XDAndriod on HTC Touch Pro 2
Well someone mentioned to me the other day that they were having fun with their HTC HD2 and how the Andriod Market had loads of great apps available… and having owned an HTC HD2 before and knowing full well this doesn’t run Andriod as standard, it got me thinking. Can any current Windows Mobile 6.5 phone run Andriod? As it happens, there are a bunch of geeks who are currently porting Andriod to work on most Windows Mobile-based HTC handsets, the HTC Touch Pro 2 (Rhodium) being one of them.
I happen to own an HTC Touch Pro 2, so I downloaded a copy of Project XDAndriod, as it’s known, and decided to have a play… and it works surprisingly well, albeit missing a few features.
Running the XDAndriod software on a Windows Mobile phone using this port is pretty easy, and thankfully, doesn’t harm the existing Windows Mobile operating system, so if you decide you don’t like it, or you manage to somehow break Andriod, you still have an untouched Windows Mobile operating system to boot into. The developers say this is not an emulator, but at the same time, not a full flash ROM. The way it works is using a program called haret within Windows Mobile. Basically, what this program does, is shut down Windows Mobile, then runs a Linux shell & operating system directly from the SD card.
On the HTC Touch Pro 2, it runs pretty smoothly. I like it because it actually runs smoother than Windows Mobile 6.5 does. Now that may just be my ROM, but the specs of this phone isn’t really something to boast about, but that said, it handles Andriod really well. My only gripes with it is that somehow it still thinks O2 is BTCellnet, and that it took me a while to work out how to change the keyboard map. It turns out there is a Startup Utility program that comes bundled with it that allows you to change the character map, but this has to be done before you boot into Andriod… so I ended up running the character map for the American HTC Tilt 2, as opposed to the UK HTC Touch Pro 2. The only other problem I have, is the power management. It drains the battery like no tomorrow, but I’m sure with a bit of tweaking, the developers will be able to sort this out 
At the moment, the main in-built speaker does not work on the HTC Touch Pro 2. You get audio in calls from the normal call speaker, so for making phone calls it’s fine… but the speakers on the back don’t work. This means no speakerphone, no ringtones and no music. This personally isn’t a huge problem, as I don’t use it very often for music. I don’t use speakerphone very often, and 99% of the time, it’s on vibrate. Bluetooth also doesn’t work at the moment. Again, personally not a big problem for me as the only time I ever use Bluetooth on my phone is to transfer files to my iMac when I’m too lazy to plug a cable in… which isn’t exactly a hard feat. The keyboard backlight is a bit hit & miss. It just doesn’t work at all for me, but some people say it works when it feels like for them…
This project gets a big thumbs up for me. If they can master the power management issue, then this is a definite winner! 
For more information, visit this thread on XDA-Developers: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=627997