[david-given]

I have an Android ADP1 --- one of the original development phones, the HTC Dream with the custom paint job. It's got 192MB of RAM and a single-core 528MB ARM11. It ran Cupcake, aka Android 1.5 (although I've since upgraded it to,

If you ignore the hilarious security bugs --- like the fact that, as shipped, they forgot to disconnect the keyboard from a root shell, so that if you typed 'reboot' into an email hilarious things happened --- it actually runs rather well; it's smooth and perfectly satisfactory to use.

...holy crap Cupcake would run well on a modern phone.

[vetinari]

I also had ADP1 - and I think that the latest official update was to Donut, aka Android 1.6.

Not that it matters much today...

[david-given]

Yeah, I've got Donut on it now.

Unfortunately its https library uses some obsolete crypto technique --- TLS 2? --- and as a result it can't connect to anything on the internet, not even to fetch updates from the App Market (not the Play Store!). I can't even log in to Google.

I did have Gingerbread on it at one point but it was very unhappy.

I found a partial Debian port but there's still not really enough RAM for that. I wonder if there's a NetBSD port...

[vetinari]

Yeah, I also tried Cyanogenmod Eclair and Froyo on it, but it was an excelent way to waste a lot of time watching things happen in slow motion. So I flashed it back to Donut and few weeks later got another phone, that ran Froyo properly.

I didn't know that the App Market doesn't work anymore - about 18 months back, my brother was still using it (as a backup phone, obviously).