The hardworking folks at XDA-Developers are at it again with the Galaxy Gear. This time around, one developer has made it possible for the Gear to pair with a few other devices and another has even created a custom kernel.
Before proceeding to tinker with your Galaxy Gear, please note that these actions might void your warranty and if you’ve never attempted to root or flash custom ROMs, I would suggest to give this a skip. For those who know their stuff and has a Galaxy Gear that they’re itching to hack, I would suggest that you hurry on over to those threads listed below and get your lowdown.
First, we’ll look at getting Galaxy Gear to work with other devices. The developer pcelli, has managed to get the Gear working on his Nexus 5 but there were others who’ve had success with AOSP based custom ROMs running on HTC One and Sony Xperia Z1.
The process may look simple but involves a bit of work. In short, after installing the gearmanagerstub.apk, the gear manager 1.6 111801.apk is renamed to gear manager 1.6 111801.zip. Then the developer opened up the zip file and copied the files within to the folder preinstalledapk and started running the individual files one by one, with the exception of samusic and saweather as those two had failed to install. Once this was done, the developer then installed the gear manager 1.6 111801.apk again. He then proceeded to open the Gear Manager and started pairing it with the Galaxy Gear. To get the notification working, the developer also installed ATNmanager 1.2.2.apk.
Things that work: contacts, call logs, gallery, camera(capture images from Gear and send directly to the phone in gallery), make and receive calls, voice recording and other notifications by way of the ATNManager app.
Things that don’t work though are weather and S voice. Another forum member suggested that these could be because the features are tied to Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.
For more info, hurry on down to the thread and learn more.Moving on to the next project, XDA Recognized Developer lilstevie has now created the first custom kernel for the Gear called Triangulum kernel. This is not a complete ROM but can replace existing kernels in current ROMs. The most notable feature of this kernel is that it unlocks the Gear’s second processor core. Others include auto-rooting and init.d support. The kernel can be flashed using the usual Odin, Heimdall, or even with custom recovery made by fOmey. fOmey incidentally is the same guy that created the first ROM for the Galaxy gear.
For more on Triangulum, proceed to the thread and get updated.Once again, please note that the instructions provided within those threads involve rooting and flashing custom software onto your expensive device. If you’ve never done this before, please give this a skip for now and wait till your Gear is a bit older or until the warranty has expired. It would be best to just read up on what’s happening and wait till the process is a little automated and more n00b friendly before attempting.