Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich and back

I have a whole range of Andorid devices now.

  • Archos 70 running Android 2.2 Froyo
  • HTC Desire running Android 2.3 Gingerbread (cyanogen mod 7)
  • Sansung GT-P6210 Tablet running Android 3.2 Honeycomb
  • HTC One X running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Although I hardly use the first two (actually need to sell my HTC Desire on ebay soon) I do find switching between the Samsung Tablet and my HTC phone a bit of a pain. I have done things to make switching a lot easier like installing the Ice cream sandwich keyboard. But theres enough differences to confuse me once in a while.

To be honest I can’t wait for the tablet to get upgraded to Ice cream sandwich… In between I’m getting a lot closer to installing Cyanogen’s Mod 9 version as it seems pretty stable? on the wifi only version of the tablet.

Also need to attempt the Ice cream sandwich upgrade for my Archos, just to see what happens…

do you have a desire for froyo too?

Today my HTC desire made a weird noise and I looked at the screen to find it wanted to download a massive update and it was asking if it should use wifi or a combination of 3g and wifi. Looking at the update it was trying to download, I saw those magical word… FROYO!

Yep for ages I’ve been waiting for Froyo because although I love my desire phone, I keep running out of space. Which is stupid because I got a 8gig micro Sd card in the device but for some reason android pretty much ignores it. Froyo came out a while ago with the perfect solution for using the Sd card for apps, but I’ve had to wait for Orange and HTC to put up a update before I could upgrade.

Anyway time for the upgrade… i’ll let you know how it goes

If you want to upgrade yourself, there’s a quick and easy way to do it. (I wish I’d done it myself a while ago to be honest)

  1. Download the Android 2.2 firmware for the Desire – here is the link to download
  2. Rename the file update.zip and copy it to your microSD card via USB. [Note: make sure the file is named update.zip and not update.zip.zip.]
  3. Power down your Desire
  4. Hold down the “Volume Down” button as you power the phone back on.
  5. A screen should appear showing your phone’s system searching for various files. Scroll down to “recovery” and press the “Power” button.
  6. When you see the triangle with an exclamation point symbol, press the “Power” and “Volume Up” buttons at the same time.
  7. From the menu that appears, select “Apply sdcard:update.zip.”
  8. When the screen displays “Install from sdcard complete” select “reboot system now” and wait for the phone to power back up.

I can happily say I’m upgraded and enjoying Android Froyo, thanks Google, HTC and Orange.