travis' brain dump

So far? I’m impressed.

I remember the old days of flashing a windows mobile ROM was a “plug-n-pray” operation… Those things were (and I’m sure still are) down right scary. It was all to common to find oneself “bricking” a phone if just one little thing was out of place. Then along came Android.

My G2 is my second Android phone. My first was a Motorola Cliq that met an unfortunate fate after being ejected into the snow during a snowboarding trip in Park City, Utah. Somehow those beautiful photo’s of  mountaintop vistas posted on facebook just didn’t make it feel any better to drop $500 on a new phone. Alas, it was time to move on. I learned some really important things with my Cliq. It was my first exposure to modified ROMS on the Android platform and really made me respect what was actually being done on the back end to create solid custom ROMS that reliably installed and ran well. The guys that ‘cook’ these things up really do some great work. Flashing my Cliq was the best thing I ever did with that phone and it was actually quite easy. Still, nothing compared to how easy it was to flash my G2.

There are plenty of help pages out there on the web to get you going as far as rooting your device and installing custom images so there isn’t any need for me to go into that here. One of the best tutorials resides on the site I obtained my current ROM from. Just drop out to Google and lookg for CyanogenMod. GREAT work being done over there as far as I am concerned. Don’t forget that before even moving foward, you have to root your phone. Otherwise you might as well not even look up information on custom ROMS for any other reason than to look at the pretty pictures and wish you had one. You can’t load a custom image without a rooted device, period.

I for one rooted my phone quite literally the day I got home with it. It’s a must on these devices as the carriers tend to pack so much bloatware and unneeded software on these phones it’s a wonder they even boot. A root and cleanup is almost mandatory if you want your phone to perform well. I don’t blame the platform one bit though as it’s somehow a necessary evil in this market to pack things on for people to have  ‘readily available’ applications and get support from vendors. *rolls eyes* With a rooted G2, all that’s left is to load up ROM Manager (available on the market) which installs the Clockwork Recovery image (once you’ve installed RM, applied the img and rebooted) and of course download CM7 from the site. Once you place the images on your SD card, you can run ROM Manager to get things going. Backup your phone (always important) and let the rom drop into place by installing it from the menu. Keep in mind you should backup important things like contacts (if you’re not syncing them), emails (if you’re not syncing them) and SMS messages if you’re so inclined to retain these things because custom ROMS demand wiped devices on a fresh load. It’s not like backing anything up is difficult these days with all the apps for it out there right? suck it up and go for it!

Anyway, so I loaded up CM7. Right away I noticed the system booted faster. While the G2 was already much faster than my Cliq, the new boot time was much faster than the carrier ROM. Out of the box, CM7 looks and acts smooth. Screen transitions, default notifications, the default launcher were all things that just jumped right out at me. The phone just seemed to run more cleanly. Battery life seems to be only slightly better than stock and the memory usage is a little higher, despite not being able to tell from a performance view. I haven’t run into any problems loading apps from the market and integration of my preferred home screen launcher, Launcher Pro, works well. I am a big fan of some of the upgrades that Gingerbread brings to the table. Things just tend to run a little smoother overall and thus far haven’t experienced any issues at all with wifi calling, tethering, texting, emailing (gmail and exchange), surfing the web, facebooking, blogging, streaming or any other things which I typically use on the phone.

Keep in mind if you want the Google apps you’ll need to load it up in the beginning of your process in the same fashion that you loaded the ROM from ROM Manager. It’s also downloadable from the same site as CM7. I’d recommend it unless you’re into loading your apps manually from the apk files and don’t want any integration with Google. It’s not like it eats up that much right? 🙂

Again, I can’t find any real fault with this ROM and can only sing its praises. It runs much better than the default G2 load from T-Mob and isn’t that hard to install. I hope those guys continue to keep up the good work. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead from this project.