Before I tell you more, please be aware these are beta builds, and not everything is working. The most notable features that are lacking that I’ve noticed are 4G, camera, and USB mass storage. If you can get by without those features, you can probably use one of these ROMs as your “daily driver”.

A brilliant Android developer/hacker that goes by the handle JoelZ9614 has posted two working builds of Ice Cream Sandwich for the EVO 3D, one that is an AOSP (Android Open Source Project) build, and another that is a CyanogenMod 9.0 build. If you’re not familiar with CyanogenMod, it is a widely used ROM that is based on AOSP but includes a number of enhancements and features designed to increase performance and reliability.

Where to Get Ice Cream Sandwich for the EVO3D

You can download the ROMs here:

http://www.androidfilehost.com/main/EVO_3D_Developers/Joel/ROMS/ICSAOSPRELEASES/

As of today, the ICS-AOSP.zip file is the AOSP build and cm9-shooter-ota-joel-12812.zip file is the CyanogenMod 9.0 build. If you download CyanogenMod, you should be made aware that this particular Android ROM does not include any Google apps by default (or Google Accounts synchronization).

If you want Google apps & features on the CyanogenMod build (often referred to by CyanogenMod users/developers as GApps), do not download the CM9-GAPPS.zip file you see in the above file download site. There is a problem with this file and it does not work. For the proper GApps, download the file located at:

http://www.mediafire.com/?db9zc0mq1lj0gqe

Minor Issues and Workarounds

Please note that although data is working with these builds, you may encounter issues initially and your phone may indicate there is No Service. If this happens to you, just put the phone into airplane mode (hold the power button down for a few seconds), leave it in airplane mode for about 10 seconds, and then disable airplane mode. This should get 3G data working for you.

Another thing to note is that the CyanogenMod build I used does have some issues with the display, where the screen gets garbled from time-to-time. Usually a swipe of the status bar will clean things up. The AOSP build does not have the display issues I encountered with the CyanogenMod version.

So What’s New?

Since you’re probably new to Ice Cream Sandwich, here’s a quick run-down of some things you may want to check out:

• Home Screen Folders: Just like iOS, you can drag and drop home screen icons on top of each other to create folders and group them together. To rename the folders, just open one and click at the bottom where it says Unnamed Folder, and you can type the name of the folder.
• Voice Keyboard: In Gingerbread, when you want to use the voice recognition keyboard, you have to submit pieces of it at a time, which is kind of a pain. In Ice Cream Sandwich, it now maintains an open connection to Google’s voice recognition servers, and behaves much more like a keyboard. You can just speak continuously, and you’ll see your speech appear in the text area as it is analyzed.
• Built-in WiFi Hotspot: You no longer need to use the WiFi Tether app, as it is built right into Ice Cream Sandwich.
• Advanced Notifications: In Gingerbread you can only clear all notifications, or click on them, which may result in launching an app. This is often an unnecessary step, as just seeing the notification might be enough for you. With Ice Cream Sandwich, you can just swipe to clear them.
• Better Task Switching: A long-press of the Home button will now show a long, scrollable list of recent applications. If you do not want to see a particular app in the recent apps list, just swipe it to clear it off the recent apps list.
• Customizable Favorites Tray: The last row of icons on your home screen is static, and is always displayed on all the home screens. You can customize it with any frequently used applications.

There are a lots of more cool new features in Android 4.0 you’ll want to check out for yourself.

Additional Info and Keeping Informed

You can rest assured progress will continue, and better builds will continue to be released. JoelZ9614 and others are working hard to make things better all the time. It seems he’s been posting new releases every 2-3 days or so. The main thread for the AOSP build is at the XDA Developers forum here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1411461

His CyanogenMod build on RootzWiki forum here:

http://rootzwiki.com/topic/16573-12812romiml74k403cyanogenmod-9-alpha-v1unofficial/

You may want to follow these threads as things continue to develop.

The Chromium OS source code is available for download (Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google Chrome OS), and you can compile and build it. It took some time, but I did manage to do this on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) machine. I also managed to put together a VirtualBox virtual appliance that is all ready to go. I built a torrent for it, so feel free to download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VirtualBox Appliance Torrent

Please continue to seed, as I’m sure there will be many people out there wanting to try it out.

To use it, just start up VirtualBox, click File and then Import. Navigate to the chromiumos.ovf file and select it. The virtual appliance will be imported into VirtualBox and you should be good to go.

I also included a txt file that more or less has the commands I used to build it. You may be able to run it as a script, although I haven’t confirmed that it will work. I guess you could say I more or less took “script-like notes” as I was building Chromium OS.

If you hit Ctrl+Alt+T when you first log in, you’ll get a shell prompt. You can run “sudo su” (no quotes) to log in as root, and I’ve set the password to “password” (no quotes). If you use this machine for anything serious (although I doubt you would), be sure to change the password.

