Latest Android Adventure: The Path to Root (Again)

I finally bought my self-indulgent birthday present today. I set up my new Samsung Galaxy S2 and immediately got upset because there was no stock SD card included. Normally there is a 4 or 8 gig card that I have to remove to put my 32 gig card in. There was no pre-existing card, which was a disappointment because I had plans for the stock card. Then I discovered that there is a built-in 12GB card, which adds extra storage to the 32 GB card that I put into the empty MicroSD slot. Awesome!

Then I installed Titanium so I could restore all my apps from the SD card back up rather than having to download and reconfigure them all. Of course I had forgotten that Titanium needs root. So 10 minutes after unboxing this thing I was downloading the latest Unrevoked rooting tool. Then I got hit with shock number 2. Unrevoked is only for HTC phones. Crap! I never noticed that.

So I immediately began the hunt for a more general root tool. I found the wonderful Super1click on xda-developers. It rooted my phone like a pro. It is so polished that I just *had* to donate 5 bucks to the developer.

After the quick root, Titanium made quick work of restoring all my apps in the same state as their last run time on the old phone. That is especially convenient since I don’t have to reconfigure them or re-authenticate. My games even retain the high scores.

I considered slapping the latest CyanogenMod on there but I mainly needed Cyanogenmod for my old HTC Desire because of its relatively low internal memory, which made it hard to find room for apps.  Also, I want to get used to the Samsung apps and interface tweaks. One of their tweaks that already irritates me is the Samsung voice recognition. It works quite well but has hijacked the home button double tap, which I use for Quickdesk Pro.

Quickdesk is a home button add on. It lets you get to a quick app screen when you double tap the home button. Unlike the normal home button, it lets you select one of your goto apps without losing your place since you can dismiss it and go back where you were without using the task manager.  For now, I’m using the single home button press to call up Quickdesk, which 9 times out of 10 will provide access to the app I need.  When that’s not the case, a second press will call up the normal home screen.  It actually works pretty well.

I must say, this phone is beautiful and really fast. It is loaded with the best hardware options I’ve seen. I’d post a picture but taking a pic of itself seems to be the 1 thing it can’t do.