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. '"

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.

once again

[fermion]

I ask why do we need to jail break an android phone? Wan't the point of Android that it was supposed to the alternative to the evil Apple phone that trapped people in a walled garden. Doesn't it seem that android is the worst of both world. No benefit of the security of the walled garden, but no benifit of automatic upgrades and protection from the telcos.