Almost Android

I just got a cool new cell phone.  No, not the iphone, the other cool new touchscreen cell phone.  Nope, not the Tmobile G1 either.  Give up?  I'll give you a hint, my carrier is Verizon.  Doesn't ring any bells does it?  That is because Verizon has a great network but for some reason they haven't jumped on either the iphone or android bandwagon.

My new phone is the xv6900.  It is an HTC touch stripped down for Verizon.  The important part is that it has a touch screen, is fairly small and lightweight and is pretty sweet.  The main problem is that it runs windows mobile.  When I use it I feel like I am stuck on the Island and we timetraveled to 1998.

To improve my lot in life I started searching for solutions, it turns out that other people have decided that this phone is a great canidate for Android (I agree), and they have put some work into porting it.  The site is here http://it029000.massey.ac.nz/vogue/.  I downloaded his latest work and put it on my micro sd.  After running haret.exe, my phone magically rebooted into Android.  I was so happy to see the green litte robot icon pulsating on my screen.  After that things went down hill.  First my phone would hang and I discoverd I needed to edit a defaults.txt file to set my radio version, so then I upgraded my phones firmware and tried again.  Now it works much better, but it is still not perfect.  The main drawback is that the dialer app craches, and it doesn't notify me of voicemail.

Android, even in a primitive state does show me one thing, how much better my phone would work.  Windows mobile is sluggish and feels outdated.  Android is fast and modern.  Why Verizon wouldn't jump on the opturnity is beyond me.