Back to work!

I’m finally back after a wonderful week and a half off.

Here’s a quick list of the stuff I did over vacation:

1) Went to the Minnesota State Fair.

2) Saw RUSH in concert at said Minnesota State Fair.

3) Rooted my HTC Evo 4G and removed all the bloatware that Sprint installed with the Android 2.2 update.

4) Searched out the mythical 4G towers around the Twin Cities.

The Minnesota State Fair is a blast, so many activities you can do there. My personal favorite is people watching, I can see where the idea for the zombie apocalypse came from.

The RUSH concert on Friday night (Aug 27^th) was outstanding.  No opening act, just 3+ hours of RUSH playing their hearts out. It was also Alex Lifeson’s birthday that night, he was given a 2-foot-long corndog and a steak-on-a-stick on stage to celebrate. They played the Moving Pictures album in its entirety.

I was pretty excited by the pending Android 2.2 (Froyo) update; I had read about the many optimizations and improvements that were added to the build that vastly improved battery life, so when it showed up unannounced on my Evo, I jumped on the update immediately… big mistake.  It seems that Sprint decided that improved battery life was something wasted on their customers, so they loaded their version of the 2.2 update with a lot of bloatware. This rendered the battery life back down to the stock 2.1 levels since all the bloat is running constantly in the background, and there is no way to uninstall it.  The rest of the bad news was that 2.2 fixed a lot of the rooting loop holes that were used in the 2.1 build, so once you had 2.2 on it, you were stuck with it until the rooters figured out another way in. 

XDA Developers to the rescue!  One of their many talented developers, working closely with the Unrevoked team who brought us build after build of rooting goodness, figured out a way to force the stock 2.1 ROM onto a 2.2 loaded phone. Sheer brilliance!  Once rooted, I installed the Ava-FroyoV6 build which is basically the 2.2 stock HTC/Sprint build minus the recovery image which allows you to maintain root access once flashed. I then installed Titanium Backup and joyfully removed all the bloatware.  Battery life is amazing! 

I paid a visit to my favorite Sprint shop and got the lowdown on what to look for around town for 4G.  Apparently Clearwire, whom Sprint just picked up a 51% ownership of recently, is going to be serving 4G in the Twin Cities and are currently up and running a few towers here and there as a test bed.  With that in my skull, I drove the 494/694 loop around the Cities looking for 4G signals and found a few.  Most of the towers I ran into would serve up a 4G signal but appeared to be locked by MAC address, most likely for closed testing.  However, if you happen to be in Roseville by the mall, turn on 4G, you’ll connect immediately to Sprint and obtain an IP address.  I was lunching at Wendy’s in Roseville last Saturday running download tests and was reliably seeing 8.5mb down, and 1.5mb up with full net access.  Flipped on my hotspot, turned on my laptop, connected, and dished out some raw pain to some poor souls in StarCraft II as my burger and fries slowly went cold. 

I run Qwest 20mb fiber service at the house, but the WIFI on the router they provide is hardware limited to 10mb throughput despite the 45mb connection. My hotspot service on the Evo was just a tad slower at 8.5mb throughput on the download but faster on the upload, 1.5mb compared to the 1mb up I get via Qwest. This is definitely a contender in a mobile device offering and I can see where it’s going to pay off in spades when I’m working onsite connecting multiple laptops to the hotspot.  The downside of 4G is that it is a battery eater. It takes a lot of power to run its capabilities and the hotspot service combined, hence the need to carry the data cable with to steal power from my laptop.  The sacrifices we make…

“Also, I can kill you with my brain.” – River Tam (Summer Glau), Firefly