A Guide To Freeing Your Phone

I was just thinking back on my first post, when I said I would review games...

What a filthy liar!

Yeah, I realize I've reviewed exactly one game, but come on... there's a lot of awesome shit out there! If you're like me, you probably are awesome and realized this already. I doubt it.

Anyway, I come bearing gifts. After all, this is the season. So what if I'm a day late?! I DO WHAT I WANT.

What I have here today is the equivalent of Jesus, except for smartphones. I'm sure Atheists will appreciate this article too though. I've never had a high-grade Android phone, or an iPhone. Now I see fucking little ten year old kids with iPhones, playing Angry Birds and texting their ten year old girlfriends. You know what was around when I was ten?

The 90s. That's what.

That large device up there was a cell phone, and almost no one had one because they were fucking outrageously expensive. How ironic that everyone has a cell phone today and it's still fucking expensive...

That is, unless you get into one of these "pay as you go" plans, or "I'm fucking poor so here's 20 bucks what does that get me?" plans. I have the latter, through Virgin Mobile, and it's not horrible.

However, most of the phones I've encountered are quite shit. I've owned two LG Optimus V phones, both having shitty internal memory and a processor that can barely handle Facebook. When I discovered rooting, and custom ROMs, I suddenly realized the restrictions these phone companies put on us were quite transparent after some research.

I can understand why they make budget phones. It's easy to throw low grade parts together with a shitty ROM and make it work, and it attracts a lot of people because hey, smartphone for cheap. Except they come loaded with apps that do nothing at all interesting and run as fast as your refrigerator that, by the way, you should go catch right about now.

It went that way!!!

My LG Optimus V ran at 600 MHz, which compared to the phones out at that time, is absolute shit. A 1GHz processor is pretty much standard in any phone that costs some considerable cash. So I rooted the damn thing and overclocked it.

That's right. My low-grade phone is running from 600 MHz to almost a full 1GHz, essentially making it a mid-to-high grade phone, and all I did was download a free app to do it. And my measly 200MB internal storage? Fuck that shit man! I use an app called Link2SD, which unlike many of the App2SD apps out there, creates a link of any app and it's libraries and files, and keeps them on the SD card. What happens is I can have hundreds of apps, and use about 10% of my internal storage.

Damn straight.

Of course it's not all awesome. It still has to read them from the SD card, which can be quite slow depending on your card, but no fear! Most custom ROMs come with so many features and SD reading tweaks it's hardly noticeable.

Which brings me to my next point. If you haven't rooted your phone, you really should consider it. A lot of custom ROMs add a bunch of awesome features and tweaks that can be customizable to your liking, and often fix bugs in the phone itself. My Optimus Slider came with a horrible stock ROM that would shut off the 3G connectivity and never turn it back on unless you put the phone in airplane mode, or restarted it. The airplane mode was bugged out, so it never worked until custom ROMs came along for it and fixed it.

That's when I realized how shitty my phone that I just bought was. Features like that should come working RIGHT OUT OF THE DAMN BOX. Thank God for custom ROMs and the devs that take the time to make them.

So let's recap for a split second. I have a low-grade phone that I pay $25 a month for unlimited talk, text and data, and has almost a 1GHz processor thanks to overclocking, more internal storage I could ask for, features that work and annoying features are gone, and it runs for 2 days straight on a full charge. That's called getting bang for your buck, something a lot of us poor people do!

I often see this in my travels on the internet.

The only downside really to all of this, is it voids your warranty. Fuck it. I'll trade a stupid warranty for getting the best out of my stuff anyday. I love my phone. It does whatever I want and I didn't pay a damn dime for any of it. When I had Verizon Wireless, even if I had insurance for my phone, it was still $35 to have it fixed! That's more than one of my payments for Virgin Mobile!!!!

These are just some of the things I use, but there are a bunch of other tweaks and apps that do wonderful things, and I encourage you to free yourself and try it out.

Choose wisely.

The rabbit hole sure goes down pretty damn deep...