Droid Joins the Unlocked Phone Club

Posted 12/09/2009 at 6:34am | by Paul Lilly

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Motorola's Droid smartphone has barely been out a month, and already the device has been rooted by the modding community. Welcome to the club, Droid.

"Droid does... ROOT," Cyanogen, who is probably the best known Android modder, wrote on his Twitter page. He also linked an Android message board containing the exploit

Droid already comes with Android 2.0, which boasts a bunch of fancy updates to the open-source OS that has the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) community anxiously awaiting a modded update of their own. But a rooted Droid gives the user administrative rights and all kinds of control over the smartphone. There's an overclocking widget available for rooted Android phones, fancy themees, and even multi-touch support, which is available on the lower end Droid Eris but not the higher end original in its native framework (it's up to developers to release multitouch apps).

Of course, unlocking a smartphone to install third-party firmware comes with certain risks, and in a worst case scenario, a mod gone bad could brick the device. But the risks gets lower and lower as the modding community continues to release more sophisticated firmware.