To Debrand Or Not To Debrand

To Debrand Or Not To Debrand

That’s the ques­tion. I’ve had a cou­ple of peo­ple email me in the past few days ask­ing whether or not they should debrand and/or hack their phones. So I fig­ured I should just write a post about it to answer that ques­tion once and for all. In my opin­ion, yes.

First off, the rea­son why phones are branded is for pre­dictabil­ity. The car­ri­ers want you to have the firmware that they have, know and under­stand so that when there’s a prob­lem, they know exactly what’s wrong or they can try and repli­cate the prob­lem. It’s all about mak­ing their jobs eas­ier and mak­ing your life less com­pli­cated. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a flaw in this sys­tem. When the device man­u­fac­tur­ers release updates for these devices, the car­rier has to “cook” a ROM with their bloat-ware  and log heaps of info about the firmware. Every­thing from the intro-animation, the fonts, links in the browser, short­cuts to ser­vices etc. have to be doc­u­mented. It’s a painstak­ing task — so what do the car­ri­ers do? They sim­ply don’t update the firmware! They often stick with what­ever they had at the start and never release any updates despite the man­u­fac­turer hav­ing them. Those peo­ple with devices that are branded can only get updates from the car­rier, they are locked down.

Free your device, you bought it, it’s yours

So debrand­ing your device frees you from the car­rier so you can get updates directly from the manufacturer.

So, what’s the price you pay? Debrand­ing your device voids your war­ranty — and that makes sense. Once you start putting soft­ware that the car­rier didn’t put on your device, what­ever hap­pens is not their prob­lem any­more and they may not have a solu­tion to the prob­lems you present them. In all hon­esty, there are hardly ever any prob­lems that come up any­way. If worst comes to worst, you can always reflash your phone back to the car­ri­ers’ firmware if it’s around — and it prob­a­bly is.

Should you pay for your phone to be debranded? No, do it your­self. There are heaps of tuto­ri­als and numer­ous videos online. The video I made a while back may be a good start although it’s for the Sam­sung i8510. The ideas and the tools are gen­er­ally the same. You can down­load firmware for Sam­sung phones from this web­site(you have to reg­is­ter for free). If you still can’t find out how to do it I could make a post about it. So yes debrand, hack and flash cus­tom ROMs. Sam­sung is no longer releas­ing updates for the i8910, so if you’re not happy with the cur­rent firmware, you have to look for cus­tom ROMs. HyperX is prob­a­bly the best way to go.

HX ROMs are the way to go

Now I’ve always praised Andy and his cus­toms ROMs. Here’s why they are awesome.

1. They are free.
2. They included licensed apps, Phone Torch and Threaded SMS.
3. The have a mas­sive fol­low­ing — the qual­ity of the ROMs is higher than most because many bugs are found and thwarted before a pub­lic release.
4. Easy to install. The eas­i­est way to lib­er­ate your phone. Switch off your phone, hold Vol­ume Up + Lock + Power but­ton, run the appli­ca­tion he supplies, connect the phone and click Dowload All and that’s it!
5. No need to hack the phone, it’s already done.
6. Con­stantly updat­ing; unlike Sam­sung, his updates keep on coming.
7. Col­lab­o­ra­tion; HyperX works with other peo­ple to aid him, that’s rare in the mod­ding community.

I could go on, but these are 7 rea­sons to love HX V7 .