How To Jailbreak and Upgrade Old Android Phones

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp provides an in-depth tutorial on how he rooted and upgraded his Motorola Cliq XT, one of many Android phones made infamous for not receiving further Android updates beyond 1.5. 'It turned out to be quite an odyssey, with twists and turns I describe here in order to help those who wish to embark on a similar journey,' Yegulalp writes. 'Was it worth the trouble? Yes, in the sense that learning how to jailbreak your own phone is a valuable skill, and I got much more functionality out of the Cliq, when I was expecting to simply junk it. '"

Comments

Re:Was It Worth It?

[DJRumpy]

Although the practice of rooting this phone probably wasn't worth the effort for one phone, the fact that it was documented will help others with the same model, so I can see a definite benefit to this. The beauty of information sharing...

Re:Was It Worth It?

[crazycheetah]

Except this guy didn't document it at all in a way that's really going to help someone out, unless they do the same stupid mistakes that he did, like first try to root it while having an antivirus program running. Anyone with this phone will probably do a lot better off of looking at different results on a google search. He basically just says "I rooted it by following directions I found online, installed a custom ROM with Motoblur, then switched to Cyanogenmod." Except he takes three pages to say all of that, without ever really describing much of any of the actual steps required to do so (he went a little bit more in depth on the recovery or "bootloader" as he calls it, but that's about it).

It is worth it.

[w0mprat]

I rooted my HTC Magic, a long time ago and have been running aftermarket ROMs on it.

It's kind of cool that I have current generation Android running on 2008 spec hardware which was abandoned by carriers at version 1.6 and the community has lost interest in updating Android for such decrepid hardware (CyanogenMod has stopped supporting this past 6.1). It's a testament to how awesome the OSS & modding community is.

Was it worth it? The phone works fine for calls and texts, has 90% of it's battery life, and is still working flawless after some horrific abuse that would have seen a iPhone 4 shatter into dust. (They don't make Droids like they used to). But increasingly many new Apps just don't work on such a old phone, let alone run acceptably. Many crash due to lack of RAM unless I enable a swap partition on a SD card (yes it's linux after all, can do that easily).

Ultimately I learned a lot about how the OS works, and learned quite a lot about how an OS should be done. Innovative multitasking and memory management and security too. Puts desktop OSes to shame. Somehow, it's Linux, yet you can make a lot of changes to your OS above and beyond installing apps without ever having to punch in a password to elevate to root. After decades of desktop OS practice, this is refreshing security practice.

It is always worth it for the learning and the insight.

Yes it was worth it.

[ArhcAngel]

I had to do the same with my wife's Cliq. I was told when I bought the phone it would get 2.1 in less than 2 months. I told them I wouldn't get it if it wasn't going to get the update. 10 months later and Motorola is telling me 2.1 will not work because it only has 256 Mb RAM. Well XDA and Simply-Android to the rescue. I was rocking Gingerbread in no time and with a little tweaking the phone is stable and fast. Somebody handed me a stock G1 yesterday and I'm thinking it's just not fast enough or enough RAM. 2 hours later I have it rocking a custom Gingerbread ROM and it is quite snappy. My son replaced his dumbphone and is enjoying Android goodness via WiFi.

Re:Was It Worth It?

[John Hasler]

The time spent doing this could have been spent on a billable (or freelance) project that would have paid for a new phone (and then some).

The time you spent writing your comment could have been spent on a billable project. Don't you ever do anything just for the hell of it?

I did more or less the same thing..

[toonces33]

I too have a Cliq, and I got tired of the overall sluggishness and instability of the thing. Yeah, I could have gone out and gotten a new phone, but I still have 8 months to go on the contract, and I would have to buy my way out. The installation of Cyanogenmod was kind of an experiment to see if I could make the thing more tolerable. Worst case, I brick the thing and go out and get something else.

The only thing time consuming for me was to back things up ahead of time. Using different forms of backups that most people have never even thought of. Including

a) First use Sprite Backup (a paid app) to backup things like text messages and so forth.
b) Back up all of my contacts out of MotoBlur, and then import them into Google. I would never buy another Moto phone again, so I would have needed to do this anyways..
c) Use "Astro" to back up all apps installed on the phone.
d) Root the phone. Cyanogenmod instructions for my phone were pretty clear, and this was easy.
e) Then back up the recovery partition. Basically use the "dd" command to back up the partition to the SD card.
f) Install custom recovery code "ClockworkMod".
g) Use the custom recovery to again back up the phone - this backs up the MotoBlur version of software currently running.
h) Download and install the new ROM. There were a couple of other important steps I needed to do as well - flushing caches to make sure things are stable. The Cyanogenmod instructions were pretty clear as to what needed to be done in which order.

After that, I was done. And it was like a new phone. Quite responsive, and it seems quite stable.

Jailbreak != Root

[mjwx]

I ask why do we need to jail break an android phone?

You dont, you can do everything you can do on a jailbroken Iphone on an un-rooted Android phone.

You only root when you want to properly tinker with the OS itself, not the programs running on it.

Make sure you understand the distinction between jailbreaking and rooting:

Jail Breaking: Getting around the manufacturers restrictions on what you're allowed to install on your phone. Hence you're "breaking" your phone out of its "jail".
Rooting: Gaining root level access to the OS itself allowing you access to change (or break) every part of the OS.

Jailbreaking does not grant the level of access Rooting does.

Most people root as a precursor to installing a custom ROM, last time I checked there were not custom IOS ROMs out there.