I had a busy day today, obviously!  Not wanting to wait until Verizon decided to push out the Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) update, I decided to take a deep breath and modify the phone myself.  Thanks to the excellent instructions at DroidLife, I was able to get my phone rooted, and install a custom ROM, in no time at all.  “Rooting” an Android phone is essentially giving you “superuser” access to your phone’s operating system, opening the door for a lot of custom features and tweaks unavailable on a standard Droid phone.

Having done the whole procedure today, I can safely say that it is worth doing an upgrade.  The original Droid shipped with the Android 2.0 OS; within an hour of turning on my Droid for the first time, Verizon pushed out an OS upgrade to 2.1, which I’ve had since then, and have had ample time to get used to.  Now, having spent the day with my kicked-up Droid running Froyo, I can say that it was well worth the effort.

My Droid now runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), using the Bugless Beast v0.4 ROM and one of the P3 kernels, overclocked to 1.2 GHz (double the speed of the original Droid).  And for good measure, I installed a “glass black” theme to change things up a bit.  Froyo is an evolutionary upgrade–there are a few new good features (more about this below), but the better news is that the OS has been tweaked and tuned, and is far less laggy than it used to be.  It’s nice to see that developers put some quality time into streamlining the OS, vs. throwing a pile of new features on.  Changing to the BBv0.4 ROM and P3 kernel were just icing on the cake, further enhancing the performance.

Fortunately, Froyo contains two improvements I felt disappointed about in the original Droid.  First of all, animated GIF images now display as animated.  Aside from forum posts with animated smilies, my most important use of GIF is on the Weather Underground site, to view the time-lapsed radar images.  Second, Droid did not have a Flash player plugin.  With Froyo, the new Flash player for Droid can be installed.

Another improvement is the home screen system.  First of all, you now have five home screen pages as opposed to three.  I was out of room on 2.1.  Second, there are now small icons at the bottom of the middle home screen for (from left to right) phone, application tray and browser.  On the far left and right on the bottom are small “dot” icons which indicate how many more home screens are located in that direction; press on those to flip through your home screens.  No more “swiping” needed.

The whole rooting and upgrading process was actually quite easy.  In a nutshell, you install USB drivers for the phone on your computer, then upload a new recovery utility to the phone (using a program you install on your computer).  After you do that, you download and rename a new file that contains the ROM update, load it into your SD card’s root, then use that recovery utility to load in the new ROM.  Reboot, and you’re running the new OS!  The same procedure is done for a new kernel or theme: upload your update file, then install it with the recovery utility.

In my next couple of articles here, I will outline the process of rooting and upgrading your phone, and run down some of the best apps I’ve found thus far for the Droid.