Customized HTC Wildfire S

 Assalam 'alaikum and very good day :)

I just wanna share about what I have done with my phone. For starting, my phone is a HTC Wildfire S which I bought about three years ago in which the price has go down like 80%. I don't have the knowledge to pick out a phone yet during the time, so the spec for this phone is really low.

• CPU Freq. 600MHz
• RAM 512MB
• Internal storage 512MB

  
What's the problem?
As you can see, the CPU frequency and RAM is really low for a smartphone. After some month of usage, it will get slow and slower. The internal storage is also very small. Half of it is already dedicated for Android system, so the only left for apps are around 256MB only. Half of that 256MB is already used for the system apps, so basically I can only install 5 to 7 apps at most, considering they can be moved to SD card.

Why not buy a new one?
Can't afford them currently. And also, I'm waiting for Ubuntu Edge to come out. hehehe

The solution?
I've seen apps which will allow you to manage the system apps, but all of them needs root access of course. So the solution is basically rooting the phone. So I've done it.


Then what?
Then after a successful attempt of rooting the phone, of course I wanted to try more. So I tried flashing various custom ROMs, mainly from CyanogenMod. The summary is:

• CM9 (JellyBean) : Runs quite slow.
• CM7 (Ice Cream Sandwich) : Really liked it except for that it is unable to do video recording due to unreleased decoder by Qualcomm. So that's a no.
• CM5 (Gingerbread) : Nice, but I don't really like it. Plus, the built in apps had already eat up much spaces.

So what now?
I finally changed back to the stock ROM, though I've used app2SD which allows you to manage system apps and mount a 2nd partition for linking system apps. So basically this apps will allow me to install more apps.

For the CPU problem, I've changed the kernel to Sense Fire kernel and used No Frilss CPU Control apps to overclock my phone. Now it runs even faster. I just do overclock for playing games though.

Additional topic
Usually, HD games cannot be played on low spec phone like mine, but recently I've found that some people made it available. For example, Subway Surfers cannot be played, but I've found the apk for Armv6 architecture and HVGA devices. So yeah, I can now play that game. Though it runs quite slow at first, but after overclocking the phone, I can play it. Diner Dash also lag at first, but runs smoothly after overclocking.

For low spec phone users
This is a good way of improving your phone. Not really improving actually, but more like taking the most out of it. But the message here is that your phone might be capable of more than it seems, so use it wisely. I've done this after my phone's warranty had ended since unlocking the bootloader and rooting it will void the warranty.