Last night I did something I was adamant I wasn’t going to do, namely rooting my Android phone and installing CyanogenMod on it. Normally I don’t like messing with (smart)phones - they’re tools in the pipe wrench sense to me, they should hopefully not require much in the way of care & feeding apart from charging and the odd app or OS update. Of course, the odd OS update is can already be a problem as no official updates have been available for this phone (a Motorola Droid) for a while and between the provider-installed bloatware that couldn’t be uninstalled and the usual cruft that seems to accumulate on computers over time, the phone was really sluggish, often unresponsive and pretty much permanently complained about running out of memory. So far it appears that updating the OS and only installing a handful of apps that I actually use as opposed to the ones that I supposedly “need” has resulted in a much better user experience.
The whole process was comparatively painless, which I really appreciated. The biggest hurdle was getting the clockworkmod recovery image onto the phone. I ended up rebooting the Mac into Windows and install it via the Windows tools. Other than that, the installation went smoothly and didn’t leave me with a bricked phone so I’m happy with that part.
Why the effort, given my dislike for hacking smartphones? Well, for starters I can squeeze a little more life out of the phone. I’m eligible for an upgrade but thanks to Verizon’s shenanigans, sorry, added hoops (and added expense) required to jump through if you want to keep a grandfathered unlimited data plan, I don’t feel particularly compelled to spend money on a phone, especially if I have to pay full retail for an upgrade. I’m also not that big a fan of Android (I admit to preferring iOS) so I’m currently waiting on how the whole “unlocked iPhone” saga will play out with the iPhone 5. If I have to pay retail for a phone - any phone - I might as well use that as leverage to reduce the overall phone bill.
In the meantime I’ll see how I like the “new” Droid and better get used to occasionally reinstalling the OS on a phone, thus reminding me of the quip that Android truly is the Windows of smartphone OSs.