Edword

Hi all, I’m back with another hack for all you android people! As always, do this stuff at your own risk, worked for me but it’s always possible that something like this may break your phone. Research your specific situation (phone, OS) and if it looks like your supported and you’re willing to take the risk then root away!

Phone modding has always been a back and forth cat and mouse game between phone manufacturers and hackers. As a result of this, unlocking a phones potential has always been a huge pain in the ass! Long drawn out walkthroughs that can take well over an hour to complete the first time and often hours more research if you run into any roadblocks along the way.

Recently iPhone users got a break with an easier than ever method of jailbreaking (Jailbreaking is the root of the iPhone world).  Simply point your iPhone’s browser to jailbreakme.com and you’re presented with a slider labeled “slide to jailbreak”, execute the slide and boom, your done.  Looks like us Android user’s finally get something almost as easy with “Universal Androot”.

Simply search google for and download a file called “UniversalAndroot.apk” then copy it to your phones sd card.  On the phone, launch the file using your file browser of choice (I use Astro) and install it. Open the newly installed Universal Androot and your presented with the following screen.

Click the Root button and wait about 30 seconds.  That’s about it, an entry on the screen should say something about “Generating Superuser Permissions”, this is actually installing and app called “Superuser Permissions”.  This app will grant other apps root access to the phone, if you try to open “superuser permissions” nothing actually happens, this is normal as the app doesn’t actually do anything on its own.

If for any reason you want to Un-Root your phone you can simply click the UnRoot button and your phone will be reverted back to a stock pre-root state.  This method supports a pretty large list of android devices ranging from Android OS 1.5 to 2.2, that said, make sure yours is on the list of supported devices before trying this, wouldn’t want to break your favorite toy!

Enjoy!
Ed.

I’m totally freaking out!  I got a text message from Rogers tonight saying that there was an update available to fix the 911 issue on my Magic. It went on to say that if not installed by the 24th of January that they would disable the devices data connection.  The thought of that made me a little queezy so I downloaded and installed it as soon as I got home.  On the first boot post install I hear a new sound coming from the phone and I look down to see a little animation of an android waving at me and thought “huh, could they have put Sense in this update”?  I wait in anticipation and holy crap, It’s all Sensed out!

Not only is it all the prettiness of Sense but get this, it’s got f’n multi touch in the gallery app as well as in the browser!  All that and it works super smooth so far.  Like I said in the beginning, I’m totally freaking out man…lol.

I wish I could play with it some more but I gotta wake up early tomorrow morning to do a little overtime, the servers are calling.  So ya, if you’re on the Magic then go get the update now!  There was also an update released for the Dream, That one won’t have the Sense UI but I’ll still install it first chance I get and report back to you with the results of that install.

Later all,
Ed.

Hello all,

HTC and Rogers have recently announced that do to memory limitations they will no longer update the HTC Dream after one more update to the 1.5 android firmware.  They have also announced that the HTC magic will continue to be developed at least as far as version 2.1 that will include HTC Sense UI, scheduled for release later this year.  I was one of the people disappointed by this being an early adopter of the platform with my purchase of a Dream handset the day it was released on June 2nd of 09 but it looks like there is some good news after all.

Looks like Rogers is going to do us all a solid and offer a free upgrade from the Dream to the Magic.  Yup, you read that right, there offering a free upgrade and they are letting you keep your Dream.  Only catch is that you will need to renew your contract out to 3 years again so this will cost you up to 7 months worth of contract.  I called in 2 days ago now and the process was super easy, I just asked to take advantage of the promotion and they said “okay, we only have the black model in stock but you should receive it in 4 to 6 days”, fine with me as the black is what I wanted.

The offer is valid from Jan 12th to Jan 26th.  To take advantage of it you can call Customer Care at 1-888-Rogers1 or online at Rogers.com, retail stores will not be able to help you with this.

Later all,
Ed.

THIS IS STRICTLY A PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK KIND OF POST.  IT’S MEANT PURELY FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES AND OF COURSE, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT HAPPENS TO YOU OR YOUR PHONE AS A RESULT OF ATTEMPTING ANYTHING YOU READ IN THIS POST OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THIS BLOG.  YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, NOW PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Was up all!  I have been playing around with rooting my Android phone and installing a custom ROM for quite a while now.  In the beginning it was quite intimidating but I feel like I have come a long way, learned a lot, made some observations  and have now gotten to a point where I’m quite comfortable throwing commands at this thing.  It all started a few months ago, I spent the required 5 hours or so doing my homework, reading forums, considering my options and deciding if the mod was worth the effort.   Here is why I initially decided to do it.

