Huawei honors the hacker community, releases Android ICS ROM

Smartphone makers, for the most part, don’t like it when you fiddle with their devices. They work hard to craft a user experience that represents their brand. When the hacker community starts messing with that, the cease and desist letters start flying. Now Nokia lets people play around with their Maemo/MeeGo powered devices, but then again those were always meant for bleeding edge early adopters. Microsoft too has an officially sanctioned jailbreak tool for Windows Phone called ChevronWP7, but that’s because they want the hacker community to actually pay attention to their platform. HTC used to be known for Windows Mobile ROM hacking, but they gave that image up as they grew more popular. Ever since Google released the source code for the latest version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, people have been wondering when the hacker community would make it run on existing devices. The folks behind CyanogenMod and MIUI have already said that they’re hard at work at making custom ROMs based on Ice Cream Sandwich, but neither of them have delivered anything.

Enter Huaweu, a Chinese handset vendor that no one usually cares about since they make low to mid range devices. They just posted a “demo” Android Ice Cream ROM for the Huawei Honor. Better yet, Yu Chengdong, Huawei’s Chief Marketing Officer, posted an image on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter clone) of his Huawei Honor running said “demo” ROM. This is unprecedented and we hope that other Android partners take notice, especially HTC. We love HTC’s hardware, but some of us at the IntoMobile offices hate HTC Sense so much that we refuse to buy their devices. Imagine how much more popular they’d be if they gave the hacker and enthusiast communities stock Android ROMs that they could use without voiding their warranty?

Anyway, we salute you Huawei, and hope you keep this up!

Editor’s note: And … here it is. Check out our video of the Huawei Honor running Ice Cream Sandwich.

[Via: The Verge]

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

http://profiles.google.com/hibbard.tyler Tyler Hibbard

Just to make sure you understand what bleeding edge means, and that you didn’t actually mean cutting edge: bleeding edge would mean not quite cutting edge, since you bleed after you’ve been cut. So if you were referring to not-quite-brand new, then bleeding edge might work. But if you meant the absolute newest, then you should fix the error by replacing bleeding with cutting.
- Anonymous
  
  Incorrect sir. Bleeding edge is the part of the razor/whatever that’s deepest, beyond the part that cuts. So, bleeding edge = newest to the point where it could hurt.
  - http://profiles.google.com/hibbard.tyler Tyler Hibbard
    
    If we’re speaking about the specific areas of the razor, there is no part of the razor that comes before the part that cuts. Blood is beneath the skin, so you have to cut the skin in order to get to the blood, so cutting happens first, and then you get to the blood. However, the part that gets to the blood is the part that just cut open the skin, so you’d just be re-naming the cutting edge to the bleeding edge, which invalidates the part of your argument which refers to two different parts.
    
    However, I can see now how it might be meant to mean “more recent” since bleeding from a cut happens more recently to the present than the cut itself does, in which case you should avoid the second sentence in your reply altogether, and just stick with the explanation of “more recent”.
    
    I hate to be so pedantic over a simple marketing term, but it just underlines my frustration with what essentially was a gimmick by someone to one-up a clever term that everyone has since run with. Oh well… If I could control marketers, companies everywhere would be truthful and objective about all of their products and services
http://prowest.ua/ Blokzhyvlennja

What could go wrong with that idea?