As many Nexus One users have noticed, the official OTA for Gingerbread, Android 2.3.3, has broken Trackball Wake with Easy Wake Mode on WidgetLocker.

Note: The volume buttons still work to wake the device.

I looked into the issue and unfortunately Android has change at a low level (android.policy.jar) and it is not possible for a third party application to offer trackball wake on Android 2.3.3. It would have to be done at the custom rom level.

I don’t believe Google did this intentionally, they were fixing an issue causing accidental wake ups. I’ve reported this as Issue 15115 so hopefully this can be fixed in a future version of Android. You can help by starring the issue, however please do not post comments that aren’t related to development.

For those curious the offending commit message is:

commit eb9f7a01b0f501a535d872a957c1102ebb13d1c7

Author: Jeff Brown

Date: Fri Oct 29 21:50:21 2010 -0700

Fix policy issues when screen is off. (DO NOT MERGE)

Rewrote interceptKeyBeforeQueueing to make the handling more systematic.

Behavior should be identical except:

- We never pass keys to applications when the screen is off and the keyguard

is not showing (the proximity sensor turned off the screen).

Previously we passed all non-wake keys through in this case which

caused a bug on Crespo where the screen would come back on if a soft key

was held at the time of power off because the resulting key up event

would sneak in just before the keyguard was shown. It would then be

passed through to the dispatcher which would poke user activity and

wake up the screen.

- We propagate the key flags when broadcasting media keys which

ensures that recipients can tell when the key is canceled.

- We ignore endcall or power if canceled (shouldn’t happen anyways).

Changed the input dispatcher to not poke user activity for canceled

events since they are synthetic and should not wake the device.

Changed the lock screen so that it does not poke the wake lock when the

grab handle is released. This fixes a bug where the screen would come

back on immediately if the power went off while the user was holding

one of the grab handles because the sliding tab would receive an up

event after screen turned off and release the grab handles.

Bug: 3144874

Change-Id: Iebb91e10592b4ef2de4b1dd3a2e1e4254aacb697

 

As I don’t have a tidy way of posting code snippets here yet you’ll have to dig up the actual commit yourself for that.