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If you didn't know, HTC has promised to provide bootloader unlock support for all devices released after September of 2011 as well as many others released before, and they have been keeping good on that promise with added support for many devices over the last few months.
The newest version of Sense UI has been somewhat of a hot topic among HTC owners, as HTC itself said that certain aspects of it has been reserved for newer devices only. Naturally, the dev community over at XDA was not about to stand for that, and shortly after the Sensation ROM leak, got to work on spreading the Sense 3.0 love.
That's right folks - CyanogenMod7 RC3 is up for grabs, and we'll be posting the devices it's available for as they come in. Here's the links we have so far:
SlashGear has confirmed with HTC today that the Desire HD, Desire Z, and Incredible S (along with the standard Desire) will be receiving the bump to Gingerbread some time in the second quarter of this year. But, there's a potential caveat: US phones might not be included.
Take a look at the top tier of Android phones right now and you might notice something. They all kind of look the same. Black front fascia, large touchscreen, minimal waistline. Boring, right? Well that's just the way things are going. Alternatives to the slate way of living are becoming increasingly rare, which puts the HTC Desire Z with its hardware keyboard in an intriguing light. With its metallic accents and suave grey pallet, the Desire Z cuts a different path. So how do I mean rare? If you want a top-level QWERTY Android phone in the USA you have a fairly limited selection to choose from: Sprint has the Samsung Epic 4G, Verizon the Motorola Droid 2 and T-Mobile the HTC G2. The first two there are CDMA which leaves only the T-Mobile handset in contention for GSM customers, unless your carrier happens to stock the Motorola Milestone as well. On either side of the Atlantic, QWERTY sliders appears to be a dying breed whichever way you look at it, so I was curious to see whether or not the added bulk and complexity of a hardware keyboard was worth it. Having had the phone for a couple of months, let's take a look at this device from a hardware perspective, pertaining to both the HTC Desire Z and T-Mobile G2.
After the positive impact HTC's T-Mobile G2 made on American reviewers, it's no wonder the company has decided to try to impress their European colleagues with a similar phone, the Desire Z. The phone is available now from Vodafone, 3 Mobile, Virgin Mobile, O2, Talk Mobile, Orange, and Tesco Mobile if you want to take the leap; the question is, should you? Read on to see what four expert reviewers from TechRadar, CNET UK, Pocket-Lint, and PhoneArena had to say on the subject.
Exactly a week after getting rooted and only a few days after getting its very first CyanogenMod nightly release, HTC Desire Z and T-Mobile G2 owners can now upgrade to RC1 (release candidate 1), bringing it up to speed with the rest of the devices supported by the CM team. Apparently, these guys move at light speed.
Who says the G2's processor is slow, eh? While its stock 800 MHz clockspeed didn't break any benchmark records, it's showing itself to be nicely capable of overclocking. Unlike the QSD8250 in the original Snapdragon, which gets rather unstable anywhere past the 1.13GHz (+15%) mark, the MSM7230 in the Scorpion of the G2 sails right on past +100% with apparent stability. The kernel was posted on XDA-Developers by member Flippy125, with the usual "NOT MY FAULT IF-" disclaimers, but also noting that the kernel runs stably for him.
After getting rooted four days ago, the T-Mobile G2 and its European counterpart, the Desire Z, finally joined the ranks of fully unlocked Android phones, which give us the freedom to replace the ROMs on these devices with something better and more custom.
People want to own their phones. Try as they might to frustrate their customers, networks and manufacturers are fighting a losing battle against the hacking community. The latest victory is an enormous one: the HTC Vision, better known as the T-Mobile G2 and Desire Z has finally been defeated. That pesky eMMC chip locking up the /system of the G2 has been circumvented, and full, glorious, permanent root has been attained:
You're probably aware of one of the slightly more irksome facets of the G2 that is stymying attempts at custom ROMs, namely the locked down /system partition, where the OS is kept. Heretofore it has been impossible to tinker with this internal memory in a permanent fashion. All alterations were reverted on the next boot, leading to solutions like Paul O'Brien's VISIONary soft-root.
Fresh on this HTC's servers this morning we have the source code for the latest G2, DZ and Dinc kernels, along with source code for their respective WebKit browsers. While this news may not be much help to those still desperate for a G2 perm-root, it should come in handy once an easy solution for that is achieved, as it will facilitate the creation of custom ROMs for the G2 (and Desire Z). While you wait for that happy day, feel free to peruse the freely available source code for HTC's pair of landscape sliders.
Looks like T-Mobile's G2 isn't the only HTC-built Android device having its source code outed today - the Desire Z (better known as the international version of the G2) has just had its source code revealed as well.
Last night, @IncredibleDoes threw a shout out on Twitter to let the world know that HTCSense.com was now live.
The new HTC Desire HD and Desire Z handsets are coming very soon, and we're incredibly excited about both of them (just take a look at that 5-second Fast Boot technology again).
HTC's new version of Sense UI - which runs exclusively on the Desire Z and Desire HD (officially, at least) - is really shaping up to be an exception to the tradition of custom Android skins turning the operating system into a nightmare.
So I'm not exactly a huge fan of custom UIs, bloatware, and the like, but even I've got to admit that this new version of HTC's Sense UI looks pretty nice.
If you haven't seen any demos from the recent HTC press conference showcasing the company's new Fast Boot technology available on the newly announced Desire Z and Desire HD handsets, you should stop everything you're doing and watch them immediately: