Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid) [LWN.net]

Phandroid has a brief article noting that Samsung has given a Galaxy S II phone to a CyanogenMod developer with the explicit purpose of facilitating a port. Donating a handset is an easy thing for a manufacturer to do, but the value of actively encouraging hacking on the device is great.

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Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 7, 2011 19:38 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (10 responses)

This is awesome news. Not only does Samsung acknowledge Cyanogen, they seem to approve of it.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 7, 2011 20:25 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

Samsung always seemed to be pretty good about the whole OSS thing. Far better then HTC and all that.

I was really surprised when they didn't receive more love from Cyanogenmod for the Galaxy S line of phones. They seemed like it would be a good match.

Hopefully this will help out getting support for the next generation of phones.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 7, 2011 21:02 UTC (Tue) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link]

I hope they apply the same kind of openness to their galaxy player line of Android PMPs.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 7, 2011 21:46 UTC (Tue) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link] (4 responses)

There were probably a number of reasons, including there being a _massive_ number of variants of the Galaxy S line of phones, each with their own arbitrary differences, as well as the code drops by Samsung apparently being of down right horrible quality.

Samsung probably made this move with the S2 due to some in the community surrounding the dozen+ variants of the Galaxy S actually _approaching_ them to extol what benefits the thirdparty devs could bring to them, /if/ Samsung would actually just put a tiny bit of effort into it on their part.

Personally, I'm looking towards HTC for my next phone. Getting Froyo rolled out to my Galaxy S variant only a matter of weeks before the /real/ Galaxy S (the i9000) began receiving Gingerbread has left a bad taste in my mouth (on top of the flaky hardware, and the tiny development community for my variant). Unfortunately, none of them look particularly attractive, but at least with current trends, by the time I actually am looking for a new phone hopefully there will be some player that has a track record for being cooperative/tolerant of the development community around their phones.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 1:54 UTC (Wed) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, the whole 'different variants of Galaxy S' problem only applies to the US, where every carrier insists on getting their own exclusive variant. Everywhere else in thw world (Europe, Australia, Asia) there was only one Galaxy S phone, "the" Galaxy S (i9000).

Admittedly, Samsung wasn't very on time when it came to updating Galaxy S to Froyo. But they did release Froyo for the Galaxy S around September/October. The fact that it takes US operators 5/6 months to push a firmware update down their networks is hardly Samsung's fault. The Galaxy S has been running Froyo for a very long time in the rest of the world.

And now, they have upgraded the Galaxy S to Gingerbread before most of their rivals have released Gingerbread for their one-year-old phones. HTC for example is yet to release Gingerbread for the original Desire.

They also seem to have learnt a bit from their mistakes in SGS and are doing the right thing with SGSII. No more use of their horrid RFS filesystem, they have switched to standard ext4 in SGSII. Some prominent hackers (such as Paul O'Brian of Modaco fame) who have delved into SGSII have said that there's barely anything to fix as it's all very clean.

Combined with this gesture towards CyanogenMod, and the fact that all new HTC flagships (Desire S, Incredible S, Sensation) have locked and encrypted bootloaders, and I wouldn't be surprised if the focus of the hacker community moves from HTC to Samsung and (maybe) Sony Ericsson.

Now we just need open source drivers for these things...

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 3:28 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

What caused you to mention Sony Ericsson? Have they done something particularly hacker friendly recently?

Re: Sony Ericsson...

Posted Jun 8, 2011 6:38 UTC (Wed) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link]

May, 2011 seemed to be a good month for people hacking on Sony Ericsson devices.

Here are a few links I remember seeing...

I don't have a Sony Ericsson so I can't comment on anything beyond the face value of those posts, but this seems to be a good start for them.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link]

Sony Ericsson seems to be doing a few things right recently. They have learnt from the (relative) failure of Xperia X10 last year, and for this year's flagship phones (Arc, Play, Neo), they have completely reversed ship.

They have launched an official website that allows you to officially unlock the bootloader of their phones and get fastboot oem unlock http://unlockbootloader.sonyericsson.com/

They also seem to be updating their phones to the latest version of Android rapidly. All of their phones this year started shipping with Gingerbread (as opposed to Samsung and Motorola who are still launching new devices with Froyo, and even Eclair!) and when the newest Gingerbread release 2.3.4 came, they were on the ball again, updating their phones to this new version only a month or so after Google updated the Nexus series.

This all might not sound like much, but I think attitudes are slowly changing, and the mobile world is slowly embracing open values. Remember, this is a world that until a few years ago viewed phones as a static device that once sold, required no maintenance. It's still a far cry from the open platform that say, the PC is, but some recent moves suggest that slowly but surely, old habit are being shed.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 8:00 UTC (Wed) by giggls (subscriber, #48434) [Link]

> Samsung always seemed to be pretty good about the whole OSS thing.
> Far better then HTC and all that.

Unfortunately this is not true for their Linux based TVs. Quite the opposite: They actively work against people doing firmware mods by adding stuff like busybox build without telnet removing Linux Filesystem support for usb-storage devices etc.

Sven

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 2:02 UTC (Wed) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link] (1 responses)

Samsung got good PR, attracts modders and tinkerers to buy that device, and codes to run on that devices (all for.... almost nothing).

Now, hope that Samsung won't EOL that device in the near future.

Anyway, nice move, Samsung, by supporting the modder community.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 9:18 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

It's a Galaxy SII, their current flagship model. It will be replaced by its successor in the fall, of course, and then it will be dumped like the S I is being dumped now.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 10:47 UTC (Wed) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (1 responses)

This is not uncommon for manufacturers to do, and in most cases is a PR move with little real-world value. I don't know if it is the case here, but usually there are no technical documents or assistance of any kind. They just kind of throw the hardware over the fence and expect a port to magically appear.

I suspect it's usually someone in the marketing departments of these companies that comes up with the idea, and it's totally divorced from the actual engineering folks.

SanDisk sent the Rockbox developers some audio player devices years ago, and then subsequently more-or-less refused to offer any documentation or even to acknowledge the existence of the project beyond that.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 8, 2011 10:57 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

In this case, the CyanogenMod people appear to have asked for the device. And in my experience, device-give-aways are often a huge draw. After all, most of these people are geeks (and so am I), so cool hardware means more than documentation, money or whatever.

And I remember that all the ksvg2 developers got for their work for apple on the webkit svg module was a macbook pro... He is well paid that is well satisfied and all that.

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 9, 2011 14:12 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link] (1 responses)

Yet the original Galaxy S still doesn't have a stable Cyanogen Mod build :(

Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev (Phandroid)

Posted Jun 10, 2011 15:58 UTC (Fri) by j0m77 (subscriber, #50443) [Link]

No stable release (yet) but let me tell you the nightlies (have a recent one on my SGS now) don't suck, not remotely as much as the original Froyo firmware at least. I know I am on Gingerbread now, but I'm not preaching about the feature set (though it's nice to have that too), just sold on the speed, increased stability, and especially no more sluggish UI. Before flashing it, I was starting to hate the device for that...