Custom ROM Gingerbread 2.3.7 on HTC Hero

Happy New Year to all and I hope this new year will bring joy and happiness, more fun than ever. 2012 was a great year I must say but being an optimist I believe 2013 brings better future and gazillions of superb gadgets for us! Everybody knows by now that Android has been the 'king' in mobile operating system, beats Nokia, the once-so-great mobile product, beats iPhone (in virtually everything!) and now with its new version of Jelly Bean 4.1, there's simply no reason why Android won't defend the throne for at least another few more years.

Android phones have been around for many years yet I haven't got the chance to use one until last year. Yes, I'm wayyyy behind when it comes to Android and even the first Android that I own is still version 2.1. My first Android phone is HTC Hero GSM. To be honest, I didn't plan to have an android phone left alone a htc phone. I was still using my old-good-local-made phone when one day it keeps on rebooting on its own. I was at the office at the time at my desk and while I was trying my best to stop it from rebooting with no apparent reason, my boss walked out from her office and walked past behind me. She saw what I was doing and asked what was wrong.

I told her what happened with the phone and we both had no clue why the phone acted that strange. After some time she told me that she had just bought a new phone for herself which is HTC One X. Her old smartphone, HTC Hero is still in good condition and she had not decided what to do with the phone.

She then decided to give the htc hpone to me.

And so that's my first android phone. When I first got the phone, I got so excited that I googled all about android specifically htc smartphones. After hours spent on researching , I finally decided that the hct hero is one great and stable phone. There's nothing I don't like about the phone except for one small fact; it's on android 2.1 Eclair.

The interface is super fine and it runs smoothly as I flick my fingers across the screen up and down left and right. I checked all the settings and tried my best to fiddle with it to further improve its already wonderful performance. I already knew that android OS has been drastically developed and updated from 2.1 to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) to 4.1 Jelly Bean, however, the development was not able to be reaped by HTC Hero users as HTC has no plan to provide an official upgrade for htc hero phones. I suspect OEMs are more interested in getting people to buy their newer phones and gadgets instead of tinkering their old phones so users could upgrade from eclair 2.1 to better version.

The HTC Hero GSM never receives official upgrade from android 2.1 to greater android version.

Amazingly, I found out that out there there is a group of android enthusiasts and fortunately most of them are good in developing the system. They managed to alter the open source operating system and came up with what we know now as custom ROMs. Custom roms are used to flash the htc hero phones - once done you will have your own home-baked OS android.

HTC Hero phones can be flashed so we can upgrade them to higher version. I spent a great deal of time reading from forum to forum and from one blog to another blog just to understand how to properly flash my htc hero gsm.

Then I found Cyanogenmod. What is cyanogenmod? It's a bunch of custom roms developed by the cyanogenmod group. These roms are then altered by others to create their own version of cyanogenmod.

I finally decided to try flashing my htc hero phone with altered version of cyanogenmod 7 which is elelinux-7.2-hero-v3.9. This custom rom allows the htc phone to be upgraded to android 2.3.7 Gingerbread. I find the rom quite clean but it seems like it munches quite a big portion of RAM. It lags at times and I had experienced multiple times of reboots when I tried to run waze app. I switched to another custom rom - this time I got it from xda-developer forum. The developer, 1ceb0x, thanks to him, created this based on another custom rom, Decked_X.

As awesome as his name, 1ceb0x calls this rom Shpongle v3.7.

Minutes after installing shpongle, I can't help but I must tell you guys that I really really love this rom! It is incredibly super fast and heavily decorated to give users ICS feel although it runs as gingerbread.

There's a lot to talk about when it comes to android phones and its reputation as an open source mobile operating system. I thought I read somewhere (or maybe someone told me that haha) that Google is planning to come out with their very own phone instead of using other OEM's phones as their flagship product.

I am new to android and a newbie in customizing my android phone - therefore I will do my best to tell you guys my journey in finding the best custom rom for my htc hero gsm android smart phone. So, if you are new too, don't hesitate to let me know or ask me. Sometimes we don't feel comfortable asking in forums or that it's hard to keep up with the forum thread. Don't worry, we can always help each other :-)

Until next time, take care guys!

Regards,
Mymode Network