You should be running VirtualBox 3.0.12, and when you import the virtual appliance everything should be configured properly. If you get an error that says “network not connected and offline login fail” when you try to log in, be sure that the virtual network adapter is set to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM).

If the network adapter is already properly configured but you are still seeing the error, try logging in with the user “chronos” with the password “password” (no quotes). This should log you in and bring up the chrome browser window. If you don’t see a Google Accounts login screen, try hitting the refresh button. That should bring up the Google Accounts login screen.

It is absolutely astounding how fast it boots. It really is nearly instant-on and takes a mere few seconds to bring up the login screen.

Once you log in with your Gmail account, it launches and you’ll see the Chromium interface open up to your Gmail. There is also a Google Calendar tab and a New Tab tab. The little chrome sphere appears in the upper left corner, but when you click on it you don’t get a menu as you see in some of the Chrome OS videos. Instead, you get a Google.com account login page.

As you can see, it looks very much like the Chrome OS screenshots that had surfaced last month. Of course, being that this is running on a virtual machine without any decent video drivers on the operating system, the resolution is quite low (800×600). Your dear old granddad may be the only one that actually finds it visually appealing at this resolution.

Right now the most impressive thing is how fast this operating system loads. Of course, it should load fast because there really is hardly anything there. In any case, it is rather neat to see an early release in action. The fact that it actually works on a virtual machine is quite promising. Eventually as drivers for more hardware are incorporated into it, it should be possible to run it your own real hardware.

I also found a VMWare virtual disk image on a Google Wave about the Chrome OS. You can download it here:

As of now, the link to the VMWare disk image is valid and the download works.

Update: I just went into the Chrome OS Wave I found with the link to the VMWare disk image, and apparently the poor guy that posted that file to Amazon Web Services ran up a $380 bill so he took the file down. Here’s the torrent of the same file posted up on Pirate Bay:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image Torrent

However, I haven’t tried using it, so I can’t confirm that it will run on VMWare without issue. Enjoy your Google Chrome OS virtual machines!

If you ask me, the Google Chrome OS will really be nothing more than a Linux distribution. It will use the Linux kernel along with a “new windowing system” Google has developed. I suspect it is really just a new window manager that sits on top of the X.org server or XFree86 (X.org would be my guess).

The Chrome browser will play a large part of the windowing system (the OS is actually called the Google Chrome OS). It seems that Google wants to further close the gap between the desktop and the web, and the applications for the operating system will be based on web technologies. I’m fairly certain that Google Gears will also play a significant role in the OS, in order to make applications available offline as well as online.

So what does this mean for Microsoft? Well, Microsoft has already announced what seems to me to be a similar product, that Ballmer refered to as Windows Cloud. Google’s announcement may help to push Microsoft to release Windows Cloud a bit sooner than expected, depending on how well the Google Chrome OS is received.

I doubt that there will really be widespread adoption of the Google OS when it is released. It probably will not be capable of running Windows applications right out of the box, unless Google includes Wine along with it. It is difficult for people to completely abandon a platform they have been using for over 10 years, without having backward compatability to it. Backward compatability has been both a blessing and a curse for Microsoft, as they have released new versions of Windows.

Windows vs. OS X is a good case in point, when it comes to adopting a new operating system. OS X is a great product, but still has a long way to go before it takes considerable market share from Windows. Plus, OS X has the advantage of products that DO provide backward compatability with Windows, yet it probably has not achieved the market penetration Apple desires.

There is one major thing in Google’s favor that Apple does not have. The Google OS will be free. I think one obstacle for Apple to further increase their market share is that the OS is bound to very expensive (and pretty) hardware. Google will have no such obstacle since their OS will be free and open source.

I for one am looking forward to the release of Google Chrome OS. I enjoy tinkering with Linux and other free operating systems. I will be most interested to see if I actually would be able to use it as a replacement to my desktop OS.

We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated. You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.

It seems that Microsoft engineers do have a good grasp on the issues that users have with Windows Vista. On the other hand, CEO Steve Ballmer doesn’t seem to have a clue:

the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I’m not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.

Ummm, yeah… Mr. Ballmer, you sacrificed security for usability not compatibility. I suspect he’s probably still running Windows XP on his desktop, so he really has no idea what he’s talking about. The compatibility issues with Vista have little to do with UAC. Vista’s compatibility problems pale in comparison to the usability issues that UAC introduced.

At least Microsoft engineers do seem to have a good handle on the problems with UAC. It sounds as though Windows 7 should bring some big improvements. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft actually intended Vista to be the New Coke of the Windows world, so that Windows 7 can bring them back with a bang. Probably not, but it does make for a nice conspiracy theory.

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