Hardware

[booboo]

Greetings,

I need to pick up an android phone pronto for a research project (I'm a phd student).

I'm based in Ireland and sadly the new breed of android based phones won't hit the shores here in time. (Droid, Acer, Dell)

I'll be buying a phone from a supplier (Sim free unlocked etc.) but was wondering is it easy to upgrade the version of android on teh phone to the latest and greatest version on the market? I believe this is called rooting, is it 'legal'? I'm assuming as I'd own the phone out right it is.

Also could anyone reccomend me some good phones / platforms. I saw the zii which was really impressive, however it has no phone functionality :( right now I think I'll have to get the most recent HTC available on expansys.

[extorian]

There is a lot of confusion about what rooting really is.

To be clear, "rooting" simply means getting Super User (called root, from the old Unix days) access to the phone. This is like Administrator access in Windows - it means you do what you like with it without restriction.

Flashing a custom firmware is different - this the term used to describe the process of installing a customised operating system on the phone, which some argue has certain benefits.

You need root access to install custom firmwares, because the system used to install firmwares checks that the firmware you're trying to install is official, correct for your phone/hardware/locale, not corrupted, etc. In order to bypass these checks to allow any firmware to be installed you need root access to your phone.

As what you're describing sounds like you just want an official firmware, but one of the latest ones, then rooting isn't an issue. You can download the latest firmware for your phone from various places (search around the forums for the correct links), or from HTC directly. It's just a case of copying the file to your SD card and pressing a few buttons at the correct times.

Having said this, any new phone is likely to come with Android 1.6 already installed, and this is the latest version for all Android phones other than the Motorola Droid, which comes with an early release of Android 2.0 (this will be released in early 2010 for the rest of us).