is a complete mess held together with baling wire and duct tape

The only place where you need to pay attention when doing a DIY upgrade is ensuring that you also update the radio firmware. If you go with the big incremental dumps that take you from one official release to another, then you get all of the firmware updates as part of the big package. If you just grab a random ROM image from the Internet, you don't necessarily get all that. The conservative thing is to first update your phone, with stock software, from whatever initial state you get all the way to the most recent 4.1.1. Once you're there, then you can start playing with third-party builds, if you want.


This is partly true, and partly bogus. If you're a naïve user who wants things to "just work", then updates happen over the air, automatically, without any care or thought on your part. They just magically work. However, different Android phones get updates at different times, and even the vaunted Galaxy Nexus has these odd variants, like the YUKJUXW tweak that Samsung sold, which goes to them rather than to Google for updates. That sort of fragmentation, on the same damn hardware, is simply inexcusable.

In the Apple universe, there's always a battle between the unlockers and Apple. They keep exploiting security vulnerabilities and Apple keeps patching them. It's amazing that the Apple unlockers have been as successful as they've been. In the Android universe, with an official Nexus phone, there's no exploitation. It's a supported feature, but it's meant for devs, not end users, thus all this 'adb' and 'fastboot' nonsense. As Mark noted, there's a tool that wraps all of this behind a nice GUI, if that's what you really want.

The only hard part is finding suitable documentation. Those chat forums are a disaster. That's why I wrote these things here, for my own benefit it not others, so you've got the minimum number of links that you need to get it done.

Okay, that worked, and wasn't too onerous.
I used the toolkit to unlock, root, and upgrade the phone to stock ICS 4.0.4, and then the phone itself found some over-the-air (wifi) upgrade that it's self-installing now. Hopefully Jelly Bean.

Yep. Jelly Bean 4.1.1 now running.

Cool!

Any particular SSH client known to be "good" ?

ConnectBot works well enough for my limited stuff. It's not great using a shell though since you often need more specialised characters than just A-Z etc on regular keyboard. Going to the alternate keyboard pages becomes a bit clunky. Always going to be that way I think you'll find though.

Agreed.

Mmm.. I'm not sure that the SSH client will be useful here -- my servers require a "door knock" sequence before the SSH attempt.

Might need a real live terminal shell for that.

ConnectBot also has a local terminal option. It's also open source, so you should be able to add a knock sequence option to it.

One nit: the all-in-one toolkit I used fails to re-root the phone once it's running Jelly Bean. Other more detailed recipes also failed.

Then I found this excellent tutorial for rooting Jelly-Bean from somebody with similar problems.

Why root? Well, I needed it here so I could run AdFree to kill off the in-app advertising from certain other useful apps. This program updates /etc/hosts, which requires root access to do.

And finally I discovered that "adb" (or adb-linux) is the way to really get into the handset. Useful, that.

Cheers

Mmm.. I don't seem to be able to get "local port forwards" to work in ConnectBot. Anyone else have any luck with those?

Googled it -- it's been broken that way since the last update in 2010, with several people reporting the bug (and one guy pointing out how to fix it in the Java source code too).

Oh well.. need to find a different SSH client now.

As in port tunnelling? Sorry for the bum steer then.

Can you just use the built in VPN client instead?

Depends what you're trying to achieve exactly.

I use SSH with port forwarding for remote access here, rather than a (likely simpler) full-blown OpenVPN setup.

But.. I've now uninstalled the old version of ConnectBot, grabbed the latest developer version of it from Google Code, and installed that: forwarding now works!

Thanks

Local port forwards work on my phone with the version from Play. I use it to RDP into my home computer

Yeah, it partially worked for me here too. I dunno what exactly was the issue, but the built-in email client had tons of trouble with it -- that piece of excrement (email) was horrible, and I eventually clued in and replaced it with something better.

I think some programs (random) don't accept IP addresses in place of hostnames in some situations -- the email client was definitely one of those, as was ConnectBot.

Cheers

One annoyance of the Galaxy Nexus / Jelly Bean, is that the phone turns the screen ON whenever the power source changes. Eg. When I connect a power cable, it turns ON. Ditto when I disconnect the power cable.

Bloody nuisance and (small) waste of battery power.
Anyone know how to disable this behaviour?

Thanks.

Mmm.. as usual, there's an app for that too. Weird that it's not a built-in option though.

One persons nuisance is another persons confirmation that they actually did plug the device into a source of power, instead of a cord that is unplugged/unpowered on the other end.

I've had several times over the past few years where this behavior has saved me from having a dead phone in the morning instead of one fully charged.

If that were the motivation, then a simple pair of "bleep" noises would more than suffice.

Unless the owner of the phone was deaf of course.

That's why phones also have built-in vibrators -- works for the deaf phone users as well as the multitudes of *blind* users.

Mark points out one my my iPhone annoyances - the phone's screen comes on AND it beeps loudly when plugged in. I wish I could turn both of those off, a vibration is more than enough. Just more typical lack of attention to detail from Apple.

The other use of the visual indicator is to see existing charge status. If I unplug a not fully charged phone, I'll know right away that I may want to use a vehicle charger. No need to remember to push a button to see it.

Blind users would dislike that "automatically drain the battery feature".

When my GN is plugged in or unplugged, it lights up the battery-draining display with the ever-so-not-useful lock screen shown.

Or at least it used to do that before I installed the app to kill that misfeature.

Cheers

I have to wonder how many blind users use touch-screen phones.

You'd be surprised, the iPhone has a very strong blind following and excellent support for blind users.

Here's one of them:

Even the camera application on the iPhone is blind accessible. It will announce the number of faces detected, and location in the frame.

Stevie Wonder thanked Steve Jobs and Apple during a concert last year: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/114311105135906816