I Love Beluga

No I am not talking about whale eggs.  I am talking about the single biggest threat to Blackberry since the iPhone.   But before I go any further, YES Beluga is yet another messenger. 

So why if Beluga is just another messenger do I love it.  Because for as much as I love Android I miss my Blackberry.  And besides the great keyboard, quick messenging, and fast multitasking the thing I miss the most about Blackberry is the blackberry messenger.  The ability to instantly talk to anyone with a blackberry was great.  And for the longest time I would pay $60 a year just for BBM.  Bit now I don't.

Enough with that.  The good about Beluga.  It is a great way to to keep up with groups of people you actually know.  You can talk to one or more people in message groups called pods.  In a pod you can share your pictures and location.

The extra great part of Beluga is you don't have to have Beluga to use it.  Say for instance you are with a bunch of people out for the night and you get spilt up.  Int the group there are some Androids, iPhones, Blackberry and regular feature phones.  Now you could email or text everyone individually. But with Beluga you could add everyones email and cell to a pod and the messages goes to them client or not. 

Right now Beluga is on Android and iPhone.  Blackberry is on the way. 

Im just an outlaw... in theroy

its not like I heard old 80s rock songs and the process of rooting ones phone has already been deemed permittable by the government. But it still feels naughty lol. I finally rooted my phone and no one raided my residence. YEPPIE!


Why I Wanted to Root
I would like to say because Motorola SUCKS but its more than that. I bought my Cliq XT in March of 2010. I bought it with the understanding that the android 2.1 update for the Cliq XT would come out in April. Well since then I saw that release date get pushed back further and further. Now they don't even give a date. They just say they need to do further testing. Classy Motorola.


Getting back to the non-bitter tone of this post, up until January 29, 2010 my phone was running Android version 1.5. That's four versions behind the latest OS folks. And pretty much any app released now would not run on my phone. That means no Kindle app, no Google Goggles, no fun.

Bye Bye 1.5
I see now why phone companies and makers are so scared of rooting. Its like I have a new phone. And granted that me being in the computer industry made me a little more familiar with the commands it wasn't that hard to do. That is thanks to some very great directions from website The Unlockr. The hardest part was figuring out if I was running 32 or 64 bit Windows for the phone drivers.


The thing I noticed first was how much faster the phone seemed. Its obvious that aandroid updates are not just all pretty user interface. I was scared that my relatively old hardware would dog it with the update. Not even close to reality however. Even apps that are Android 2.1 exclusive work great. And lastly the phone functions exactly how I would expect. The camera button works. Heard some horror stories about early ROMs.

Helpful Tips
Please make sure your data is syncing before you decide to flash your rom. Nothing worst than finding out you lost a few months or worse of contacts. Also. If you don't already have it install AppBrain and sync all your app installs with it. Once you finish your root and ROM flash you can log back into AppBrain and do reinstalls of all your apps.


If you are just changing ROM that are on the same OS version you could use the Astro File Manager to backup all your installed appspot on your SD card.


It isn't all good however. I do suffer from random reboots. Plus the "new" version of Android on my phone is still two releases away from the latest and greatest. So in another four months I could be right back where I was. But that's life in the broke lane for ya.

Helpful Links
http://theunlockr.com

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

http://market.android.com/search?q=pname:com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps

http://market.android.com/search?q=pname:com.metago.astro

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