Gadgetory

hey everybody it's joe from pocketnow.com today I would like to show you how to install the HTC desire rom on your unlocked nexus one now the HTC desire is a different phone than the nexus one they're both made by HTC and the hardware is almost identical main differences between the two are the UI that the phone uses on the nexus one it's the stock Android UI and on the desire it's the HTC Sense UI and then some apps and widgets and whatnot but to show you how that's done let me go ahead and start off here first thing we need to do is reboot the phone into recovery mode so to do that we're going to hold down power button I'm running cyanogenmod on this phone right now so i have this neat little reboot phone option going to tap that and it asked me if I'm sure i want to do that before i do it's important to note that once i do this i have to be ready to push the volume down button on the side of the phone to get me into that special recovery boot mode so we're gonna hit ok wait for it and right here we're holding in that volume down button now what we've got here up at the top of that pink line if you can see that says that this phone is unlocked you have to have an unlocked phone to be able to do this I've got an article that tells you how to do that just in case yours is not from here this is the fastboot we need to use the volume down button to go down to recovery press the power button to select that and now it's going to reboot there's your little unlocked icon so you can see that this is an unlocked phone once you've unlocked your phone that will always be there so you'll always know warranty is void it's unlocked but what that's going to do it's going to reboot and it's going to come up into the android system recovery and from here that's where we can do a whole bunch of cool stuff first and foremost i would highly recommend that you back up using nandroid all of your current settings that's going to back up to your SD card and if you don't like the ROM if something goes wrong anything like that you can really easily go back to where you were the last time you did a backup so I'd recommend doing that I'll shoot a video on that so you can see how to do it in the future but today I really want to show you how to go in and flash another rom from the SD card so this menu option says flash zip from sdcard we're going to select that and I've got this rom called the next desire v 1.2 remix zip on the root of my ass d card so i'm just going to scroll down to that and select it by pressing that button down here at the bottom it says that it's going to install 0 go back in here as i pushed any other button it asked me if i want to install it and if i do press the scroll button and if i don't any other key so if you want to abort now's your chance to do it I want to continue so I'm going to push the scroll button again you get your traditional unboxing icon and a status to tell you what's going on down here installing it from the SD card finding the update package opening the package finding the package a whole bunch of stuff this process is going to take you probably three to four minutes so I'm going to cut right here and we'll be back as soon as that's complete okay a couple minutes of past and the last item on this screen it says install from sdcard complete and it's brought me back up to my android system recovery menu so at this point you think we're good we're done but we're not we've got a couple other things that we need to do first and foremost we had another version of an operating system running on this before or another rom in this case that rom had a bunch of custom settings that aren't going to work with this rom so the first thing we need to do is go down here to wipe and we need to wipe data / factory reset so i'm going to go ahead and do that right now again press the trackball to confirm any other key to a board that's going to format the data and format the cash i'm going to take a step further and wipe the dalvik cache and once that's done we should be good to go use the volume down button to take you back to the main menu and then i'm going to power off and here's a little trick that I learned phones off at this point we could reboot and it should boot just fine into that desire rom but because I've used apps to SD on that cyanogenmod and some other stuff I've got some a swap partition and whatnot I'm gonna go ahead and take out the SD card now if you've got an extra SD card by all means put that in there it'll make your life a lot easier if you want to swap between a whole bunch of different roms great just use a different SD card not necessary but it'll probably save you a bunch of headaches so we're going to go ahead and continue I'm going to turn this on and when i do that comes back up to our stock bootloader icon there now booting up a custom rom for the very first time usually is a relatively lengthy process when you do a cyanogenmod on a t-mobile g1 for example that initial boot can take sometimes 8 to 15 minutes this boot hopefully isn't going to take that long but I don't want to have you sit here and stare at this nice little nexus one logo so we'll be right back as soon as it's booted up okay you'll know you've done everything right when you get this HTC logo on the middle of the screen and I don't know if you can see it on the video but there's this nice little animated reflection going across the letters here to let you know that it's still booting it hasn't locked up if it doesn't have that animation for five or six minutes you probably want to reboot something's gone wrong I might just need to restart and go on with it but in this case it's still going good we should probably have another 34 minutes left before it boots up into the OS I'll show you that as soon as we get there okay and here you'll notice we have booted up into the HTC Sense UI go ahead and grab the walk bar and drag it down and the first thing that we have is this really intuitive very very comprehensive setup wizard it's asking what country and language I prefer I'm English us so i'll hit next you'll notice on the bottom we have a little status bar indicator that's really nice you know how far into the process you are because it does