Up until now I’ve pretty much been a Droid purist in that I’ve waited patiently for their software releases to trickle in. I figured it was the safest method of keeping the phone free of defects and frankly there really wasn’t that much in the releases to get jumpy. Today however I’ve taken a leap of faith and have finally broken down and “Rooted” my Droid. There was just too much in this next release that I wanted for me to sit on the sidelines and wait. The number one item on that list is of course the ability to use Flash 10.1 and finally see the web as it was intended from the comfort of my handy little phone. Sorry Apple you guys really blew it on that decision!
Another huge benefit derived from Rooting your Droid is that you gain access to Super User Permissions and have the ability to get into things Motorola, Verizon and Google keep you out of. One shining example of what you can do is to overclock your CPU. There are a number of utilities both free and paid in the Android Market that will allow you to up your clock speed once you’re rooted. I chose a paid app called SetCPU.
The process by which you Root your Android phone is not ridiculously hard but I would caution those who want to follow in my footsteps that its not ridiculously easy and the potential to render your phone inoperable does exist. Think carefully before you head down this path because if you blow up your phone you’re effectively screwed since you have violated Verizon’s terms of use. Since “Rooting”, for some reason, is either more difficult or impossible from release 2.1 you first, assuming by now you are on that release, have to take your OS back to version 2.01. This is not that difficult and with the exception of getting the utility to function in Windows 7 took only a few minutes. After that you have to load a piece of software that alters the recovery startup application. There are two flavors of this app, Clockwork and SPRecovery. I chose the latter since it appeared to have more reliability among forum users. The next step is to actually root your device which is as simple as loading an update.zip file to the phone and then running it Continue reading →
Well I haven’t posted anything out here for quite some time. I’ve spent the last year or so working on another blog called MacifyME! which was supposed to be a diary of sorts dealing with my transition to the Mac. It has become too much to deal with and I felt restricted on that site not being able to really cover items outside the Apple ecosystem so I decided to shut it down. With that I have decided to start writing here again when I feel the need to blog. With that said, this post will be the first new post in many many months. Continue reading 
