Now that our daughter’s in middle school and is involved with extra-curricular activities we needed to get her her own phone, so she inherited my smartphone as I upgraded mine. Having a new phone has provided me the opportunity to try out something I’d been meaning to do for a while: flash my phone with an open-source version of Android.
What’s the worst that can happen? Well, flashing a new ROM onto your phone can turn your sophisticated pocket computer into an expensive doorstop. Known as “bricking” your phone, a mistake in the process can make it inoperative. Fortunately, there are plenty of guides which walk you through the process as well as simple “one-click” programs which will do the dirty work for you. And even if you goof up, you can almost always fix things up again.
My phone is a Samsung Epic 4G Touch (SPH-D710) through Ting.Com. Some models of this phone have a flaky chipset which make it more prone to bricking. The first step was installing an app called eMMC Brickbug Check which instantly told me whether my phone was vulnerable to this or not. Once I had the all-clear, I downloaded a new ROM, placed it on my phone’s SD card, and then used Mobile Odin to flash the new ROM onto my phone. This was a bit tricky, too, since my model phone needed a FlashKernel to get it through the process. Once I installed the FlashKernel, Mobile Odin was happy and I successfully flashed my phone.
Now I have ClockWorkMod (CWM) installed in my phone, which allows me to easily flash new images. CWM also provides an easy, low-level way to backup and restore my phone. It’s pretty cool.
Now I have the “Wild For The Night” version of Cyanogenmod, built from the latest Android version, running on my phone. The image is half as large as the bloated Sprint Android that came with my phone and provides me with full control over all its features since it is open source. It took some work to get here, true, but it’s been worth it to figure everything out.
For those who want to follow in my footsteps, I suggest you do your homework first. Learn how to root your phone, then install Nandroid Online backup on it and back up everything to your SD card. That way if something goes wrong you can restore it. Last but not least, follow your phone’s instructions for flashing very carefully to avoid extra work.
I use open source during my work day and at home. Why wouldn’t I use it on my phone as well?