get pretty detailed even going as far as having you run through a tutorial on how to use the new HTC keyboard which we're all used to if if you've been running cyanogenmod roms and whatnot in the past well skip that for now asks me how I want to connect mobile network or Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi only I want to be able to do both so I'm going to hit next it asks me if I want to connect to the Wi-Fi network right now I'm going to uncheck that just for the sake of time and hit next how much location information do I want to send to google and there's my check mark that lets me share some of that information with them next at this point I can set up my google account microsoft exchange or another mail account you can always go in and do this later again in the interest of time we're just going to skip that this is really where it gets fun with the HTC Sense UI that comes included with the HTC Desire and included in this rom by extension we've got the ability to link our Facebook Flickr and Twitter accounts to various parts of the OS specifically in the sense UI in the widgets and in some of the apps that that come included with the ROM really need I'm not going to bore you with setting those up but it's simple as supplying your credentials for each one and logging in skip that for now something I haven't seen on any other roms is the ability to backup your data and settings to your SD card that's fabulous you can see up here I don't have an SD card in the phone so I'm going to uncheck that just because this is a demo if this were your production phone I'd leave that checked and take advantage of that because backing up is a very good thing to do we'll say okay and then we're left at this tutorial screen where you can learn more about various different components on the phone we'll go ahead and finish up and presented with the loading indicator which takes all those configurations that we just built in that setup wizard and it configures our home screen for the first run really kind of nice something else that's neat is this little indicator this little help pop-up if you will that tells you a neat feature about this particular version of the sense UI now most android phones you know you can scroll side to side and you have anywhere from three to five home screens this one has seven you can see this little bar indicator shows you which of those screens you're on which is really nice you can tell at a glance which screen you're on and know which way you need to go to get to a screen but like that little pop-up window told you there's something interesting with this with this rom with this sense UI you can pinch to zoom and it shows you in a very animated very easy very clean way all the screens that you have open along with miniaturized versions of what's on each one of those screens you can easily jump to one of them just like that jump back and forth really fast if you don't like the pinch to zoom if your phone doesn't let you do that for whatever reason you can also hit the home button down here on the bottom and it will take you to that same view back and forth so really neat a couple other things to note about this version of the ROM the app drawer down here isn't the traditional just drawer icon when you tap it and it opens your app drawer up you've got this little drawer icon off to the side first thing you'll notice is this is just a stock drawer it doesn't do anything fancy which is just fine on the nexus one we've become accustomed to what some people called the Star Wars drawer which has a few rows of icons in the top and as you scroll some of them fade off the top and come in from the bottom really cool really animated just one of those bells and whistles that really polishes the OS but it takes a little bit more processing power this doesn't have that but it does have something else interesting if you tap the menu icon from here you can display all of those programs in a list if you like lists better than grids you can go back in here and change it back to grid because that's how I prefer it and there you go the center button has been changed from the app drawer button that I just showed you over to phone very simply phone is a phone this device is first and foremost a phone so it kind of makes sense that you'd have that as your main button kind of hard to get used to for me but if you're coming into the sense UI rather than coming in from a stock Android perspective like I am not hard to get used to it all in fact it feels right still a little awkward i find myself tapping the phone button to open my app drawer but i'll get used to that over time last on this customized bottom part of the screen is this little plus item this lets you add stuff to your home screen widgets program shortcuts folders we've talked about those in some videos and some articles in the past one thing to note is these widgets you'll notice that under each one of the widget names is a sub name this one says android android HTC HTC android HTC the HTC widgets are widgets that are specific to HTC Sense UI so you get a whole bunch more widgets on believe they're about 40 in all somebody correct me on that but there are a whole bunch of widgets that come pre-installed pre-configured ready to go just for you to drop on all you've got to do is come in and tap which one you want to add to the screen and you're good to go on lots of different faces to the widgets really really nice what you can do with them if she likes the stock Android interface you're probably not going to like sense UI it's taken quite a bit of time for me to get used to it but it's something that I wouldn't mind having on a phone for me i'll stick with cyanogenmod rom just because it's so clean it so fast and i am so used to it and i just love the clean pure Android UI but if you like sense especially if you're a Windows Mobile defector and you've had some of the HTC screens and apps on your phone there are similar versions of sense UI on Windows Mobile you might come over to this and really enjoy what HTC is done with their sense UI for the Android so looking at how to install the HTC Sense UI via the HTC desire rom on to your google nexus one i'm joe levi for pocketnow.com