I like to play with all of my toys and of course I rooted my HTC Thunderbolt phone long ago. I’ve done the whole gamut and have installed different ROMs including CyanogenMod, the unofficial ICS ROM from Team BAMF, and many flavors of Gingerbread. I’ve used apps that require root privileges, I’ve tethered and played with different radio code to get it all working well.
I’ve also created an unsupportable pile of poo that has been driving me nuts.
The damn phone loses data connectivity all the time. I have to baby it just to be able to read my Twitter feed. The battery life is embarrassing and I feel like my charger has become my lifeline. The phone crashes all the time and has spontaneously caught fire on more than one occasion.
That last part may have been an exaggeration but not by much. As sometimes it happens to people suffering in a crisis someone in my life intervened. Lily spoke those words that made me considered a new path filled with enlightenment:
“This happens to you with every phone you have. Maybe you are doing something wrong?”
She’s a smart woman. I’m lucky to have married her.
She is currently using an unmodified Samsung Galaxy SIII phone and except for the battery life not being as long as she’d like she hasn’t had any problems.
The real reason I hacked my phone (aside from the geek coolness factor) was to be able to run a tethering app. But now with the phone plan I have tethering comes with it at no additional charge. Instead of running a third party tethering app I can now just use the built in one from Verizon.
So last night I undid everything I did to my phone. I un-rooted it, I put it all back to the way it was from the factory and I’m now running the latest Verizon provided ROM on my phone. That includes the radio code as well and anyone looking at my phone would never be able to tell that I did anything to it.
I’ll still beat it to death and see if I can my phone to misbehave. I’ll also still get a new phone when I can as I’m up for getting new one, but maybe I’ll learn not to poke or break the next phone.