Ok, It’s Rooted. Now What?

According to engadget, a couple months ago the Library of Congress “added new anti-circumvention exceptions to the DMCA that, among other things, allow people to tweak their handsets for the purpose of installing legally obtained software“. Personally, I was never extremely excited to root my Android phone. I figured I’d do it when the warranty expired or when I needed to for some reason.

Last weekend, I noticed that the “Dialer Storage” app on my original Motorola Droid was taking over 50 MB of memory. After some research, I discovered that this could have been related to MMS messages erroring out and hidden files accumulating in one of the databases. The fix involved rooting the phone. I ended up not doing it because the doc I found at the time indicated that the procedure would wipe my phone. This deterred me at the time, and purging all of my SMS/MMS messages ended up cutting Dialer Storage down to .5 MB. Mission accomplished.

This whole experience left me with a desire to tinker, though. I had saved this link previously, and decided to give it a try.  If you have an original Motorola Droid and you’re thinking about rooting it, this is the way to go. I was a little nervous about flashing SPRecovery, but the whole process went smoothly. The process should work regardless of Android OS version, which is good because a lot of the “one-click” solutions are version-dependent. I have Froyo build FRG22D, and this worked just fine.

Now my only problem is that I fixed the original problem and I have no other need to have my phone rooted. I’ve thought about tethering apps, but the free ones don’t seem to work, and I already have a Verizon mobile broadband adapter from work. Custom ROMs are probably the next option, but I’m not ready to take that plunge just yet. Does anyone have any suggestions?