I’m now a couple of days in to this phone hacking stuff, and I have to point out that I still have no regrets about doing it. My original aim was to end up using the leaked version of the HTC Sense software but things haven’t worked out like that.

It was just before Craig’s album launch party on Sunday night. I was getting ready to have a go at streaming the gig via my phone. In early testing I just couldn’t get it to work. Any video I managed to stream over the internet was very choppy and came without audio. A quick run of the SpeedTest app showed me that I was getting 1.8MB down and 0.01MB up. Clearly that isn’t right as I was on my home Wi-Fi, and I know just how wrong it was because previous speed tests had produced 6.6MB down and 1.2MB up.

After a bit of searching online I discovered that there was a problem with the way I had partitioned my memory card. You need to partition your memory card so that the phone can install apps to a section of the card. That isn’t a feature of Froyo, it’s a feature of ROMs, one which saves you a lot of trouble as with Android you have only been able to install apps to the phone’s internal memory. Unfortunately for me, it is also possible to partition some of your memory card to act as RAM for the phone. In older phones it speeds things up and lets you run apps that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. In the Desire however, it just causes problems. That meant re-partitioning the card and that means losing everything that’s on it.

When that was done and I had the new OS installed it became clear that the Wi-Fi problem was actually a problem with the ROM rather than the way I had installed it. If you’re ever wondering why it takes companies like HTC a bit of time to release OS updates then I think it’s safe to assume that they’re sorting out stuff like this.

Anyway, there I was with a hacked phone, the OS I thought would improve things and broken Wi-Fi. That left me with just two options, either I admit defeat and restore my original backup of my phone, or I try any number of different ROMs until I found one that works properly. We all know that the former isn’t the one that ended up happening. It was time to start looking at these different OS versions and see if there was one I liked.

I have found that pretty much the best place to get all the help and advice you need, as well as a selection of ROMs is the XDA Developers Forum (http://forum.xda-developers.com). It’s where I got all my information from and where I’ve been downloading ROMs. Just a quick note, while there are lots of different ROMs, the differences between them are relatively minor. Some of them try to put HTC’s Sense UI back into Android. Some of them miss that all together and chose to got with as little extra software as possible. Some are pretty much a bare bones version of Android. You get the picture.

I started with a ROM called OpenDesire which was put together by the same people as the leaked ROM I had tried. OpenDesire is a very basic install of Android and takes care to centre on speed and stability rather than packing the ROM out with as much as possible. I found it to be quick, smooth and with no major problems that I could see, except the same Wi-Fi problem I had earlier. That meant I had to try another one.

The next one was DeFrost, which is a similar set up to OpenDesire. It’s got all the stock Android apps and runs very smoothly with very few or no problems. It even has the Wi-Fi working. It also serves as a clue as to how fast Android development is moving. On Sunday night I downloaded version 2.1 of DeFrost. Last night (Tuesday) I downloaded version 2.3 (which has the Wi-Fi problem again)

Like I said before there are lots of ROMs and they’re all quite good. It’s a case of finding the one that does what you want it to. I’m sticking with DeFrost for now, if for no other reason than I’m fed up of getting my phone set up how I like it. I swear no one person has signed into Google more times in the last three days than I have.

  • Share/Bookmark