Android Open Source Project!!!

My Xperia X10 was my main phone, mainly because of better battery life and a more comfortable form factor. But after I got CyanogenMod 7 on my Motorola Milestone the battery life gap was closing and fast!
The biggest flaw of the X10 though was the painfully outdated Operating System (OS). It was still running Android 1.6 Donut! I had Android 2.3 Gingerbread running in my, older and not flagship phone, Milestone!
Something had to be done about that, and it was a long time and after a lot of broken promises and delays from Sony Ericsson that finally Android 2.1 arrived to the Xperia! Yes Android 2.1!!! That's not exactly ideal but it's much better than 1.6. From 1.6 to 2.1 there's a great leap performance wise and with battery life.
But right after getting Android 2.1 to my Xperia it was slower than when I had 1.6 on it! Yes, again Sony dropped the ball and really bloated up the OS making it sluggish and disappointing...
But then the X10 developers started to pick up the ball that Sony dropped...
The XDA forums had the answers again, and some great developers started tweaking the 2.1 release from Sony to get a good experience on our phones. One of the best 2.1 ROM's can be found here.
But that wasn't what we wanted, we wanted more, we always want MORE!!! So the great Jerpelea and the great zdzihu started working together and managed to get Android 2.2 Froyo working on our beloved Xperia!! That was great news... Although 2.3 is a nice upgrade there are no major features that you don't have on 2.2. 2.2 on the other hand had Flash support that 2.1 lacked!! That's big, just ask any of your friends that have an iPhone or an iPad that can't access some sites because they don't have flash...
But that wasn't all they did, it wasn't a Sony Ericsson 2.2, with bloatware, Timescape, Mediascape and other things that slow your phone more that it helps, it was Android Open Source Project!!! That means it was a clean, nothing but pure Android!! That's what the Milestone had when I bought it almost a year ago by then, but that was a much lighter better looking phone with a better hardware with it!! This ROM completely revitalized my X10 and made using it an enjoyable experience again!! And that was not all, for now I could change pretty much anything I wanted to make my phone look and act the way I wanted it to...

PS: Sorry for the long gap between posts, I'll try and get back to a post a day, but I've been a bit busy lately...
PPS: The app I'm recommending today is Total Commander for Android, it's still beta but it's one of the greatest file managers for Android out there, it's free and has no ads!! Click here for a more detailed description.
PPPS: I still have Google+ invites if any of you guys want it...

CyanogenMod for the win!!

Ok, so custom ROMs were not yet available to the Xperia X10, so I let it be for a while and went on to play with my Milestone...
As some people already know the Motorola Milestone is the international version of the Motorola Droid, the biggest difference being that the Milestone has a locked bootloader :-( whereas the Droid has an unlocked one...
For custom ROMs this makes a huge difference, first big difference is that Cyanogenmod does not support devices with a locked bootloader. And you really want Cyanogenmod if you're planning to use custom ROMs. It's the most popular custom ROM in the Android scene. It offers some nice performance and interface improvements. But not all hope was lost because of the best part of having an Android phone is that you have a great developer community behind it...
So thanks to Kabaldan and other great developers a port of Cyanogenmod was made for the Motorola Milestone!!
And as an added bonus Kabaldan's port was of CM (CyanogenMod) 7, which is actually Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)!! Now that I managed to get my Milestone to run CM7 the battery was better than ever, was incredibly fast thanks to the ROM and to the great overclock for the processor which made my measly 500Mhz processor turn into a 900Mhz machine!!
My Xperia was starting to feel like a bad phone, and it was sluggish in comparison, and it has a much better hardware on it! That just goes to show how much difference can exist when you have Android 1.6 (Donut) instead of the latest and much more modern Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)! But I wouldn't just give up on it...

PS: In homage to the MLB All-Star break (congrats to Robinson Canò for his Home Run derby win and the National League for the All-Star game win) here is a nice app to play a little baseball on your Android, is on sale and I like it a lot! Homerun Battle 3D. Hope you guys like it!
PPS: Thanks a lot for all the visits guys, yesterday there was a boom in the visits thanks to my previous post with the new Android Market app, if you didn't grab it yet go ahead and download it!