The Ballad of Modern Devices

[directive0]

I get a Samsung Rugby i547 smartphone for cheap.

Hurray, I think, I can install a custom rom and use this a beater for when I go hiking and whatnot.

Okay, I find the superthread for the device in question on XDA. What a great community, its full of people making new roms and sharing information.

Okay I need to root the phone and install a custom recovery so I can then flash a custom rom. No problem.

Uh oh, Samsung makes it difficult to root. I need to use a leaked flashing tool to install a rooted stock rom.

Flash tool (odin) exists in many different forms, need to find the right one.

After many many many softbricks and errors I finally have unlocked phone, and I install custom recovery.

FINALLY, I think. Now this phone can really sing.

Stock rom is slow as balls so I install Cyanogen Mod 12 for it. Great! That'll put me right at the bleeding edge for this hardware.

Rom works great! It's fast, clean... oh wait. None of the sensors (accellerometer, magnetometer, camera, GPS, SD) work. Need to roll back to an earlier ROM.

Find an earlier one. Okay well, works pretty good but still no camera. 1 out of 5 aint bad. Would be great to get the whole package.

I spend days crawling deprecated forum posts, looking for any kind of lead. Nothing. Looks like I'm stuck with good enough.​

This whole rigamarole just makes me love my Pandora even more. It was made in 2008 and it's still zippy. Still supported by a community of dedicated individuals. No it doesn't run all the most recent apps, but getting it to run secondary OSs is trivial even for a noob like me. Thank you everyone who makes the Pandora a breath of fresh air in a world of "practically liberated" options. Despite its age I always come crawling back to my Pandy. Wish it was ruggedized, though.

 

[Eight Bit]

You love the tinkering with that old phone. admit it!

 

[directive0]

Yeah if I'm honest the phone would probably just end up in a drawer once it worked properly. Maybe all this headache is a means of self-preservation for the device.

I just can't stop thinking about how much better it would be if I could find a ROM that provided all functionality.

 

[Agricola]

With my Galaxy Note 2, it was really easy to flash CM10.1. To get good support of custom ROMs, you sadly have to have a well-known phone with many users, so the amount of amateur developers for it is higher. I'm personally really sad about this whole situation, Android may be a open-source platform, but it's almost impossible to get any freedom preserving or fast version on a cheap chinese phone.

I hate tinkering around with phones with the constant fear of locking everything down by an accidental brick, and I hate the fact one can only buy a phone from mainstream product lines from big companies to get a working device with up-to-date software for years. These things are part of the reason I support the Pyra.

 

[___]

same here. i started with the motorola milestone 2 (droid 2) and was so excited about custom roms. then i had to upgrade at some point and imported a droid 4. most horrible experience i had with custom roms so far. a lot of promising different branches, all of them buggy as hell, some working quite well for a while, then breaking down into laggy, buggy and constant irratic behaviour. I have been trying to find something stable for years, but since most xda android "developers" seem to be script kids who will go for the next phone as soon as something alse has been release, noone really seems to see things through. rather they release a new buggy rom and then at some point abandon it for the next thing. I have thought about rolling my own release, but I barely have the time to redo my phone at all. stock roms are shite, especially motorolas.

I have a quad core smartphone with a beefy gpu, that cannot be used reliably for anything else but stupid touchsreen games. the lag is horrible, random lockups and slow downs with just about every stock and custom rom I've tried. thanks for locking up the bootloader motorola. you've produced another piece of electronic garbage which could have been a huge success if only opened up for development.

 

[erico]

Hey @Agricola, so CM10.1 works fine on your note 2? I have one too and have been thinking about doing the same.

 

[Agricola]

@erico Yes, I've been using CM10 since the week I bought my Note 2 in 2012. It works fine and probably faster than the original version, but I have very little experience with the Samsung ROM, so I can't tell for sure.
Sadly, the stable version CM10.1.3-N7100 has not been updated since 2013. After the team pushed the stable, most lost interest in the Note 2 while the remaining developers have been making Nightlies of CM11 since. That wouldn't be a problem if CM10.1.3 was perfect, however, it isn't. Especially Trebuchet (the UI, basically AOSP on steroids, like everything else in CM) sometimes crashes; as that only happens every few weeks to me, I'm still over all happy, but it should be noted that you will probably never see a version of a custom ROM that's as stable as the hardware manufacturer's ones.

 

[comradekingu]

Arent our shelves full of shit that just needed to be made to work, and then proved quite quaint.

Sell phone, buy Samsung S2, install replicant. Be done. And then you need a keyboard.

 

[erico]

Thanks @Agricola , I will keep an eye on that rom and check it out at some point. The Samsung rom is not that stable, I get crashes once in a while.

 

[coolbox]

Thanks @Agricola , I will keep an eye on that rom and check it out at some point. The Samsung rom is not that stable, I get crashes once in a while.

Mine crashes all the time.