It was time to put my wife’s old smartphone out to pasture. Her old Droid 2, itself a year old hand-me-down, had seen better days. In its day, it was the workhorse phone and the best in its breed, but now it seems to have lost a few steps in its old age.
So what do you do with a smartphone which can no long pull its own weight? It would seem unlikely to find it a new home, and it would seem wasteful just to throw it away. My oldest child, Cameron, expressed an interest, as there are a number of games he likes to play. Well, all he would need for that would be a WiFi connection. Okay then, why not?
Since there was already a ton of junk on it, the first thing I did was a factory reset to wipe it and get it to a clean state. After the phone rebooted, I was greeted with a setup screen. Since I was not planning on using the phone features, I skipped this step. Alas, even though the junk I had previously installed was gone, all the bloat from Motorola and Verizon was still there, and was causing it to be just as sluggish as ever. It looked like there was more work to be done.
Getting Dirty
I had always wanted to root my phone, but I never did for fear of turning the phone into a paperweight; but now there was no excuse. A Google search led me to a forum with some instructions which were nowhere near as straight-forward as I would like. Once I had a good idea of what needed to be done, I got to work.
For this project I would need Framaroot to root my device. Framaroot can use several exploits to root many Android devices. The exploit I needed to run for the Droid 2 was called Gimli, and it worked like a charm. A quick check revealed that, indeed, the superuser app was there – proof that the phone was rooted.
The second tool I needed was ClockworkMod’s Droid 3 Recovery Bootstrap, which I would need to purchase. Fortunately it was only $3. I needed this tool because the stock bootstrap has been diabolically locked by Motorola to prevent users from installing 3rd party ROMs like I was about to.
The next step was downloading the appropriate ROM; I settled on a custom CyanogenMod 7 ROM by Pooka. I downloaded the ROM to the memory card, performed a reboot recovery, and installed the ROM. After rebooting, I was once again greeted by a setup screen, and once again I skipped it.
At once I noticed a remarkable difference in performance. Swiping my finger across the screen, the phone seemed much more quick and responsive. This was a huge improvement. All traces of Moto Blur was gone, replaced by ADW Launcher. Good riddance to the pre-installed Verizon apps as well.
A few last tweaks; I needed a quick trip to goo.im to download and install Google apps package, which included the Play Store and Google Search. Since the phone radio is never going to be used I set the phone for airplane mode, and then enabled WiFi for internet connectivity. Now it was just a matter of figuring out what apps to install.
Up to Something New
Obviously, games were something that would be of interest to Cam, but I wondered if this device could serve a greater purpose. Since it had the guts of a phone, my first instinct was to install Skype on it. That would give him free voice calls, but only Skype to Skype, and that would limit who he could talk to. Then I discovered an app called Talkatone, which is like a phone dialing program for Google Voice. It’s free and Google Voice is free as well. Plus, Google Voice gives you a real phone number, also for free. So now Cam has a phone number, voice mail, and he can send and receive SMS text messages as well, all for free. The only requirement is a WiFi connection, which we already have at home.
This got me thinking; if I didn’t need to have my phone always available, I could totally ditch Verizon and just deal with the pain of finding a WiFi hot-spot whenever I needed to make a call. Obviously, living in So-Cal would give me a huge tactical advantage due to the multitude of places that offer free WiFi, plus having high speed broadband at home and at work; my mileage would vary if I lived in a more rural area. Even so, I bet there are plenty of people who are totally cut off who could benefit from something like this. Someday I may revisit this idea.
In the end, I suppose that I didn’t need to flash a new ROM for the free phone calls to work, but there are other advantages to doing so. For instance, CyanogenMod allows total control of almost every feature imaginable. Plus, it saves precious battery life, without the bloatware that comes stock on the phone. In fact, since the phone is pretty much in airplane mode with the exception of WiFi, the phone can last days on a single charge. The stock phone, on the other hand, wouldn’t last a day without being plugged in. It looks you can teach an old smartphone new tricks.