Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and you know I told you in my last video one of the things that really like about Android is the ability to customize that you can't get much more custom than getting rid of the ROM the actual operating system and all the programs and everything that came with your phone and replacing it with something completely custom something built by the developer community customized tweaked and deployed so that you can easily put that onto your phone see but there's the trick easily for one person isn't easy for someone else and I've kind of shown you that with you know going into ADB and flashing over roms and using fastboot and blah blah blah you know it's not easy going into the recovery console and flashing a ROM that way a little bit easier but still kind of complex so what can you guys do that either don't like get in your hands that dirty or maybe guys like me who just like being able to flash stuff all the time one after another really fast succession without having to remember all of these command prompts and being able to to plug into a laptop whenever you need to do it well in that case there's rum manager there are two versions a free version and a paid version and if you like to flash roms this is really really going to help you let's go take a look all right so ROM manager let's do some vocabulary first all right a rom in this context is basically the collection of stuff that makes your phone work now that stuff is your kernel it's the operating system which is Android itself its drivers its configuration files and whatever whatever other apps are included by the rom developer themselves most of the time roms come from the hardware manufacturer in this case HTC and their customized by t-mobile now that's usually at least in this case yours might be Sprint or orange or Rogers or something else so all these carriers will tell the manufacturer hey we want to have this stuff you know we don't want to have Wi-Fi tethering we want to have all this bloatware yadda yadda yadda and all of that is rolled up into the ROM now most of you already knew that but for those of you who didn't now you do there are some custom roms out there like we've talked about many times in the past my favorite is CyanogenMod rom and before to be able to flash those that's the process of installing them on your device basically overwriting what you currently have then replacing it with what you want you had to boot up into recovery mode and then from a recovery mode you had to go in and flash the the rom file if you had a custom recovery like almond Raw's recovery or like clockwork mod it was very very easy whereas if you didn't have one of those and you were just doing one of the stock ones it was more difficult for reasons we're not going to go into so what we're here to talk about today is ROM manager rom manager is by Koosh and it's actually the same guy who has written clockworkmod for us so while we fire that up what this lets you do is a whole bunch of things we'll talk about some of the stuff and we'll just breeze over some of the other stuff so I'm going to go through everything kind of really fast up front and then we'll come back and do some of the funner things first and foremost this lets you flash clockworkmod recovery if you don't already have it or if you're running some other recovery rom you can do this right here even if this is your stock recovery ROM if you are running on routed phone you can go through and flash recovery this recovery image right here it's a piece of cake it's pretty much one touch follow the prompts and you're done you don't have to worry about naming it putting out on the root of your SD card doing it through through fastboot piece of cake this this is almost too easy next one down and now you need to get into recovery so tap that reboot into recovery mode it'll ask you if you're sure you want to you go ahead and do it and what do you know your phone boots up you're in recovery mode and you can do all of your recovery tasks and processes from there so really cool next section down is ROM management you can install any ROM from the SD card doesn't matter what the location is on that SD card you can pick it from here which is a huge improvement over the stock recovery ROM where it has to be at the root of the SD card and it has to be named update zip not update zip zip which that just made it about half of you laugh out there next one download ROM we're going to come back to that check for a rom update and it shows you that my current ROM is CyanogenMod 6.1 point 0 for the vision which is the code name for this device I can go in and check for an update to that and it will go out and see if there's a newer version of CyanogenMod and do it relatively quickly of course it also does that in the background as well intermittently so I'll be notified of an update every couple days if there is an update it'll check for me so really cool what if I have a theme for example now a theme is a customized ROM file it basically sits on top of your existing ROM and it replaces key things like config files prop files icons you know stuff like that and what you do is you just flash it like you would a normal rum it has to be compatible with the ROM that you already have and you just load it on top of it well most of those are distributed you know on the web XDA developers or the themers website but a lot of times they have a QR code a two-dimensional barcode that says hey you know flash this on your phone well you fire up rom manager tap that it opens up barcode scanner you scan that that barcode essentially and it will start downloading that really really fast so you don't have to go hunting around you don't have to type in the URL you don't have to navigate to it on your your mobile browser and then try and get that URL in here so it makes it very easy and convenient to do so really cool next section down is backup and restore now that's pretty self-explanatory you can manage and restore your backups and backup your current ROM which is something I always recommend you do before you make a major leap or even a significant leap in your roms so back it up the backup files are somewhat big but you know that nothing to be worried about and there are definitely good insurance for you utilities fixed permissions if you have flashed something and installed some some apps and all of a sudden you know things aren't working right you're getting forced closes and whatnot it may be a permissions mismatch tap on that run it it takes sometimes five ten minutes depending on how much stuff you've got on your phone then it's just going to go through and make sure that all the permissions are set properly now of course we're talking you know Unix Linux type permissions stuff that you'd go through and do a change mod at a command level change mods zero six four four change mod 0 7 5 5 etc etc I don't know what all those are and I definitely don't want to go through and make sure that I've run a change mod on you know four or five thousand files or even four five hundred or even 40 or 50 files this does it all for you it's relatively fast painless if you're running into force close problems you run that reboot your phone your Forks closes if it was a permissions that you are going to go away next partition SD card okay way back in the early days of CyanogenMod you wanted to partition your SD card that was a pain in the neck you wanted to have your basically your data partition which was still fat32 so it could be read across desktop computers everywhere and you wanted to have a swap partition or optionally have a swap partition which held your swap file or held a a swap file because you've already got some swapping going on on the device but you also have this ext partition that you could install apps in - and now you know that's kind of gone away with the way Froyo does apps to sd but it's still kind of there and it's still very convenient because the ext partition and the swap partition kind of speed things up and they kind of free up your space on your phone which is another way to speed up your phone so all in all it's a good a good way