Hello World!

So a little while ago, I came into possession of a rooted LG Optimus Z. The my LG-using readers might point out that they have never heard of such a phone, and I respond "for good reason." The Optimus Z, also known as the LG SU950/KU9500, is a high end Korea-only phone made by LG and sold under the CYON brand, on South Korea Telecom.

It came out came out in 2010, was trumpeted and heralded by western tech media, and, as is the fate even of American tech products, was promptly forgotten. It came out running Android 2.1 Eclair, and was promised an upgrade to 2.2 Froyo in the fall of the same year.

So great! I now own and use a Korea-only GSM phone! I've always wanted an Android phone to play with, and I now that I've got one promise I'll feed it and pet it and clean up after it and can we keep it, can we keep it please please? I started reading my email on it, I installed Google Voice to enjoy the benefits of free text messaging, didn't install Angry Birds, and was generally pleased.

Fast forward a few weeks. Once the giddiness that every geek knows all too well faded away, I had a few gripes. The translation wasn't perfect, which is surprising given that the thing had to be localized from English. The Google Voice app took a painfully long time to open. Three quarters of the applications are in Korean, and some of them work with services that don't even exist in the States.

Beyond that, I had some real serious problems. The thing has the annoying tendency to crash at the most inconvenient time. There is nothing worse than having an alarm clock that goes off once, crashes while you snooze, and lets you sleep an hour and half longer than you meant to. What's more, the text messaging application limits the length of my messages to 80 characters. I'll leave the exact reason for this as a puzzle for my more programming-savvy readers.

So what choice do I have? You might think the promise of the firmware update was foreshadowing for some mean trick on LG's part, but it's not. The update to 2.2 came out last year. So why not apply it and hopefully get these bugs fixed?

Because this thing is rooted. I have no backup of this rooted image, I have no idea of how it was rooted, and if I were to install LG's Android 2.2, I'd be stuck with just a boring old phone. I got it rooted, and I don't think I could possibly go about rooting it myself. If there's already a hack out there, I can't speak Korean, so any and all documentation would be useless. So I had to fall back on plan B: Port Cyanogenmod.

Over the next few months, assuming my classes allow me the time, I will be working on porting Cyanogenmod to this phone. If you've ever been curious about what goes into creating a custom ROM or Android port, then come along and find out with me. I will be covering things that I know and am familiar with, as well as reporting wonderful new things I discover.

This is going to be fun.