David Carrington

This is getting a bit silly now!

1. September 2008: I won a Sagem MY721X “So Ice” for emailing Ben Smith “Ben Smith is the best presenter on Mobile Industry Review”.
2. December 2008: I won a Dell Mini 9 netbook from Mobile Industry Review’s Christmas Presents competition.
3. June 2009: I won a Nokia N97 from The Really Mobile Project’s WeekOfWin competition.
4. November 2009: I won a Sonim XP3 Land Rover phone from Mobile Industry Review.
5. June 2010: I won an HTC HD2 as part of a team entering Microsoft’s MyKindOfPhone competition.
6. Yesterday (July 2010): I won a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro from SE’s “insiders” competition.

So please, forward me any phone competitions you hear about because I really like entering them!

Funnily enough. Even though I win so many phones, it doesn’t stop me buying another every time my contract runs out:

• 2005: HTC BlueAngel
• 2007: HTC Touch
• 2008: HTC Diamond
• 2009: HTC Dream
• 2010: HTC Desire

I really ought to sell one or two of these!

A couple of people have asked me about how I went about rooting my HTC Desire and what ROM I’ve put on it. Here’s how I did it:

1. I installed “HTC Sync” from HTC’s official website
2. I followed the rooting  instructions over at http://desire.modaco.com
3. I downloaded ROM Manager from the Android Market
4. I used that to install the DeFrost ROM (currently v1.4)

That’s all. No risk. No worry about breaking things, it all just works.

What I’ve lost:

1. All the slow, ugly, bloated, HTC software
2. The ability to record video (for now, until the community find a fix)

What I’ve gained:

1. Lovely pure Android OS with no HTC intrusions
2. 3G -> wifi tethering and other similar little things from Android 2.2

That might not sound a lot, but the benefits for me are huge as it has a big impact on the most used applications:

1. The browser is nicer
2. The phone dialer is nicer
3. The SMS app is nicer
4. The home screen/launcher is nicer
5. The locked screen is nicer
6. OK, the whole phone is just nicer!

If you do like HTC Sense and Rosie and all that Facebook nonsense, then stick with the existing ROMs and wait for an official update hopefully some time in the next 6 months. If you want to have a phone with all the latest and greatest Android capabilities then I highly recommend doing an update.

UPDATE: The latest DeFrost versions already have a working video camera. Android community rocks!

I’ve always been a big fan of smartphones, especially from HTC. I currently own an HTC BlueAngel, Touch, Diamond, Dream (G1), and now I’ve ordered an HTC Desire to match.

This morning I posted to Twitter:

T-Mobile want to charge me £170 to upgrade to an HTC Desire. Yet another reason I’ll probably switch to Vodafone next month.

£170 for the upgrade, on a contract that was already costing me about £30 every month? No thank you very much.

People can say what they like about Twitter but it’s great when I start getting responses like these, it makes it a great place for me:

gavinlew: speak to @vodafoneukdeals for a good deal on a htc desire – there is a nice guy called Ben who is helping me out

artesea: if you want I can get you 30% the line rental on any (standard) tariff. Makes £35 a month only £24.50

VodafoneUKdeals: We can do the Desire FREE on 18 month 300mins unlimited sms and data for £30 all in [and] artesea’s staff discount would still be available on the £30 offer saving you even more! :-) ^BH

After a quick chat with Vodafone’s Web Relation team, they knocked that £30 monthly contract down to £25 and signed me up. With any luck, artesea (Ryan Cullen) will still be OK giving me that 30% staff discount too.

Here’s a random graph I thought I’d put together just for the fun of it:

Hooray for the interweb!

Tapping away on the Nokia N97 wondering whether this WordPress mobile client is any good.

Seems OK.

Update: seems to work reasonably well on Android too (G1).

Google Analytics is one of those great Google products that I’ve used from the start. It provides very useful statistics, graphs and alerts about site usage. I use it for all of my sites and have recently modified Dabr to work with it too – with only a handful of minor obstacles along the way.

First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.

Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:

5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.

Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!

AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.

Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.

AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.

So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:

• AdWords to bring in potential new users,
• AdSense to bring in a little cash,
• and Analytics to track site usage.

Thanks Google :)