to add a little bit more speed to your device however you want to make sure you do this on a brand new SD card not on one that has all your stuff on it otherwise you're going to erase everything so if you want to partition your SD card which I have and I do on all my SD cards you want to make sure that you back up everything from that SD card before you go through and do this and then it's just a very fast process because that is a destructive process I am NOT going to show you that today but just know that you can do it if you have questions on how to do that or want me to run a video on that go ahead and contact me from the the post over pocketnow.com that's going to associate with this video so moving right along more Recovery's if you don't like the the clockworkmod recovery and want to put almond on there you can do that right now I don't have that available to me to install but I've done it many times in the past and then of course there's older and experimental versions of clockwork recovery that I could go ahead and put on there so let's go back to the good stuff with me so far so with ROM manager you're pretty much going to do two things you're going to download a rom so we'll do this let's go into CyanogenMod is that's what I'm running and this is all personalized customized for the device it detects what device you're running and it only shows you stuff that's relevant to this device so you're not going to accidentally install a nexus one image for example on on your g2 so I can come in here and at tap on CyanogenMod 6.1 which it says is a stable release and I have done all of these release candidates in the past which it says a release candidate so I can tell very quickly very easily which one I want to get to download I simply tap on it and it downloads now obviously I'm not going to do that today because that's you know 60 70 megabytes but I am going to show you the process of flashing it I've already got it downloaded so from here let's go ahead and install a rom or you know what let's go ahead and try that because it should be already downloaded and it shouldn't download again so let's see if that's the case shows me a screenshot to show me what it's going to look like which isn't really all that helpful for for just roms but it is when you get into themes go ahead and download that it asks me if I want to also install Google Apps because we know that CyanogenMod got a cease and desist letter from Google saying he can't distribute them so these are mirrored from somebody else who shouldn't be distributing them and you can just pull them in and install in here so it out it'll actually flash the CyanogenMod rom and then it will flash google acts apps right after that so very nice and I have options to back up my existing ROM and wipe data and cache if I'm going from say CyanogenMod 6.0 to 6.1 I might want to do the wipe data and cache definitely if I'm going from a 5 to a 6 or any any kind of major jump in this case since I'm just over writing I don't have to do that and then if I want to back up my existing ROM I can do that as well as part of the process I know this process is going to be ok so I'm not going to do either one of those we'll just say ok tells me to press ok to reboot into clockworkmod recovery and continue the installation now normally at this point it would download the rom but like I said I've already done this you know for the sake of time so it says all you've already got these on here you don't have to download them but normally we would do that it would take you know half an hour or however long it takes depending on your internet speed and all of the the traffic that's bogging down between here and there so what's going to happen now it's booting up into that recovery mode so I've got my htc screen this should stay here for about 15-20 seconds and then there I am right into at the clockworkmod recovery this by the way is version 2.5 point 1 point 3 it's waiting for my SD card to mount and after that it is going through and installing the you can see the name of it right there the really big long name of CyanogenMod 6.1 point 0 that I'm writing now tells me welcome to it and this is just the the regular flashing process you can see my status bar down here hasn't gotten anywhere this will take you know as maybe up to five minutes sometimes a little bit more than that sometimes a little bit less I'm not going to make you suffer through that I'll pick back up here in a few minutes so you can see the next step in the process all right now that process just finished up here and now we're going through the the google apps hdpi this one's the 2010 November 11th it goes through and it flashes those very quickly and then at that point it reboots the phone this is a first boot into that new custom ROM or in this case flashing the existing custom ROM over itself so this boot usually takes a little bit of time while it goes through and sets everything up just like every first boot does but you can see just right there how fast and easy it was to download well first of all to find a rom a custom rom to update to download it to reboot into recovery mode flash it flash the Google Apps and reboot just right they're super super fast very nice if you want to do any any rom flashing at all this is really the way to do it now there are two versions of of the rom manager now they are both available in the market you go ahead and go back over there this is the first boot of course so things take a while as it's launching the SD card and we'll just move back over here okay so row manager two versions there is the standard version which will let you do almost everything that you saw me do there are some things some menu items that are still in place but aren't aren't available for you and it'll prompt you to nag you and say hey this is only available to premium users if you want this go ahead and purchase it which I have done for the purpose of this video and I'm really glad I did it's going to run you five six seven bucks I forget which but it's well worth it and it does come with ads both versions of course they're turned off in the premium version but still there if you want to support the developer then then they are turned on and you can't turn them off in the standard version but the standard version lets you do most of the stuff it doesn't let you automatically check to see if there is an updated ROM you have to go out and manually for it but very very cool very nice especially if you if you're like me and you want to keep up to date on the latest stuff like I said I went through bacon bits I went through CyanogenMod at six point oh six point one release candidate all of them so that was four four release candidates and then finally the stable release which would take an awful lot of time to find download we didn't rename boot up into recovery and just tedious this makes it fast easy and I'm really glad I got it it's something that's going to live on all of my phones from here on out I'd recommend that you do the same if you want to do any kind of this stuff it is very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing you know just especially that partition SD card you want to kill everything on your card that's how you do it so kind of avoid that but really cool kind of high end but a way to to make really technical complex stuff easier for just the normal kind of geeky person which it probably represents the majority of you out there in our audience you know otherwise you wouldn't be here you'd be at one of those other frou-frou websites you know Apple or something so really cool really fun rum manager premium go out download it from the market if you like this kind of video if you want to see more of it please make sure you subscribe to our video channel we've got a link right down there at the bottom go and do that it's free of charge head on over to pocketnow.com to read the article related to this video and other stuff as well we've got all kinds of articles and videos over there including breaking news on not just Android but other mobile devices as well make sure you do that give this video a thumbs up and for Pucket now I'm Joe Levi