Monday - Day 6
On Monday night, I was feeling pretty tired, and needed something I could do at home. I decided to have my first geek out of Lent, and root my HTC Evo 4G. To the non-nerds out there: you don't have to stop reading. This is not going to be a technical article!
For those who don't know what is means to "root" a phone, "rooting" means to hack the device to have full control over it. When most phones come from the carriers, such as Sprint, AT&T, or Verizon, they have software installed by said carriers. Many times, a carrier will limit functionality on the device using the software they install. They may do this for many different reasons - to increase stability, to improve better battery life, or to charge you more to enable that feature! After having a conversation with my friend Sean last weekend about how he rooted his phone, I decided to sit down and give it a shot.
After doing a whole lot of reading on XDA Developers, I figured that this would be a simple process. Download some software, restart the phone, and voila - I'd be done. Of course, I ran into a minor snafu with some software on my computer that was interfering with the connection to the phone, which took me a while to figure out. But, once I realized that, it was a fairly painless process. If you want to know what I did, simply watch this YouTube video.
After finishing that process, I was able to install new version of the Android operating system on my device. I chose Fresh Evo - mostly because that was what my friend Sean was running, and he said good things. After the relatively painless install, all the bloat that was on my phone was gone. Goodbye and good riddance to all the Sprint apps and the advertisement apps (like Blockbuster) that I never used or wanted. It seems to me that the phone may be a little more responsive, but that might just be me. I definitely have much better battery life - which was what I really wanted.
All in all, it was a cool experience. I learned more about how my phone worked, and did something I'd never done before. None of this would be necessary if I would have just stuck with my good ol' reliable dumb phone from back in the day, but I'm a sucker for technology. Oh well.
So much for this not being a "techy" article. Sorry. It happens sometimes when a computer engineer is writing a blog :) I promise to not do this TOO often!
Return from Hiatus
As for the last two days, you may have noticed that I haven't written anything. I've spent the last two days sick, and I've haven't felt like doing much at all. I slept most of Tuesday, for what it is worth. Today I went into the office, but I could have stayed home. However, the one "cool" thing I did was watch a great documentary on Michigan's Fab 5. You should check it out.
Today's interesting experience: writing this whole article after taking NyQuil. Looks like it was a success, until I read it tomorrow :P
-Phil
No comments:
Post a Comment