Several of my co-workers have been asking about rooting and modifying the Android OS, so I thought I’d take some time today and post some screenshots that will show you what I’ve done with my Evo since rooting it.

One of the first things I wanted to change was the default Sprint boot animation when you power the phone on.  I dug through the forums at XDA-Developers and found and installed an old school BIOS load screen that was created by a user named “akastixx”.  The best part about this is the audio file the developer included with it: noisy fans, spinning floppy drives, BIOS post beeping – its got it all.

Here is the audio that plays as it loads:  Fake_BIOS_SPC_animation_final

Next, I wanted to change up the HTC widgets a bit. The first thing that jumps out at you when you unlock the Evo screen is the big white facing on the clock widget, as seen on the left image below.  I wanted something a bit more subtle and found a clock widget created by a user named “Godzson” that has white numbers on a black background, and blue highlights that matched the theme I was going for.  I also got rid of the HTC stock background and dug up something nifty from Alienware that fit my mood.

Next, I wanted to change up the standard “Rosie” user interface a bit. The green email notifier in the image above needed to be blue, so I dug around some more and found Avalaunch’s stock Rosie interface with blue highlights mod.  Most of these mods are all flashed through recovery mode, so lets take a look at how that works while we’re at it. 

From a powered down state, press and hold the down volume button and press the power button briefly. This will put you into the Android boot menu. Selecting “Recovery” loads up a custom recovery program that allows us to flash ROMs and signed installation files. 

While  in recovery mode, lets take a quick peek at the “Nandroid” backup tool.  This is pretty important because anytime you’re installing a new item, you want to make sure you can recover from a malformed file, poor programming or some sort of hardware incompatibility.  If we run into any problems, we can perform a full backup and a full or partial restore with Nandroid.

Time to install Avalaunch’s stock Rosie with blue highlights.  Using the volume up/down buttons,  drop down and select the “install zip from sdcard” option and press the power button to go to the next menu. This will take us to the next option we want: “choose zip from sdcard”.

Pressing the power button again brings up the contents of our sdcard. Using the volume up/down we select the “stock-rosie-BLUE.zip,” and then we confirm that we really want to do this.

Pressing the power button again will then invoke the installer. 

Time to reboot and see the new toys we just installed.

Looking good so far, we then open up the home screen to make sure everything works as advertised. Should anything fail, we can reboot into recovery mode and run Nandroid to restore the previous version.

The changes are pretty subtle: darker tones on the buttons, straight lock bar vs. curved, blue notifications instead of green. Overall, I was happy with the results.

Now the question that you’re dying to ask, “how did you create those screenshots of your phone’s interface?”  The Android developer’s debug tool is what I used to capture the above images. 

I can’t thank all the hard working people over at XDA-Developers enough for giving us modification options.  I also want to thank HTC for building a great platform to play with. And a special thank you goes out to Sprint for all the bloatware they stuff into the Android 2.2 release. Without it, I wouldn’t  have been angry enough to  remove it and make the Evo something truely unique.

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About Leigh
If RJS employed “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” one could argue our very own Network Security Engineer, Leigh Reimers, just might fit the bill. Leigh is a black-belt karate master and former United States Army tough guy. At RJS, Leigh is a “jack-of-all-trades,” assisting with network administration and support on the off-chance he isn’t solving difficult security conundrums as a certified Sophos Advanced Sales and Technology Engineer.