Modifying your Android Phone
Android phones are becoming increasing more popular as time goes on. It’s a portable do all in your pocket. It can surf the web, send and receive email, text messaging, take pictures, record video, play music, watch movies, and play games just to name a few. Then with the app market you can do just about anything else. There are apps for Facebook, Twitter, your banking center (mine is Chase), check local movie times in your area, youtube, business card holder, and the list goes on and on and on. But what about if you don’t like the all the bloatware they cram in these devices from the factory? Or what if you would like different bootup animation? Or different shutdown animation? What about a totally different ROM with a different kernal or even different lock screens? How about when you want to use your phones as an access point for internet access without having to pay your provider extra per month?
If any of these things appeal to you, then your in luck. There are a lot of options to accomplish all of these needs, if you end up wanting to modify your android phone. Before reading on, please make sure you have a backup plan if you end up bricking (it won’t boot up anymore, so it becomes a brick) your android phone. A hint for this would be to investigate a program called Odin, the original factory image for your phone, the proper USB drivers, and another program called SDK android tools (better known as ADB).
One of the first things you’ll have to do to your android is to what is called rooting it. All this does is give you superuser permissions to your phone and all it’s files and folders. Once this is done you’ll want to go find an application called ROM Manager (better known as Clockwork Recovery) and install that. Once these two things are done then there is no holds barred from modifying your androids ROM, Themes, and anything else that can possibly done to this phone. I WILL WARN YOU THAT DOING ANY MODS, EVEN ROOTING, VOIDS YOUR WARRANTY.
One of my favorite things to do to my Samsung Vibrant is to change ROMS frequently. In my case, 2.2 Froyo wasn’t release until February 2011 and I bought my phone last August. While many other android phones had 2.2, I was still stuck with 2.1. The reason I wanted 2.2 was for Flash video. Well I was on 2.2 in September, four months before anyone who didn’t flash a 2.2 ROM had it. It was nice. Not to mention all the bloatware removed, the kernal beefed up, the file system changed, and the speed of the system tweeked. With these changes in place, I was able to download Setcpu and tweek my cpu settings which increased my phones overall performance. I’ve experimented with many different ROMs. I’ve tried Axura, Bionix 2.1, and every version of Nero v5 by Team Whiskey. I’ve also tried numerous different themes, which change colors of icons, different wallpaper, different colored text windows, etc..
Credit for all these different options to modify my phone go out to all the devs that spend thier free time developing these themes, kernals, and ROMs. Most do it for free with the hopes of some donations, so please if you end up using someones work, be kind and donate even a buck to them.
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