New gingerbread leaks out ep1w.....

[DC5_K20Z1]

Hopefully we get this build ota soon...p3 droid says it is the official build of gingerbread for our phone. He says there are no known issues after 30 days use.

[WCMack]

Dear DC5,

I don't mean to be argumentative, but I read his post and I would not really say he said it was the "official" build. In fact he used the word "unofficial" and I would think that any leaked version of the OS would have to be considered that; the only "official" version will be the one that Verizon/Samsung releases.

Having said that, it is probably pretty close to the real thing I would guess. I am too much of a choir boy to risk my warranty on an in-the-wild download of a new version of the OS. Especially since I really don't have the experience of flashing all this software into the phone, and one mistake puts the phone in brick mode, as I understand it.

Anyway, good luck if you decide to take the plunge!

[DC5_K20Z1]

Oh no I'm not downloading it...I'm waiting got the official ota update. In a few different forums people asked if this build was the official and thats what people serum to think is that on his page there was official build....but he said unofficial as it has not been released yet so it is unofficial....but a few different people on a few different forums seem to think this could be the final build....but yea it very well might not be either.....I'm just reporting what others have been talking about.

[WCMack]

No worries. I just did not want people to take the word "official" too seriously. There are so many of us waiting for the next iteration of the OS to see if it solves some of the problems people have been having. If they felt an official version was out, but had not received it OTA, there would be tons of posts here asking why.

[trparky]

Actually, it's pretty darn hard to hard-brick this phone.  And by that I mean being unable to recover it.

The reason is that no matter what you do you can always get into Emergency Download Mode.  You do this by turning the phone off and then holding down the Volume-Down Rocker Switch while powering the phone on and keeping the Volume-Down Rocker Switch depressed until you have the screen with a big yellow triangle in the middle.  The reason is that this mode is hard-embedded into the phone's core SoC (or System on a Chip) in ROM (or Read-Only Memory).  You have to do some really bad things do mess with that part of the phone.

When most people think of bricking a phone, it really isn't bricked.  It's more like a soft-brick as versus a hard-brick.  A hard-brick would be messing up the Emergency Download Mode which as I said above, it's pretty darn close to impossible to mess that part up.

Once getting into Emergency Download Mode, you can always use a tool called ODIN to reflash the core ROM along with the partition data file (a PIT file) and get back to a working phone in under ten minutes.  This is the same process that Samsung does when they have to fix phones but they use slightly different software tools to do this process.

[WCMack]

Dear trparky,

That's nice to know. But it doesn't change my mind. I guess I am just too conservative when it comes to messing with a relatively new phone. I understand the process, but I am not ready to try it.

Thanks.

[trparky]

Believe, I was just like you when I bought this phone.  I never thought I'd ever root and ROM it but I increasingly got frustrated with the likes of Verizon and Samsung not coming out with a fix to the issues that we've been having meanwhile the Android Community was solving all or at least most of the issues that we've been having with the phone.

{edited to comply with Terms of Service}

As far as I'm concerned, Verizon and Samsung pushed me to ROM the phone because of their obvious inability to push a fix to our phones for all of the issues we've been having.  I paid for a phone that I expected to work, not a phone with a crap-ton of bugs like the current OS build that the Droid Charge has.  Is a working phone that much to ask for?

[WCMack]

trparky,

No, I hear you. I don't have anywhere near as serious a set of problems with my Charge, and that's probably another reason I haven't tried anything out-of-bounds yet. If I had some of the major issues that others complain of on this forum, I might have done it before now.

I use my phone primarily for business, so calling, emailing, using Dropbox and reading the news from various services are the activities I spend 99% of my daily time on. These work pretty well on my phone, so I can't complain. Yes, I have some Bluetooth issues, but I wanted to stop using BT because of radiation/health concerns, so this was a motivator. Yes, I sometimes (rarely) drop to 1X but the 3G connection is very solid overall. The antenna/radio is weaker than other phones I have owned (this is purely subjective), or maybe its the OS, but not so bad that I am desperate for something else right now.

So I will give Verizon/Samsung a few more months to get us the update, unless something goes very wrong for me before then.

Thanks.

[HoustonHeart]

while 1w is closer to the current official test version it isn't the final one, jsut a much more stable leak, since then there have been minor tweaks. THe sites that release testing leaks are typically 2-3 builds behind.  When verizon knows there are no issues with the actaul official update and won't cause OTA issues then they will push it gradually out. Not sure how they plan to schedule them with Droid 2's being updated as well.

[DC5_K20Z1]

Houston, thanks for the info. Do you happen to know what versions are newer than ep1w now? Any word from anyone or sources as of when GB will get pushed to the Charge? Do we have to go through a soak test at all or will it just be released? I'm hoping that it will be pushed by mid September, if not sooner....any ideas or more info on that? This is kinda crazy that none of the 4g phones have GB...but just about every other smartphone on Verizon now either has it....or will have it and tomorrow will be the release of the first 4g smartphone to get GB. I've heard that Verizon is stalling to get this out first to be the first 4g device to have GB....maybe we might get an update....a day or two after that then??