Rooted & ROM'd EPIC4G... now what?
 

My EPIC turned into a complete POS after Sprint pushed the FROYO update... it wasn't that great a phone to begin with, but after the push, it was practically a paperweight. At the suggestion of somebody here in another thread, I rooted and installed a new ROM in my Samsung EPIC 4G.

Almost everything I learned was from this page:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki...axy_S/SPH-D700

First, I loaded all my contacts onto my SDcard.

Then I (re)loaded the full (not patch) version of FROYO using ODIN (which really wasn't necessary but I didn't know until after I did it):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki...Stock_Flashing

Then I used oneclickroot to root the phone:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=897612

Then I flashed Syndicate Rom Frozen 1.1.0:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=976194

This YOUTUBE explains all in painfully detailed... um... detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy2Et6qVGdo

It's been running about 8 hours now and I haven't really done much except send a few texts and a couple calls.

I set up the hotspot function and played around with a few personal settings, changed a few display options, etc...

The question is... now what? I know it will be faster and the battery will last longer, and I can use it as a free hotspot... but what else? Am I done? I thought it was supposed to suck my dick or something for me?

Run some benchmarks to get the high scores that will justify the time and effort you put into all that.

LOL, glad I could be of assistance to ya on Odin'ing the phone - looks like you took it a full step further and custom rommed it. Very interested to hear what your thoughts are on the syndicate rom. How is the wi-fi hotspot functionality? Let us know how your battery life is, and any problems you run into.

Thanks!

I'll be sure and provide updates. I just drove down to disneyland and am currently sitting in the parking structure waiting for a buddy.

The map widget was fucking lightning fast the whole way down, at least 4-5x faster tha ever before... that alone was worth the hour it took to convert the phone.

Battery seems to be holding better, but only a few more days will tell.

Forgot I had my Samsung Netbook in the trunk... am currently WIFI tethered rocking 4G sitting in the parking garage at Disneyland. Speetest showing:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1295074642.png

I'm tempted to root my wife's droid2 to fix her constant crashing and 3 hour battery life. she has to pull the battery to reboot it almost daily.

i dont know what the fuck is up with that. my htc incredible has been so incredibly rock solid since day one on whatever dessert version.

maybe that's why i got the netflix app and she didnt.

incidentally, you might want to find the netflix apk and install that so you can watch your stories whenever you want.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1076150

Tethering works great... this is from 3G out of Yorba Linda:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1295805768.png

Living in an urban environment helps with the speeds.
Here's my speedtest on my T-Mobile G2

http://www.speedtest.net/android/53301796.png

I think you answered your own question there. Motorola loads so much shit onto their phones its no wonder they suck.

After a few days I can report that battery life has about tripled, and everything is lightning fast. I've loaded a few apps and am still tweaking some settings and what not. I didn't do this because I'm a geek or anything, and don't plan on making phone-hacking a hobby, I just did it because it had turned into a piece of shit on the stock program and I wanted to stick it to the man (Sprint) a little bit. Hopefully in a week or so I'll confirm everything is still working great and I'll never delve into the menus again... I'll just use it.

Last night I also ordered off Amazon a huge-ass 3300mah battery and spare stock size battery, along with a couple chargers and 10x screen protectors... total $30 for everything.

Now if it would just suck my dick.

Hopefully it was a mugen or a seidio battery. I'm running a seidio 3300mah. My phone's nuts eats iPhones for appetizers at breakfast. I had a friend that bought a "cheap" 3300mah pack, it worked fantastic for about a month before batt life started dropping dramatically. One of my first purchases for the phone was 5 USB cables for the phone - at like $1.50 a piece on eBay. I'm so glad I did that.

The Seidio was $50... the one I bought was $15. Reviews are across the board on the one I bought. It won't be my full-time batt, so hopefully it will give me the full grunt for awhile. And I got 2 USB cables.

I'm switching from cognition (2.2) to Continuum (2.3) to allow the watching of Netflix.

Samnavy, now that you've gotten to play with it for a couple weeks, what are your impressions? Is it missing anything useful that the vanilla garbage has? Voice command over bluetooth? Battery life, speed and function still light years ahead? I want your experience to help me decide if I want to custom rom. Any cool things vanilla doesn't have?

It was awesome for about 3 weeks... then got a little buggy. The HOME button wouldn't work and I had to back out of every screen. The screen rotation function started to take a really long time... a few other little "glitches".

But then it stopped receiving calls. I could make calles, internet worked fast, text worked fine... but I just happened to notice that I hadn't heard it ring in a week or so and a couple people had said they left me messages I never received. I did some experimenting and found that inbound calls went straight to voicemail and the voicemail never popped. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Sprint with no luck.

So last night I re-flashed the ROM and it's all good again. I'm going to hold off on installing anything from the marketplace except Pandora for awhile and then load shit up one at a time over every few days to see if any single program/app is interfering.

I just want the damned thing to work.

damn, and I was getting excited about putting a custom ROM on. Did you reflash to the same custom ROM you had installed before?

UPDATE:
So, in 3 months, I had to reload the ROM twice... first time it got a little buggy as mentioned 2 posts above, and a few days ago, some of the Google things quit and a few other little glitches started happening.

So, last night I got back on XDA and there was a new version of the Syndicate ROM I was using... so cleared out the memories, downloaded the new ROM, and installed.

So far, so good. It takes me about 10 minutes to cycle through all the menus and make the phone "mine" again. After loading the ROM, the phone goes back to basically an "off-the-shelf" state, so you need to run through the menus and customize all your settings, but the features of this ROM make it totally worth it.

I figured I was about triple the factory battery life. I could certainly unplug it one morning, and not have to plug back in until bedtime following day still with a 30% charge... it certainly would have lasted through the following evening if I didn't have anything turned on, but I almost always have GPS and WIFI turned on all the time.

Anyways, if you like your phone, I'd probably not mess with it, but if your shit is buggy, slow, battery short, etc... you really can't go wrong. In any case, you can ROOT it, and then reload it with a completely factory ROM minus all the bloatware instead of minus-all-the-bloatware plus all the cool shit this one does.

My 2-day old Evo 3d soft-bricked and I had to pull the battery 5-times yesterday, lol.

Hrmm my iPhone lasts 3-4 days on a charge with constant use (gym app/ipod function/wifi+gps/etc) and have never had any issues with it....



just sayin
:inout:

^Yah, but I'm not a raging fagaholic so I'll never own one.