Just got HTC One 64GB Developer Edition - Questions!

[jamesgirgis]

Hey everyone,

Had every iPhone ever made... paid $499 on 2 year contract with AT&T when the first iphone came out because I knew it would revolutionize the market. I had an iPhone 5 but to be honest - worst iPhone ever made... battery life was TERRIBLE, always crashing, YUK!

So.. decided to test the waters with android, and decided HTC One over S4 because of build quality primarily (used to iPhone build quality).

But... I'm so confused. I have an unlocked boot loader and I hear about people loading different "loaders" and "rooting" the device? I'm not sure where to start with this... I have jailbroken every iPhone and pretty tech saavy I feel but I'm so confused with this android business. Anyone want to shed some light? Thanks!

 

[poncewattle]

I'm pretty much the same story as you and I'm still working on figuring it all out. So I'm going to post what I have learned, and hopefully some pros will teach both of us by pointing out where my understanding is wrong.

First, background. Know how many PCs these days have a dual-boot environment where you press some key after turning on so you can choose to boot a recovery procedure to restore your computer? It's the same thing with the phone. It can boot into the OS or boot into a recovery kernel that is meant to restore the phone OS back to factory specs.

So what I believe what happens is, the recovery image on the phone is replaced with an image that can replace the OS image with some other image. So instead of recovering the factory image, it lays down an alternate image. Also this can be used to modify the OS image to allow it to be rooted. But that can't happen if the boot loader that loads either the OS or the recovery image is locked (I think).

Here's some steps to doing all this.

[Tutorial] Root, Unlock, Recovery and flashing a Custom ROM - xda-developers

You can skip step 1 since the boot loader is already unlocked.

I haven't done it myself -- yet. I'm chicken and want to figure out how to restore both the stock OS image and stock recovery image first. And apparently since we don't have a way to do something called "S-off" we can't reverse the "tampered" message that appears in the boot screen.

Android gurus, would appreciate any corrections to my understanding of all of this. Thanks!

 

[aaronlam]

Me too!!! Hated the iPhone 5.

Couple things that helped me... Smooth Sync Calendar and Contacts syncs with iCloud. Works pretty well. I've spent the last couple days messing with everything. It's really breaking Apple habits for things that might be better. Give it a real chance... I almost threw in the towel a few times but getting pretty happy with almost the way everything is set up.

Check out: [TUTORIAL]Unlock your bootloader and install a custom recovery with a Mac - xda-developers

I am running Trickdroid with Nova Launcher and really like it. Sense isn't bad but this is very customizable.

 

[poncewattle]

Couple things that helped me... Smooth Sync Calendar and Contacts syncs with iCloud. Works pretty well.

Nice. I got excited, until I read in the description...

HTC One users please check out this site first: HTC Sense issue - dmfswiki
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Did the contact sync work on your HTC One?

 

[jamesgirgis]

So whats so special about Trick Droid and Nova Launcher? Like... what are the benefits?

 

[SeanBlader]

I would suggest leaving it unrooted for at *least* a month. Do some reading, and then a bit more reading, and make sure you read some stuff as well. Try following some of the theme steps over at Beautiful Android Themes, Wallpapers, and Homescreens some of them will require replacement launchers, which may actually be enough for you to enjoy for a while. You can really spend a lot of time just reconfiguring things without rooting.

Then when you feel like you can navigate your way around a command line, and you've gotten a connection between your phone and system via fastboot, then maybe you can try replacing a recovery partition.

Seriously though, don't rush into it. And if you're going to do it, make sure you bookmark xda-developers, here's the HTC One general forum: One General - xda-developers