Rooted

With the last weeks of my 2 year phone contract coming to and end and my phone long out of warranty I started looking at removing the bloatware from my phone.  The HTC Wildfire S I had was a good budget phone when it was released and I was really impressed when I first got it.  I had plenty of room for new apps, it was fast and the apps on the original image were really useful.  However, as time went by a number of the apps either stopped their services, had large updates or just simply stopped working.  There were also a couple I never used but I couldn't stop from running (stocks app) which would use unnecessary data usage.  After about a year the phone started running out of internal memory, even with most apps partially stored on the SD card.  I was forever installing/uninstalling and wiping user data keep enough space.  The other problem was that some apps required about 25MB on the internal storage to be free even to run efficiently. 

My first stop was to look at removing the apps but soon realised that to do so would mean a new image.  Being the first time I had attempted re imaging a phone I went to look at the big players first and to gauge the most popular custom Roms.  The two main players were AOKP and Cyanogen mod.  Both these groups have unofficial ports for the Wildfire S but I chose to go with the Cyanogen mod purely on popularity (Baa Baa). 

After finding a tutorial on XDA developers net I started to attempt to unlock the bootloader which is needed to install the Clockwork mod recovery image.  Unlocking was fairly simple and after getting a token from the website I flashed to the boot image and hey presto the bootloader was unlocked.  Once the bootloader was unlocked I installed the clockwork mod recovery tool and did a backup of the stock image (very important before proceeding with any custom Roms).  I also did a backup of the SD card and then formatted it for reasons I will explain shortly.

Once the Recovery program is installed its a fairly simple operation to then install items from the SD card.  First of all I installed the superuser application to gain root access to the phone.  This was a simple case of copying the superuser zip onto the root of the SD card  (which has to be formatted) and using the recovery application to install it.  After a quick factory reset of the phone I rebooted and we are all done, bootloader unlocked and phone rooted.

Next step is to install the custom ROM and off we go.  First I copied the Cyanogen Mod 9.1 and the google apps installer onto the SD card.  Then boot into recovery (power + volume down) and install both zips from the SD card. After they are both installed I reboot the phone and waited for the mod to configure itself.  Now, the first boot can take time so it was pretty scary waiting to see if it had installed correctly or whether the phone had just hung and my phone was bricked.  Eventually the mod booted up and a wizard takes you through the setup.  The phone runs really smooth with ICS and there is no lag on any of the screens.  The only obvious problem is that the video function on the camera does not work but to be honest I only ever use it in camera mode so wasn't a big deal. 

So far so good.  However, after a couple of app installs the phones lack of internal memory soon starts to hinder things and performance starts to suffer.  After reading some posts on the forums of similarly disgruntled Wildfire S owners I came across INT2EXT scripts.  Now these are little scripts you can install to extend the internal memory onto the SD card and the best thing is that it is seamless.  I went for INT2EXT4+ which requires an ext4 partition on the SD card which I put on using mini tool.  After the partition is made I place the INT2EXT4+ zip onto the root of the SD card and install the script.  A quick factory reset and wipe of the cache and I reboot the phone.  I have only given the partition 500MB because the script can only address 500MB for every 100MB of internal storage but it seems enough.  Once rebooted the phone reports 500MB of internal storage with 1.5GB on the card.  I reinstall my apps and everything runs just as smooth.  Very impressive.  The SD card is class 4 so a faster card is recommended if you need to run some disk access heavy apps but most of the apps I have been running all run fairly quickly.

Overall, it was a worth while activity as it has resurrected a phone that in all honesty I thought was worthless.  The custom ROM is stable and the extra storage is an absolute luxury.  Its probably not a task to take lightly and some degree of skill is needed (in order to keep the flapping to a minimum) but otherwise the benefits outweigh the risk of bricking your phone, well certainly phones you were looking to replace anyway.  I would recommend having an external micro SD to USB reader or some other way of reading the micro SD card without using the phone as this makes things a lot easier.  The other key is to backup everything and don't even attempt it if the phone is under warranty.  I would also look around and read everything you can before you start.  Choosing an actively developed ROM is also a must as problems can be answered on the forums a lot quicker.