The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

If you still have a Touch HD lying around or maybe in daily use, you can now run Google Android on it, thanks to a bunch of developers over at xda-developers.com. The software is not in rom format yet, which means that when your phone starts up it will start up in WinMo as usual. You then have to run Android from Start->Programs. I tried it. Works. Seems quite slow. Too slow too really use, especially if you have experienced Android on a fast phone. But still worth a little play. And as it is not a rom, you can go back to trusty old WinMo by simply pulling the battery and restarting the phone. Follow this link for the instructions and file to download. The instructions are good but left out one step:

After you have unzipped the contents of the downloaded zip file into the root of your sd memory card (and remember to use path names when unzipping so that the subdirs unzip into subdirs on the card), you need to run Auto-setup.exe which you will find in the root of your memory card. This will install the Android app. Thereafter you will find Android under Start->Programs.

Check out these pictures of the new Nokia N8 at FinestFones. Nice looking phone. Definitely on my shopping list. Keen to try out the new version of Symbian that this phone runs.

What has been the best and at the same time the worst feature of the Mototola Droid? Its keyboard. It was its best feature, because at the time of its launch, there were a paucity of high-end phones with qwerty keyboards. In fact, I recall that it was the only Android phone with a keypad, except for the original G1 of course. It was also its worst feature, because as keyboards go, it was a shocker, made worse by the portruding edge on the right side of the phone.

Well, it looks like Motorola has fixed the bad aspects of the keyboard on the upcoming Droid 2, giving its keyboard more tactile feedback, slightly raised keys, and dropping the d-pad. The right side of the phone, when in held in landscape mode, is still wider than the left side but a lot less so.

The Droid 2 will also have a faster processor than its predecessor.

This is what HP’s CEO Mark Hurd said yesterday at a technology conference:

We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business, and we are not going to spend billions of dollars trying to go into the smartphone business; that doesn’t in any way make any sense. According to Hurd, HP was actually more interested in Palm’s IP – specifically webOS, which he wants to put on “tens of millions of HP small form-factor web-connected devices”

He is either nuts or lying. I hope it is the latter.