Anyone fancy telling me what this root thing is? What it does? And could I o it to my HTC Desire without completely fucking up my phone?
Rooting your phone means giving your self root privileges; this is from the UNIX world where there is a user called root who has permissions to do anything to the system. Without rooting, you are a user of the system and not permitted to do some things which could potentially completely stuff up your device. Once rooted, there is an app called SuperUser installed; your phone is still running as a normal user, but if an app requires root permissions, the SuperUser app asks you if you want to permit it.
If you want to root your phone and install a custom ROM, the first thing you want to do is to back it all up just in case of problems as depending on the custom ROM, you may need to wipe your system. I used MyBackup for this.Note that as with jailbreaking an iPhone or hacking a PS3, it should work, but there are no guarantees.There are many guides available to root and flash custom ROMs. One which seems reasonable is
http://theunlockr.com/2010/09/20/how-to-root-the-htc-desire-unrevoked-method/Basically, download the Unrevoked package and run it on your PC. This flashes the ClockworkMod to your phone.
Once your phone is rooted, you can install a custom ROM by placing the zip file for the ROM at the top level of your SD card, and powering on your phone to the bootloader. One thing to note is that I could not get Unrevoked to complete under Windows 7 64 bit. I had to burn an Ubuntu disk image to CD and boot up into that before running the Linux version of Unrevoked.
I have an HTC Desire and I had two major issues with it.
1) Poor battery life, with the phone lasting around 20 hours before a recharge.
2) Continually running out of application memory.
These have been improved after rooting. Once rooted, there are several excellent pieces of software that you can run, one of which is setCPU. This allows you to set up profiles which adjust the CPU speed on certain events. For example, you can turn the CPU speed right down when the display is off, which will extend battery life.
A2SD+ (hopefully installed as part of a custom ROM) which fools the system into installing applications onto the sdcard. There is no issue with widgets not working, and you do not have to rely on the developers enabling the app2sd feature.
I have tried the CyanogenMod and LeeDROID ROMs, and I am currently running LeeDROID.
CyanogenMod, based on Gingerbread, but no HTC Sense - runs pretty well, but I missed my HTC Sense widgets such as the clock and the contacts. One big thing I did not like was that zoom does not work (actually designed this way) on mobile versions of websites in the browser. Normal versions of websites are fine, but I just find the text on some mobile sites too small for me to read.
LeeDROID, based on Froyo, and includes HTC Sense. Slow bootup time, but once running seems pretty good. Pinch to zoom works on all sites, and I have loads of free space for apps.
I have since found the GoLauncher with the GoWeather and GoContacts widgets which I am running under LeeDROID in preference to the Sense launcher and widgets. Note that these work regardless of whether you are rooted or not. Some excellent themes and transition effects in the Go Launcher
Operationally, the Go Launcher allows you to do the following
1) have up to 9 screens
2) change the order of the screens
3) allow the screens to cycle so if you keep scrolling left, yo ueventually get back to the screen you were on.
4) Up to 15 applications on a scrolling icon dock at the bottom
5) App drawer which allows horizontal page by page scrolling and allows you to reorder and create folders.
6) Allows your desktop screens to rotate depending on the phone orientation
