I love T-Mobile. They have great customer service, reasonable rates, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Lately, however, I’ve been getting annoyed at their constant reneging of promises to update some of their older Android phones to v2.0+.
Driven by suggestions from friends, I finally decided last weekend to try rooting the phone and flashing Cyanogen. At first I flashed Cyanogen 6 (Android 2.2) and my phone refused to boot. Next, I tried going back down to Cyanogen 5 (Android 2.1) and the thing ran great! In fact, it was running much better than it did with T-Mobile’s build of Android 1.6. Being the daring chap I am, I decided to give Cyanogen 6 one more try and it worked! I was excited to have Android 2.2 and all the features that came with it along with the perks that come from having root access to your android phone.
Then, I slowly realized how sluggish Cyanogen 6 was being on my phone and put up with it for about a day before I decided to go back to v5. So, now I have a phone running Android 2.1 and I love it. Apps run quicker, I have a 4GB ext2 partition on my SD card for installing apps as well as a 256MB swap partition to keep things running smoothly. Also, with full root access, I can run apps that I wouldn’t be able to on a locked-down T-Mobile build. Two of my favorite such apps are Wireless Tether for turning my phone into a Wifi hotspot and ShootMe for taking screenshots on my phone like the one in this post.
I was a huge fan of Android before and now that I’ve discovered how much more useful my phone can be from rooting/flashing I don’t ever want to own a non-Android phone again.