• The thought of running a Hero ROM (Pretty but ya, don’t bother as performance is horrible)
• I wanted to tether my phone to my MacBook so that I could take advantage of that 6 gig data plan.
• I wanted to play with apps like “Market Enabler” and maybe some system over clocker.
• Move installed apps to the SD card to save on system space.  (Actually not doing this yet, just the custom ROM alone gave me a 4x boost on available space)
• Overall performance enhancements.  Seriously, I love this OS but man can it be laggy at times, the custom ROM is nice and snappy.
• Multi Touch in the browser is cool I guess but was not really a reason for me.
• Geek factor involved.  So I could talk about the mods with friends at work

So let me take a second to say that yes, the countless hours spent flashing, some of them spent wondering if my beloved phone will ever work again, all of it, was 100% worth it!  Every painful second!  The phone nice and snappy now and there was like 80 megs free out of the gate!  The tethering alone makes this all worth it for me.  The difference in the phone from then to now is simply amazing!

I’m think I’m going to try and break this up into 3 steps, Backing up your phone’s current state (seriously, don’t skip this step), rooting the phone and finally installing the custom ROM.  I’m not going to write a guide here, that’s already been done so I honestly don’t see the point.  What I want to do is write down my observations and maybe a tip or two, things that may not be so clear in the guides I will link you to.  Read this post first from start to finish and you should have all the background and info you need to run a successful mod.

So first off, a little bit about the phone.  A lot of again this is based only on my opinion and observation and may not be 100% true, take it with a grain of salt and if I have something totally wrong please do leave a comment and I’ll correct it.

The phone’s memory seems to be split into the following different partitions.

• recovery (code for recovery mode that will be used in the rooting process)
• radio (Used by the phone’s radio)
• boot (the boot partition, pretty self explanatory)
• system (the system software)
• userdata (your data, installed apps etc)
• cache (note sure how important this is but I’m assuming it holds the phone’s cache)

The phone has the two following special boot modes that you will use while modding it.

• Recovery mode (start the phone while holding the home button, this is used to create your nandroid backups and to flash zip packages to the phone).
• fastboot mode (start the phone while holding the camera button, this mode is used to issue commands to the phone from a computer).  Fastboot requires that the android SDK usb driver be installed on your PC, you can get that here and simply point the found new driver wizard at the drivers folder when you plug in your phone.

The files you will be using throughout this process will be either image (img) files or they will be zip files.  The image files (img) are pushed to the phone via PC with the phone in fastboot mode and the zip files are placed in the root of you SD card, renamed to update.zip and flashed to the phone while in recovery mode.

The modding process will basically go as follows…

1. *1st guide* Flash a custom recovery image onto the phone.
2. *not in guide but do it!* Boot into recovery mode and create a nandroid backup (this is not in the guides I link to but trust me, do it!)
3. *not in guide but do it!* Bootup back into the phone and move the new nandroid folder from the SD card to the PC for safe keeping, if something goes wrong or if you want to revert back to the stock OS you’ll be happy you did this!
4. *1st guide* Boot into recovery mode and flash a radio update to the phone .
5. *2nd guide* Place a custom ROM on the root of your SD card and name it update.zip.
6. *2nd guide* Boot into fastboot mode and erase all the data on the phone then flash the radio, boot and recovery images that are required for the custom ROM’s to work.
7. *2nd guide* Boot into recovery mode again and flash the ROM (update.zip) file to the phone.
8. After this, rebooting should boot it right into the newly installed OS.

One last quick not before we get started, this is probably going to take you at least an hour to do (if all goes well) and will probably take way longer than that if your not happy with the ROM you choose.  Be patient, take your time and don’t do this when you’ve got other things going on, you’ll be fine.

Step 1 and 2:  Backing up and rooting
Open this link and follow the directions listed there…  The only thing I would change there is that after step 8 and just before flashing update.zip, I would make a nandroid backup of my phone (nandriod backup is just one of the selections in the recovery mode menu) then bootup the phone normally again, copy the nandroid folder from the sd card onto the PC for safe keeping and then continue with the guide.  You’ll appreciate the backup if anything goes wrong or if you ever want to revert back to your phones current state.

