Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

When I finished going through all the "new" old hardware, I took some older devices out of the drawer and I found my old Sony Xperia Tipo.



It was my first Android phone, so it has a special place in my collection. When I took it out, I thought about how I could use Android on such a small 3.2" screen. However, after using it for a while, I discovered that it was quite good. The system's GUI was comfortable even on the small screen, the only problem is that the small amount of buttons fit on the screen when the top bar is rolled down.

The device came with Android 4.0. Later i can remember i have changed the ROM to GIMLO, which upgraded the Android to 4.1, but the settings still shows that it runs on 4.0.

The fun part with GIMLO rom i can remember, was that it came absolutely without any other software, even launcher. So after booting to fresh ROM, just black screen appeared and i was not able to do anything.

I spent a lot of time trying to get into some GUI, and I can remember I somehow glitched to camera, and from there, using some other glitch, I went to some issue of missing application to do some activity. Possibly missing program to open taken photos? Anyway it took me to google play, I have flashed with ROM. From there I would be able to install the missing launcher and move on... However, the keyboard was also not installed to enter the WiFi password, and during this time I had no data on my SIM card. So I had to borrow a SIM card with data from my classmate and try again to get into Google Play.

Once there, I found the launcher and keyboard by going through the listings and links to the various apps, as I was unable to type to search to find some directly. So... it was really tricky.



So rule number one is to never do a factory reset on this phone.

When I turned it on, I found that there were no games left, but it still had the Maverick map application that I used for geocaching. Maybe I will try to restore some coordinates of those old geocaches and try to visit those old places, even though the caches might not exist anymore.