Android 2.2 (Froyo) for the HTC Desire with Sense

I’ve finally got round to rooting my HTC Desire and installing a custom rom on it. The one I went for is the newly released DJ Droid, which is based off Android 2.2 (known as Froyo) but also has HTC’s custom Sense UI improvements on top of it.

From what I can see it’s a build that comes from inside HTC itself and has just been modified to get rid of watermarks and the like. This means it’s not a final built and apparently has a few stability issues. I’ve yet to find any though, and it’s been absolutely flying for a few hours now with no force closes.

There are a few new bits in the user interface:

• The messaging app has a new look as well as a bit of a refresh for the HTC keyboard

• The Gmail app now looks horrible. There’s a thin white border around the black of the title bar and just looks bad. I’m going to guess that this is just a bug though and won’t be like this in the final release

• There is now a flashlight app which turns on the camera flash on the back of the phone. It has 3 different getting and can also be set to flash at a regular interval and also display an SOS pattern

• You can now turn the phone into a WiFi hotspot and use it to get your laptop in the internet. I can see this being useful when you don’t have the USB cable to do internet sharing (or when multiple people need to use it) but it will kill the battery very quickly (not tested this, it’s just an assumption)

• In the settings there’s now options to do with a car dock. I don’t remember seeing these before. The car dock home application is also included (at least in this ROM it is)

• There are also a few new setting widgets for you to place on the home screens. They can control the sound profile, the ringtone and new features like the wifi hotspots. One that I wish was there would be enabling and disabling auto rotate

One of the other features I’ve been using is the new Cloud to Device API (C2DM) which was demoed at Google I/O this year. Personally I think this is a great technology. It’s what was lying under the Gmail push for a while, the only difference now is that it has been opened up for any developer to use it. It required Android 2.2 and was the main reason I’ve decided to use this ROM. I’ll likely post something once I’ve had a bit more of a play with it.

If anyone wants to have a go with this ROM (it really is worth it) the  first you need to root your device. I used this video guide to make the gold card and do the rooting. You then need to get fakeflash installed and then you need to follow the instructions to install the DJ Droid ROM.

That may seem like a lot of steps but over all it took about an hour and was well worth it. It gave me a ton of new features and has improved the speed of the phone, even though it’s alpha grade software.