Experiences On Rooting My HTC Wildfire

CyanogenMod 7 running on my HTC Wildfire

Couples of posts earlier I wrote about my experiences on rooting and flashing a new ROM to my Samsung Galaxy Tab GT-P100. Since everything went well and relatively without a hassle my hunger grew and I started to consider doing the same thing for my phone. So, I own an old HTC Wildfire and it never has had a very good performance. Having used the phone for couple of years the OS responsiveness of the phone became rather sluggish and prone to crashes. It did not help that the geocaching application had "secretly" hogged space by storing every geocache that I had viewed into a hidden folder on my SD-card. Clearing up all the hidden files from SD-card helped a bit, but I wanted more.

Here is how I rooted my phone:

Backups

First of I had to back all my data. I synced my contacts to my Google account and used some free sms-backup software to take a copy of my messages. There are a tons of free apps that you can use to backup your messages. I did not think I had any that important apps on my phone so I did not bother with backing up my apps with Titanium Backup.

rooting

Rooting

Google Car Home - YES!

First item on the list is rooting. I used Revolutionary to gain root access and s-off. It was a piece of cake. The only problem was that all the rooting guides tell you that you use the volume keyes to navigate when you are using Revolutionary. At one point I was sure that my phone was bricked. This is not the case. In fact you can use the optical track ball navigate inside revolutionary.

The basic flashing procedure was very straight forward. I chose to flash the latest version CyanogenMod7 since the Wildfire doesn't have very powerful processor. So now my Wildfire runs Android 2.3.7. Great!

After rooting I noticed that GPS reception was not working. Crap! Again this was quite easily fixed by reflashing the radio part of the OS. I flashed the version 3.35.20.10 of Wildfires radio software and now my GPS work quite fast.

I think the phone is a little bit faster with the new custom ROM, but the performance increase isn't that big. The slight increase in performance, however, has improved the way how newer navigation apps work. The FM radio app works much better now. Before you had to be very careful with your headphones when you wanted to listen to the radio and each and every little movement of the headphone wire caused crackling. Now you can actually listen radio on the go, while biking or walking it doesn't matter. Second nice new feature is that Google Car Home is included into CM7.

Overall benefits

 

Overall, again, I would say that rooting and flashing a custom ROM to my HTC Wildfire gave it a new lease on life (?!?). I think that I am able to use this a while longer and I am not in a hurry to upgrade my phone SGS3 (drool) or even iPhone. Actually, the fact that I'm able to modify and upgrade my old phone by myself, makes me like my old phone even more. I think this is were the true power of open source/ Linux based systems lies. You control the software of your devices and not some company that may or may not release an update for your device. I know that this sort tinkering is not for everyone but I do feel that if you spend couple of nights familiarising with the basics of rooting and flashing custom ROMs to Android devices anyone can learn to unleash the full potential of their Android devices.

There was one problem, quite a big problem, that emerged after flashing the new custom ROM. The battery of my phone seemed to drain out really fast. I charged the phone up, went to bed and when I woke up the phone had powered off. I had to use terminal emulator to delete the batterystats.bin file and reboot the phone and after few cycles the battery seems to (almost) back to normal. The information on the forums says that this is quite a common problem. Otherwise my HTC now works much better.

Arts&Crafts: HTC Wildfire bikemount for Pokemon Go

Time for the first arts and crafts entry in this blog. I'm pretty sure that there won't be many more of these. Anyway, I was searching a way to mount my HTC Wildfire to my mountain bike and was unable to find a solution that was commercially available that would meet my requirements. Of course there are some solutions available, but most of them are expensive, clumsy and look pretty stupid. Then I got this idea of making a bike mount myself. I came up with design that is cheap, sturdy and at least in my opinion looks pretty cool. This design can be adapted for many other types of devices and it is kid of universal bike mount mobile phone/devices. Here is how you can make one yourself:

1 Parts: 

What is so great about this bike mount is that you do not need that many parts. There is only two parts that you need to buy. Firstly you need to buy this mount from DealExtreme. It costs 8$/6€, so it's very cheap and the shipping is free. Then you just get a silicone case that fits your phone. I don't have any recommendations where you should or could buy the case. It shouldn't be hard to find.

In total the parts should cost you less than 20$/15€ so this bike mount won't blow any ones budget.

2 Putting the mount together:

First thing you need to do is to remove the screw that is on the Fotopro Flip Motion Mount. Basically what you need to do is to cut a bit of rubber from the other end of the hole. This allows you to take the screw out. There is a little notch at the other end of the hole that was used to put screw in, be sure to cut from that end.

Secondly, you need to cut holes to the silicone case. You can use the Fotopro mount to mark the places where you make the cuts. I recommend that you use a leather hole puncher to make holes to the ends of the markings and then cut out the rubber in between with a sharp knife. Utility knife should do the trick. The round ends of the holes should prevent the silicone from splitting. You could reinforce the holes with electric tape. Any ideas for reinforcing are welcome.

BAM! And you are done.

Time to slide the velcro straps through the holes and mount it to your bike. Now you can use your mobile phone's navigation features while biking! SWEET.

Since the mount is on the stem it is easy to read and operate your device while riding.

The mount sits pretty nicely on the stem.

If you combine your Android phone with something like WorkSmart Cardio Trainer your phone turns into a fully featured bike computer. Cool.

EDIT: If you decided to build a bike mount using these instructions, please drop me a comment and/or picture of your bike mount.

EDIT: This also works great for Pokemon Go players riding their bikes. You can have your phone attached to your stem while hunting for those Pokemon.