David Carrington

A couple of people have asked me about how I went about rooting my HTC Desire and what ROM I’ve put on it. Here’s how I did it:

1. I installed “HTC Sync” from HTC’s official website
2. I followed the rooting  instructions over at http://desire.modaco.com
3. I downloaded ROM Manager from the Android Market
4. I used that to install the DeFrost ROM (currently v1.4)

That’s all. No risk. No worry about breaking things, it all just works.

What I’ve lost:

1. All the slow, ugly, bloated, HTC software
2. The ability to record video (for now, until the community find a fix)

What I’ve gained:

1. Lovely pure Android OS with no HTC intrusions
2. 3G -> wifi tethering and other similar little things from Android 2.2

That might not sound a lot, but the benefits for me are huge as it has a big impact on the most used applications:

1. The browser is nicer
2. The phone dialer is nicer
3. The SMS app is nicer
4. The home screen/launcher is nicer
5. The locked screen is nicer
6. OK, the whole phone is just nicer!

If you do like HTC Sense and Rosie and all that Facebook nonsense, then stick with the existing ROMs and wait for an official update hopefully some time in the next 6 months. If you want to have a phone with all the latest and greatest Android capabilities then I highly recommend doing an update.

UPDATE: The latest DeFrost versions already have a working video camera. Android community rocks!