XDA-Developers has an ongoing project to port Android to a number of HTC-manufactured Windows Mobile phones, including my own HTC Fuze (the AT&T version of HTC Touch Pro). The project has been incredibly successful, due to the phones having very similar hardware to a lot of the HTC Android phones.
Recently, I’ve been getting a little involved with the Android 2.0 (Eclair) port to these devices. With help from the developers in that community, I’ve been able to make a couple small contributions. My usefulness is mainly due to me having lots of Linux experience, a tiny bit of Android experience, a strong programming background, and most importantly, an HTC Fuze, being one of the few American guys there.
Anyway, I’ve been able to help the port get stable deep sleep working in the kernel (which gives Android much more useful battery life on the devices), working outbound texting (SMS) on North American providers (by providing logs to the smart guy), and a Fuze-specific keyboard layout for Android.
We’re still not done yet, though. The following are not yet working in Android (probably in order of importance for daily consumption):
- Camera – work has been done, but internal testing is ongoing before public (binary) release. The hangup is now mostly in userspace
- Bluetooth – this shouldn’t be too bad to get working, but it’s been low priority
- GPS – I don’t know of any recent progress with this yet. It’s some time down the road.
- Accelerated Graphics – I have no idea what progress has been made on this. This would be nice to have, but obviously is not integral to the system (Android works great now even without it)
…Among some low-level system things to work out.
Most of what isn’t mentioned is working. This includes phone calls (most important for a phone), texting, mobile data and 3G, etc. Testing the port is of utmost importance. There are many users interested in the project, but not lots of people with the experience required to directly contribute. Concise reports detailing exactly what went wrong and under which circumstances is very useful to the developers.
A lot of the work on this port is being done by phhusson and babijoee on XDA-developers. Please donate to them as you see fit. Also, please provide feedback to any or all of us via the thread or on freenode IRC in #xdandroid.
Obviously, I’m very interested in feedback about the Fuze keyboard layout. I appreciate bug reports, success reports, and improvement suggestions. Thanks.
[1] XDA-Devs port thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=601751
[2] Freenode IRC #htc-linux: irc://irc.freenode.net/xdandroid