School boy alert!

[Guest freshage]

Hi guys, I have just purchased my first android phone (HTC Desire... :) ) after HATING my HTC HD7...

Now, I love all this customisation stuff and I am a techie, however, this phone stuff is very new to me, can someone just summarise what each thing means (ROM, root ect ect) so I have a little background for when I am reading these guides.

Just a general overview on what the norm is when it comes to customising.

Many thanks!

[Guest hugobosslives]

jeez man you need to read. as its your first post i'll let you off and answer you post. BUT in future make use of the search function on this website and there's also google....

otherwise (as you can imagine) these forums get full of the same crapy threads. and thus the website becomes crap as it is full of rubbish topics.

now your question:

roms: think of a rom as the OS or operating system (i.e. on windows you have xp, or vista). the stock rom (which comes on the phone) is often full of junk and quite slow. so you can flash custom roms (built by fellow android users) which tweak the OS to make it better (whether faster, less crap, more features etc) to learn how to change your rom, look at the forum....

root: having 'root' on your phone means you can execute 'administer' tasks. (eg on windows only the administer(s) can install programs) On android you need root in order to fully command the phone (change system level stuff). again, search the forum or type into google 'how to root YOUR PHONE'.........

[Guest freshage]

Knew I would get slated for asking!

Thanks though, gives me a general oversight of what people are talking about in terms of the 2 basic things needed to do anything to the phones :)

Thanks

jeez man you need to read. as its your first post i'll let you off and answer you post. BUT in future make use of the search function on this website and there's also google....

otherwise (as you can imagine) these forums get full of the same crapy threads. and thus the website becomes crap as it is full of rubbish topics.

now your question:

roms: think of a rom as the OS or operating system (i.e. on windows you have xp, or vista). the stock rom (which comes on the phone) is often full of junk and quite slow. so you can flash custom roms (built by fellow android users) which tweak the OS to make it better (whether faster, less crap, more features etc) to learn how to change your rom, look at the forum....

root: having 'root' on your phone means you can execute 'administer' tasks. (eg on windows only the administer(s) can install programs) On android you need root in order to fully command the phone (change system level stuff). again, search the forum or type into google 'how to root YOUR PHONE'.........

[Guest squrl]

Might come in handy: XDA Wiki

[Guest longy92]

Hey,

I know where you're coming from, I was in your exact position about a yea ago, when I went Android and got a Hero. My friend had one, I liked so I bought. Soon I found there was a lot of sh*t on the OS, and internal memory wasn't great. Google was my best friend. Heard of 'rooting' and decided to research. A few searches will give you a LOT of info.

The way I explain 'rooting' to my friends was to simply say 'jailbreak'. Even if you don't have an iPhone, you most likely know what 'jailbreaking' is. I don't like iPhones, much prefer Android but it gives you a rough picture. It doesn't give you the fake pirate app store, but it lets you 'free' your device and now you can control EVERYTHING. Unfortunately, the app I used to root my Hero (Universal Androot) doesn't work on the Desire. That was disappointing when I got my Desire as it was simple one-click. I discovered unRevoked though, which does the job pretty painlessly. Just look up a guide on Google, but I'd recommend changing the recovery image to AmonRa, and not using ClockWork, I find AmonRa a lot better. If you Google AmonRa for Desire, it'll give you a link and tell you how to install with unRevoked.

ROMs (like hugobosslives said) are like the OS. If you root, you can continue to use the Stock ROM, and manually remove stuff using ADB (another thing to learn, I only learned about this recently. Its not necessary really, but can be useful. Quite complicated, I still don't know half the commands. ADB is like using command prompt on your laptop to do things, not necessary, but useful, at times.) You can also remove apps with Root Explorer (a paid app which can browse your whole device, if you've root access.) A lot of people prefer Custom ROMs, its easier to just change ROM than to remove stuff manually. Different ROMs will have different things done to them. Some will remove HTC Sense, and use the stock Android UI, some won't. I prefer Sense to stock, and couldn't really find a ROM to suit my needs, so I signed up for Ad Free here at MoDaCo. By paying the £10 I get a year subscription of MoDaCo which is Ad Free and the use of the 'kitchens'. The 'kitchens' let you build your own ROM. Its very straight forward. You tick the boxes of what you want to remove and uncheck what you don't want. Easy. Then 'bake' the ROM, you download and then can 'flash' it and have your very own Custom ROM. (Google installing a Custom ROM on Desire.)

I'd highly recommend the kitchens. I only have my Desire about a month, and the internal memory is kinda sh*t. Therefore I chose the option for A2SD+ in the kitchen, which puts everything onto SD (including the data with apps). I've found Google's A2SD isn't great but if you're happy with it, that's fine. I've also bought a class 6 micro SD, so it reads/writes faster because I'm using A2SD. I'd recommend using A2SD+ because it puts a lot of stock stuff on SD too, which you can't do with Google's A2SD. You'll need a partitioned SD card, but you can do that in recovery with AmonRa's recovery image (one of the reasons I recommend it).

I hope that helps you, and if you've any more questions, fire away :)

Ian

[Guest bpivk]

The way I explain 'rooting' to my friends was to simply say 'jailbreak'. Even if you don't have an iPhone, you most likely know what 'jailbreaking' is.

Heh. When someone says jailbreake I imagine a bunch of cowboys, a few sticks of dynamite and a county jail. :)