impromptu project

so, yesterday i woke up late, 8:30 am to be precise, instead of 7:30 am which i normally would.
so naturally, i ended up not going to work. i figured it was not worth the trouble going through the traffic, reach work late and get a crappy parking spot thats too far away from the office, and also in a less secure area, i might as well stay at home and burn 1 more day off my annual leave (i got a some left over still anyways.

so after the usual TLK(link) and Earth:2025(link) sessions, i wondered my way to XDA-Devs(link).
after reading up there and some discussion with myself, i decided to reflash my phone ROM to a new one. the current one is "daldroid Rogers ROM", the new one i decided to flash onto my phone is the stable branch of Cyanogenmod 4.0.2 for 32A Magic.

the process went on smoothly, i have been using it for close to 24 hours, and so far have not encountered any problems.

so, the pros of the upgrade :
1. the rom is fast, very responsive.
2. i have 5 screens instead of 3 (yeay!)
3. the new donut power control widget!
4. the music player widget is much better now. (no more playlist empty displaying)
5. voice dialler and voice search
6. some subtle but spiffy visual upgrades all over the place

the cons:
1. i lost all my words in my dictionary, so i need to reenter it again
2. the phone book/contact management is a bit iffy, it does not recognise numbers like normal phones do. ex, 01261xxxxx and +601261xxxxx is not recosnised under the same contact. other phones would have recognised that its the same number. but small fix for that.
3 . the very functional HTC dialer is gone. but hey, i'll survive..


also, i got a cool program for the PC/android based phone that allows you to tether your phone as a modem. priced at USD29, but after the trial is over, you can still used the program, but are limited to http connections. so its essentially free to use for browsing.

the program is called PDAnet for android(link).

so i tested out the PDAnet. and i gotta say it rocks. speed test i made proved it all. screen shot of it is at home. i will post it later if i remember. but here is what i did :
downloaded a 90Mb file via rapidshare premium. normal speed for that (on streamyx 512kbps) is 60-65kbps. using PDAnet and maxis 3G (note that i wasnt even connected at HSDPA speed), i managed to blazing average of 250kbps, with the max topping out at around 290kbps.(click on the image for a better view)

so thats all for this round of updates. :)