So now that I’ve gotten use to the HTC Aria and Android, I found a new challenge laid ahead of me. You see for what ever reason AT&T decided it was going to let you side load application onto their Android device. Very stupid if you ask me seeing as every other carrier let’s you except for them. If you not sure what side loading means, it just means that you can only download applications from the Android Market and not from websites through your browser or SD card.
So this is where I find myself this week. You see for my general purposes I don’t really need to download anything that would need to be side loaded, but the one application I wanted, currently wasn’t available in the Android Market. I had recently heard about a program called Swype that was a replacement keyboard for Android devices. Swype lets you type by tracing your finger across the keyboard to input your words. This was a program I really wanted to use, but the only way to get it was to side load. The only way I was going to be able to get this, was to root my Aria. And this is the journey I was set upon.
I started this journey by going to Google and entering in “Rooting the HTC Aria”. From there a wealth of links appear, some not really relevant, and many that led to the xda-deverlopers.com forums. This would be my next stop and would pretty much be the place I found all of my information. I found a thread that had info for the HTC Aria and I began to follow the steps. I quickly found I was a little over my head. I’m a new Mac user and the directions to follow for the Mac confused me, but I’m was in luck (so I thought) as I had Windows installed in my Mac as well. So I proceeded to follow the Windows directions. This eventually led me to much frustration, as the search for HTC drivers, trying to catch that right moment in the bootloader, and trying to flash the update.zip file gave me many problems.
The process to root this phone was literally driving me crazy. I tried to get this to work from the Mac, then Window 7 (in a VMWare session), and Windows XP. All attempts failed and I was left with still an unrooted Aria. I next decided to hop in a IRC chat that was being mentioned on xda-developers.com. From there I met a gentlemen who was also a new mac user but had gotten his phone rooted. He basically gave me step by step directions on how to successfully root it using a Mac. That night i followed his directions and YESSSS I successfully rooted my Aria. I immediately installed Swype (which I love by the way). Funny enough since I have rooted my Aria, I haven’t done anything special with it beyond installing Swype and removing AT&T’s crapware. So in essence I drove myself crazy to do very little else lol. Stay tuned for week 3 as we are half way through the 30 day challenge!