I am posting this from my Android phone! Well I was, until I found that the screenshots are all upside down thanks to ZTE building the screen that way! The Android Gallery app only edits the EXIF data on JPEG’s to rotate them, it doesn’t actually rotate the image. So I uninstalled ShootMe and stuck to using ddms from the SDK via the PC, at least that seems to rotate the images properly.

Since the announcement that Microsoft are buying Skype I thought I’d look into alternative VoIP providers. Firstly I fired up good old Ekiga (formerly Gnomemeeting) with the Diamondcard SIP gateway provider, to see if it had improved any since I last tried it. It hasn’t is the short answer. I mean it works as a SIP client but its difficult to use and a bit low on features/services. I then tried my ISP as my SIP gateway provider via their Freephonie service.

I hate waiting for things to come from ebay, I sit here every day cursing the Hong Kong postal service, or the French customs and postman; never once considering that I’d either have to pay a fortune or simply wouldn’t be able to get hold of the goods I’m buying without fleabay. They do have some weird shiz on there that you’d never see in the highstreet. So here’s my list, in order I’m expecting them:

Cyanogenmod 7.1.0 nightly 59 with Android 2.3.4 (GRJ22) is available for download. I installed it on my ZTE Blade and it doesn’t seem any better or worse than CM7.0.2 N57, of course this isn’t even 7.1 RC1 yet, its RC0. I think the main focus of 2.3.4 was on video performance which probably won’t have much of an effect on the lowly Blade which can’t even run Flash. I’ve also been playing with K4MobiDeDRM_v02.

Well I finally bit the bullet and installed CM7 on my ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco) as well as upgrading from the Gen1 radio to Gen2. The install all went quite well using the TPT image-and-upgrade method. Disappointingly my downloaded apps didn’t all reinstall automatically, so spent a while on the Market re-sending them to the phone. Also the paid-for LauncherPro+ didn’t automatically unlock itself, however ROMManager did. I forgot to backup my SMS’s, but I found that you can unzip your nandroid backup’s data.