Step 3: Flashing a custom ROM
Follow the directions at this link.  Pay close attention to the part where it says to put an update.zip file in the root of your SD card, if you don’t and start the process before placing it there you will not be able to boot the phone again, you will not actually be bricked but you will be switching to an oops kind of mode where you will probably be best off recovering with your nandroid backups and starting all over again.

As for ROM’s, there are lots of places that list custom ROM’s and google is your friend here but I’ll give you one of the many I have found here.

If the fastboot commands don’t work then you probably dont have the correct usb driver installed, see the link I posted above about getting the SDK driver.  Also make sure your running these commands from the SDK’s “tools” folder, that is where the “fastboot” app lives.  I would copy all of the .img files in the tools folder too, you would actually have to do this to use the commands that are in the guide.  If you need help with using command prompt this probably is not something you should be doing at all.

So the phone wont boot, what now…  No worries, do the following to get it back.

1. In guide 2, download the files that are in the “revert back to Rogers” section and place the two files “rogersradio.img” and “rogersrecovery.img” into the SDK Tools folder you have been working in.
2. Place all the files that are in teh nandroid folder you created durring the first guide into the SDK Tools folder (you did do a nandroid backup right?).
3. Boot the phone into fastboot mode (hold the camera button while you power on the phone)
4. Type the following commands…
   fastboot flash radio rogersradio.img
   fastboot flash recovery rogersrecovery.img
   fastboot erase system -w
   fastboot flash system system.img
   fastboot flash userdata data.img
   fastboot flash cache cache.img
   fastboot flash boot boot.img

Huh, I think I got it all.  So what are you waiting for, go mod that Dream/G1 already!  Once your modded install Wireless Tether, awesome app!  Drop me a line if you need help setting it up or if you have any questions about the modding process.

Later all,
Ed.

So those links once again are…
Android SDK: Here
Guide 1: Here
Guide2: Here
Some ROM’s: Here

I‘ve recently noticed something about my HTC Dream.  I have been using it since last June and have recent began to tire with it, mostly because of how annoyingly laggy it would be at times.  I still love the phone, just doesn’t feel like its powerful enough, like running Vista on an old PC that shipped with 98, it works but how well.  Lately I have set out to try and make it run better and have found a few things you can do to improve the phones performance.

1. Delete all applications that you don’t need.  One of my biggest pet peeves is that phone manufacturers just don’t put enough memory in there phones.  Come on people, memory is so cheap these days and having more memory would make such a huge difference in smart phones, why haven’t you guys figured this out yet?  The biggest violator of this was the Blackberry Storm.  They actually went so far as to give you 1 gig on board and an 8 gig SD card, perfect right?  Nope, the 1 gig on board is for media only and cant be used for application space.  I already had the 8 gig SD for media, why not let me use that 1 gig for app space, did you really think that the 128 Mb of RAM was enough?
2. Forget about those widgets.  Are some of them cool, yup.  Do they work, not at all.  Being that that’s the case is it worth having them all over the screen, nope.  For the longest time I would keep re installing and trying cool widgets to see if they would work better than before but they never do.  They work fine for a few hours then they stop updating.  At one point i remember looking at a date widget and thinking “what, it’s not the 3rd, today’s the 5th, WTF?”.  Not only do they not work but having them open uses up phone memory and slows everything else down.   So ya, drop the widgets, all the widgets, your phone will thank you!
3. When I first got the phone I was wondering why I couldn’t get the on screen keyboard to work.  That was followed with the disappointment of the realization that Rogers actually had the nerve to remove it from the phone.  A few short hours later I installed an on screen app and got to feel the smugness associated with getting functionality out of the phone that Rogers didn’t want me to have.  I think I may have used the on screen keyboard all of  like 5 times since then, it sucks and the hardware keyboard is tons better!  I uninstalled the software keyboard a few days ago and the difference in performance has been amazing.  All of a sudden everything is working so smoothly!  Could that be why Rogers left it out of the phone, just doesn’t work well?

There you have it, do those three things and I promise you, your phone will thank you.

Later all,
Ed.