This is going to start as a rant, become a life story, and eventually approach a thesis.
I have always been obsessed with tinkering.
When I was younger I was obsessed with transformers and other action figures that could change form. I would switch them back and forth, often getting so frustrated if I was unable to figure out how to make them transform. My parents had their hands full if I went with them to Walmart, I was a bit spoiled in that respect and God bless them for putting up with me during that.
This was always in me but I guess it didn't really reveal itself again until last year when I got my girlfriend a Kindle Fire. I loved the dame and wanted to spoil her a little for her birthday, after not being able to do enough for a couple holidays before. She still uses the thing to this day, and I am so grateful I made the purchase.
I loved the idea of a tablet, this slick little computer replacement that we could carry anywhere. I later decided to get myself one, which ended up being the Nexus 7. That was it for me. I had never experienced a more intentional feeling piece of tech with a touch screen. The best part of it was coming from my most recent smart phone, a Nokia C7, which at the time was a decent phone, it was a serious upgrade from the one I had prior, a Nokia Nuron (labeled at the time as a 'budget smartphone'), but still felt clunky, and the Symbian system app store was full of junk and nearly useless.
Coming from the Symbian OS to Android was great. First of all the Jelly Bean OS was a new world. Apps felt solid and smooth, the interface was beautiful and well designed, and everything felt as it should be. I have never owned or extensively used an apple product (save my trusty iPod Classic 80GB, which I am convinced will never die. But I digress.) but everything I have heard points to this sort of user experience. The biggest difference being the ability to change anything. I'm digressing again.
All was great during the honeymoon period between myself and my Nexus 7 until a couple of months later I decided I was finally going to upgrade my cell phone, and I got a pair of Galaxy S3's for myself and my girlfriend. The touchwiz features slapped on top of android 4.1 were great and I really enjoyed how smooth the phone felt, having all the different features of my Nexus in this compact, and quite frankly beautiful piece of technology. I got into custom launchers to get a more custom user interface, and that was great for a while as well and satiated my need to tinker.
Eventually I got sick of touchwiz, and one thing lead to another and I learned about rooting and enabling certain locked permissions in the phone, which lead to discovering the ability to install custom operating systems, flashing and rooting became my new addiction. I experimented a great deal with my phone, lots of wiping, flashing, even one time accidentally deleting my operating system and backup, and needing to jump through a whole mess of hoops to finally get what I wanted on my phone. Jelly Bean. I installed Cyanogenmod 10.1 and finally figured out how to get it running stable, and that's where I've stayed since. I love the ability to customize every little thing about the phone to finally get everything exactly where I want it.
But that feeling of the first custom rom I flashed...
I remember going through the motions to root and flash superuser to the device, sending over the cyanogenmod zip file to the phone's internal memory, booting to recovery mode, wiping and flashing the custom rom. Hitting reboot, seeing the boot animation light up and hang for a moment.
I had many experiences up until this resulting in 'boot loops' where the boot animation just runs and runs until you finally power off the phone.
I noticed something different in this one though. It went around and around for a moment, but then I saw the backlight dim slightly, the animation hang, and I was greeted by the sight of that welcome screen, and one of the most gratifying feelings of accomplishment I have ever experienced.
This was quickly squelched by realizing all of my texts were gone and I needed to log into every one of my apps again.
But it will forever keep me coming back.
This Nexus connected me into a whole new world. The various connectivity methods such as bluetooth, wifi, nfc. the apps, the software, all of it was so inspiring. I've had a couple ideas for my own projects to get into soon, I am just beginning school for computer engineering and I hope to soon get into studying android design and programming on my free time.
