I finally broke down and replaced my long in the tooth Palm Treo 650 with a T-Mobile G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream). The only major complaint I had with the Treo was stability. It used to like to reboot itself about once each day…

So far I'm mostly working on replicating all the functionality that my Treo had. Almost everything on the G1 meets or exceeds the capabilities of the software I had on my Treo. Some software has both improvements and regressions compared to the Treo, but overall I'm pretty happy so far.

Cyanogen 4.1.999

I only ran the stock firmware long enough to install the Cyanogen firmware, so I can't talk about all the specific details that are different from the stock firmware.

There are some interesting improvements behind the scenes, though. The Cyanogen firmware uses compcache and Con Kolivas’s BFS process scheduler. I'm already a heavy user of compcache on my laptop, and I've been testing the BFS scheduler as well.

I've really only had one issue so far with the 4.1.999 firmware. Every once in a while all the icons disappear from the launcher and the phone has to be rebooted to get them back. It seems to be a known issue with the experimental firmware. I doubled the size of the compcache swap space and I didn't see the problem for a few days. I can only assume that the race condition is less likely when the phone is more responsive.

Neat Things I'd Like To Do With Android

I would like to get rsync and cron running on it. I think it would be very nice to have automated wireless backups that are always likely to be in my pocket. I'm hoping to be able to do it without having to rely on having Debian on my SD card.

OpenVPN might be interesting, but I don't currently have a real need for it. A few years ago this would have been a top priority for me, though.