Make all the ‘sooner’ jokes you want, I’m wondering what it has to do with Oklahoma
The second-earliest build of Android known to date is now free for anyone to download. And no, it’s not from the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream. It’s from something a bit earlier.
Android Police was actually able to go hands-on with the Sooner, what was essentially an HTC Excalibur that then got repurposed to be Google’s pre-commercial Android testbed. The experience is actually somewhat familiar to most modern Android fans — the home screen features a scrollable home row of apps and showed off rounded corners (though they didn’t stick around the rest of the UI).
Of course, the reality is that there was plenty of work between then and now that changed the way Android’s home screen behaved. The build was compiled on August 29, 2007.
A Twitter user by the name of Old Phone Preservation posted the code dump yesterday, noting that it was an effort made possible by multiple people yet all it took to execute was a few terminal commands and a microSD card.
The build number, htc-29386.0.9.0.0, indicates some semblance of succession in the pre-stable era and follows on from another build discovered in 2012, htc-2065.0.8.0.0, compiled May 15 that same year.
Curious minds can download the ROM dump from the Internet Archive. Happy building.
Read Next
