Mobile Phone News

Seriously, don’t let Verizon’s tyrannical “we want to make sure the update goes smoothly” attitude get in the way of enjoying your Android 2.0.1 just the way you like it: fresh, piping hot, and served on the bleeding, jagged edge. Just because you haven’t been carefully groomed and hand-picked to receive the Droid’s latest (and first) firmware update over the air doesn’t mean that you’ve got to twiddle your thumbs; thankfully, the binary has leaked onto the ‘nets, which means you just need to copy it to your microSD card (Motorola graciously included a 16GB one with your phone, if you recall correctly) and follow a few simple instructions. Godspeed, Droid owner — never let The Man hold you down. Not at this time, not ever.

Every time an Android phone launches, a stopwatch quietly starts ticking, because we all know it’s just a matter of time before the thing gets rooted. This time around, it’s a big one: it appears that the mighty Droid has fallen to the hands of hackers looking to drop whatever they please onto the phone’s firmware — and anyone enjoying Cyanogen’s works over in the HTC world understands full well the benefits of being able to do this. We’ll hold off on cracking open the bubbly until we start to see some practical benefits to the root, but this is a stellar way to start if it’s legit and functional.

We don’t really recommend trying this yourself if you like “using” your Droid for performing “tasks,” but if you’re the 1337 type or you’re just looking for a quick, easy, and fun way to brick a perfectly good Eclair device, you might want to take a look at this ported ROM that’s just hit the streets. What we’re looking at in this place is an early, half-baked conversion of that leaked Hero ROM with Sense and Android 2.1, apparently with functional messaging and calling (whew) but without a working WiFi stack. If nothing else, this is a good start for the community; hopefully we’ll see something a little more solid soon that can actually be used day to day without an iron will and a brass pair.

HTC Hero’s Android 2.1 ROM hacked onto Droid with all sorts of busted originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.