This is me, James Brooks, about to start on a journey.
You see, around this time last year I ditched my iPhone for a new love, a HTC Desire Android powered device.
The romance lasted a while, until I had more than 3 downloaded apps on the device, and then it turned into a nightmare.
You see, the HTC desire has a terribly low amount of internal storage, and I was used to the dizzy heights of iPhone internal storage.
I then started a daily process of my internal storage running too low, therefore causing me to need to clear caches, clear app data, uninstall and reinstall apps etc. Even when the latest version of Android came out which allowed transfer of some apps to the SD, I still had this problem.
So today, I bit the bullet. I am not hugely technical when it comes to these sort of things, I wouldn’t say that I have ever “hacked” a mobile device, but I had no choice. My Android was driving me mad, and I knew that if I rooted my Android, and installed a custom ROM which included something called Apps2SD, I would be able to actually store all of my apps on the SD card, plus all of the stupid apps that come with the phone that nobody wants would get removed too! Woop!
It took a few hours, and certainly some frustration with my family’s PC, but today I managed to:
- Root my HTC desire
- Backup the phone in it’s rooted state
- Partition my SD card
- Install a new ROM
- Reinstall all of the apps that I have paid for but weren’t able to have on my phone due to storage issues
- WIN
I’d never done any of this before, but after digging for a while I found some great tutorials and I now couldn’t be happier! It feels like I have a new phone.
This was my rejoicing moment:
Have you ever customized a mobile device in any way? What was your experience like?
Brett says
Nicely done! I recently switched to Android with my purchase of the HTC Thunderbolt. Great phone! I decided to root to get rid of the tons of preinstalled “bloatware” that verizon puts on it. The forums over at Android Central made it incredibly easy to do. I’ve also started experimenting with custom ROMs in the last few weeks. I’m a tech nerd, so it has been a lot of fun. 🙂
James Brooks says
Yeh bro, I was kinda scared when I started, but it was so much fun and SO worth it!
Eric J says
i love android central as well they are my favorite android news site, i’m tempted sometimes to get a thunderbolt just so i can be grandfathered in for unlimited 4g.
Eric J says
Yeah i rooted my droid X to get rid of cityID (worst app ever) and have installed a few custom roms, right now i’m running the gingerbread leak for the droid x eagerly awaiting the final build.
The lame thing with the droid X is that it has a locked bootloader so while i can install custom roms i cannot install a custom kernel which means no cyanogen mod.
James Brooks says
Brother, thanks for reply, but that just went STRAIGHT over my head! LOL
Eric J says
@james what rom are you running and how did you choose it?
James Brooks says
I went for MIUI-Au (http://www.miui-au.com/) because it has App2SD built in which is the main reason I wanted a new ROM.
I found the tutorials on the MIUI-Au website SUPER helpful, and very n00b friendly.
Eric J says
Wow their website is terrible look at all those colors! Anyways it looks like the iphone that is pretty cool
Brett says
Yeah, that sucks about the locked bootloader. I’m currently running the pre-alpha version of cyanogen mod on my Thunderbolt. There are a ton of bugs (as expected with pre-alpha), but it has a lot of potential when they get a better version.
Tre Lawrence says
Rooted here too! Welcome to the club!
The thing I love about rooting is that it prolongs the life of a device. My wife does not even want to bother upgrading from her HTC Hero. It’s running a custom FroYo ROM, and she has a “new” phone whenever she wants… she just has me load a new ROM.
I hear Motorola is going away from locked bootloaders… we can all hope, right?
Samuel Sutter says
yeah – i put CM7 on my droid incredible – will never look back – very nice.