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A reader recently contacted me looking for advice with his new Captivate. He was concerned he’d bricked it, but the phone was getting as far as recovery mode, which meant that I was confident it could be saved. I met him at a coffee shop, and we spent some time recovering his phone. I learned some stuff, and have some thoughts that are worth sharing. But first, I’ll explain how to do this yourself.

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Since my previous post about flashing my new Samsung Captivate from the stock Rogers ROM to the AT&T build of Android 2.2 I’ve flashed the device to a couple different versions of the Cognition ROMs. They’re certainly an improvement over the stock Rogers ROM, but Cognition is still based on the AT&T ROM, and I really do think that the Rogers ROM would actually be a better starting point because there is a lot less cruft. So, without further adieu here is my wishlist for a hybrid Rogers/Cognition ROM:

1. Get rid of that damn AT&T boot logo
2. Let me select the original Samsung Galaxy boot/shutdown animations, they’re actually really nice
3. Use the Rogers modem files, since they have superior GPS functionality (though the Rogers modem config does not support HSUPA)
4. Caller Name Display (as far as I can tell, no US carrier supports caller name display on their mobile networks, but Canadian firms do, so that explains why it’s missing)
5. When using Maps, it seems that my direction wrong by about 90 degrees.

I think that swapping out the boot animations should be pretty simple, if I could figure out how to use make the bootsamsung.qmg files (which I believe are raw frame buffer files that are the animation) work from a bootanimation.zip file. A little more research and #2 could probably be solved. The other three require either more knowledge, or assistance from the guys who actually make Cognition.