baldmosher
Newbie
There are lots of blog posts telling you how to do the official Gingerbread upgrade, and some have even tried rooting, but I figured I'd post this thread and see if anyone is interested in doing what I'm doing as I've had some trials and tribulations along the way.
DICE system?
DICE = Desire In Car Entertainment system
It seems I might be the first person on here daft enough to bother to use such an archaic piece of hardware as a satnav/ICE, but the audio output is pretty clean, and it's actually quite powerful hardware. I've been using it as a satnav ever since I got the phone so it made Sense (groan) to carry on using the HTC.
Gingerbread
So, as the sort of proud owner of a new Samsung Galaxy S2 upgrade (yes I got stiffed by T-Mobile, no I'm not bothered), yesterday I took the plunge and converted my now-redundant Desire running T-Mobile branded Froyo (2.2.2) into a sleek, slimmed down, more responsive, bloatware-free Desire running unbranded Gingerbread (2.3.3) by simply downloading the RUU upgrade package from the HTC website and installing it.
I say simply, it took about an hour on the phone to HTC support where we both took AGES tryinbg to find the file, meanwhile having (yet another) good long chat about rooting, ROMs, new technology and some off-the-record pointers about what I could and couldn't do with my phone now it's out of warranty.
Once we finally located the file (just search htcdev.com Developer section for "RUU Upgrade" and you'll probably find it) it took 10 minutes to download the 161MB update file, and about 10 minutes to install it.
I then spent about 2 hours in total playing around with different launchers, and I now have a fully-configured satnav and ICE (not ICS!) for my car, as well as a fully-synced spare phone for festivals, holidays, and suchlike.
On the surface, 2.3.3 looks basically no different to 2.2.2 but there are some notable changes under the hood, and it's a LOT faster, probably because I'm not using any of the typical bloatware. The stock browser is a massive improvement and boot speed is greatly improved.
I've got Zeam launcher running, which has all the best features that Go Launcher stole from it, but without all the bloatware.
I also have installed on the phone:
- Google Maps (with text-to-speech for sat navigation)
- Ulysse Speedometer Pro
- Winamp
- Digital Clock Disc Widget
- Beautiful Battery Disc (widget)
- Dolphin Browser HD
- WiFi Automatic
- Voice Search
None of the other stock apps (e.g. Flash) have been updated
And I still have 66MB free for apps, and plenty of scope to move a few of the above to SD if I ever needed to do that. I don't see much point in rooting it.
As regards my ICE setup:
I've got Airplane enabled all the time (since I don't use it for phone calls or 3G) and I'm using Wifi to connect it to the hotspot on my S2 for data access (and to load music over wifi whilst sat in the car outside my house).
I have an unofficial cradle from Amazon and I'm using a 1.5m Blackberry USB cable (they're solid as a rock) connected to a dual output 2.1A / 1.2A 12V socket. Of course this cable means the Desire still only draws 512mA from USB, which is a pain, but I will fix that.
It should sit idly in the glovebox for 4 days quite happily without being charged, so now I just need to mod myself a USB cable for AC charging, so that it doesn't drain the battery when I'm using Google Maps and Ulysse with the screen on full brightness.
I then need to mod my head unit (long story - click here if you want the details) and connect up a 3.5mm jack and I've got myself a 32GB touch-screen MP3 player at the same time.
All in all, pretty excited about this.
Gonna come back here and post updates as I was actually surprised nobody else had thought of doing this. I've seen a lot of people using Android tablets, but I don't have anywhere to mount one, and anyway, having a big 10" screen down and to the side is a bit distracting when you're supposed to be driving and looking ahead.
DICE system?
DICE = Desire In Car Entertainment system
It seems I might be the first person on here daft enough to bother to use such an archaic piece of hardware as a satnav/ICE, but the audio output is pretty clean, and it's actually quite powerful hardware. I've been using it as a satnav ever since I got the phone so it made Sense (groan) to carry on using the HTC.
Gingerbread
So, as the sort of proud owner of a new Samsung Galaxy S2 upgrade (yes I got stiffed by T-Mobile, no I'm not bothered), yesterday I took the plunge and converted my now-redundant Desire running T-Mobile branded Froyo (2.2.2) into a sleek, slimmed down, more responsive, bloatware-free Desire running unbranded Gingerbread (2.3.3) by simply downloading the RUU upgrade package from the HTC website and installing it.
I say simply, it took about an hour on the phone to HTC support where we both took AGES tryinbg to find the file, meanwhile having (yet another) good long chat about rooting, ROMs, new technology and some off-the-record pointers about what I could and couldn't do with my phone now it's out of warranty.
Once we finally located the file (just search htcdev.com Developer section for "RUU Upgrade" and you'll probably find it) it took 10 minutes to download the 161MB update file, and about 10 minutes to install it.
I then spent about 2 hours in total playing around with different launchers, and I now have a fully-configured satnav and ICE (not ICS!) for my car, as well as a fully-synced spare phone for festivals, holidays, and suchlike.
On the surface, 2.3.3 looks basically no different to 2.2.2 but there are some notable changes under the hood, and it's a LOT faster, probably because I'm not using any of the typical bloatware. The stock browser is a massive improvement and boot speed is greatly improved.
I've got Zeam launcher running, which has all the best features that Go Launcher stole from it, but without all the bloatware.
I also have installed on the phone:
- Google Maps (with text-to-speech for sat navigation)
- Ulysse Speedometer Pro
- Winamp
- Digital Clock Disc Widget
- Beautiful Battery Disc (widget)
- Dolphin Browser HD
- WiFi Automatic
- Voice Search
None of the other stock apps (e.g. Flash) have been updated
And I still have 66MB free for apps, and plenty of scope to move a few of the above to SD if I ever needed to do that. I don't see much point in rooting it.
As regards my ICE setup:
I've got Airplane enabled all the time (since I don't use it for phone calls or 3G) and I'm using Wifi to connect it to the hotspot on my S2 for data access (and to load music over wifi whilst sat in the car outside my house).
I have an unofficial cradle from Amazon and I'm using a 1.5m Blackberry USB cable (they're solid as a rock) connected to a dual output 2.1A / 1.2A 12V socket. Of course this cable means the Desire still only draws 512mA from USB, which is a pain, but I will fix that.
It should sit idly in the glovebox for 4 days quite happily without being charged, so now I just need to mod myself a USB cable for AC charging, so that it doesn't drain the battery when I'm using Google Maps and Ulysse with the screen on full brightness.
I then need to mod my head unit (long story - click here if you want the details) and connect up a 3.5mm jack and I've got myself a 32GB touch-screen MP3 player at the same time.
All in all, pretty excited about this.
Gonna come back here and post updates as I was actually surprised nobody else had thought of doing this. I've seen a lot of people using Android tablets, but I don't have anywhere to mount one, and anyway, having a big 10" screen down and to the side is a bit distracting when you're supposed to be driving and looking ahead.