Droid Hype

Viewsonic recently released the Gtablet to the masses at the $399 pricepoint. With a dual core Tegra cpu, 512MB of ram and 10″ of screen real estate, this tablet has a lot going for it. However, right out of the box it is probably by far the worse OS and/or UI I have ever used. If this tablet was given to me as a gift with no option to change the stock OS, I would try and re-gift it. It is just that bad and then some.

So what’s so great about this tablet then? Custom roms. There’s nothing locking this system down, so there are already a few roms available that really improve the functionality of this tablet. Trust me, the difference is night and day and all kudos go to the folks on XDA Developers for really pushing this tablet forward.

Let’s get started shall we?

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Update (Nov-12-2010): A new 1-click root apk that can do all the below has been released that works on the Droid X!

If you recently updated to the OTA 2.2 Froyo update, you likely won’t be able to use the one click root apk that was floating around. There’s a method to root via ADB and a semi-one-click Windows batch file, but it seems quite a few people are having driver or ADB access problems.

I came across this root method that works on the Droid 2 and works on the Droid X.

First grab this zip file and empty the contents into the root of your /sdcard.

Login Required

Then go to the market and download the Android Terminal.

- open up your favorite terminal emulator program
- cd /tmp
- cp /sdcard/rage*.bin /tmp/
- chmod 777 rage*.bin
- ./rage*.bin
- ignore it’s output, we are thinking outside of the box here, just wait for it to finish and return a $
- now go to settings -> applications -> manage applications -> running -> terminal and force close that girlie
- relaunch the terminal app and you should be greeted with the friendly # symbol. Toda you now have a root shell
- the rest is pretty much the same.
- mount -o rw,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system
- cp /sdcard/Superuser.apk /system/app/Superuser.apk
- cp /sdcard/su /system/bin/su
- cp /sdcard/busybox /system/bin/busybox
- chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
- chmod 4755 /system/bin/busybox
- mount -o ro,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system
- exit

Now try any app that requires root (ex: Titanium Backup) and it should prompt for root access.

If you need to revert back to non-root, it’s as simple as deleting the apks you copied over.

- open your trusty terminal app
- you should see a $ symbol, now do the following
- su
- now you should see a # symbol
- mount -o rw,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system
- rm /system/app/Superuser.apk
- rm /system/bin/su
- rm /system/bin/busybox
- mount -o ro,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system
- reboot your phone.

via [DroidForums]