Ailing Human Suit Leads to Rooting My Droid and Top 5 Essential Rooted Apps List

Hope everyone who observes it had a fabu Thanksgiving holiday!

Spent most of mine lounging on the couch, dealing with human suit issues. I seem to have acquired a minor cold, which is throwing off my temperature regulation system. Irregular fever spikes are an early symptom of my immune system about to go totally wonky, so I took it really easy, even through I didn’t feel that bad. As such, I got little to no writing done. But I did take the plunge and root my Droid.

I’ve been wanting to root it for a while now, primarily so I can overclock the CPU. But I’ve been too lazy to go through all the hoop jumping, and I’ve also been concerned about the whole voiding of the warranty thing (with the related worry that I’d brick my Droid in my root attempt). But my warranty is nearly up, and a new, free, extremely safe, one-button rooting app recently came out: z4root.

Z4root provides the option of temporarily or permanently rooting your Android phone. So I could try it out first and make sure everything worked okay before doing it for keeps. And it also has an easy, one-button unroot option, so “permanent” isn’t a set-in-stone commitment either. Installed z4root, rebooted my Droid, ran z4root, and two minutes later, I was rooted. And suddenly a whole wealth of new apps with shiny options opened up to me. Time for another list!

Herein my Top 5 Essential Rooted Apps:

• CacheMate – Free up space and speed up your phone by clearing the cache from all apps with a single click. Also lets you set up scheduled automatic cache clears and specify what caches you want to clear.
• ROM Manager – If you root your phone, you need this. It helps you manage your ROMs, organize and perform nandroid backups, and do ROM restores without the need to connect your phone to your PC.
• SetCPU – Allows you to change the CPU settings (overclock and underclock) to improve performance or save battery. Didn’t even have to install a new kernel, and my Droid is much snappier! Ran a series of benchmarks before and after I rooted and installed SetCPU, and I’m seeing about a 25% increase in performance. My Droid is noticeably faster, and I’m still using the stock ROM and stock kernel (which maxes out at 800MHz).
• Titanium Backup – Makes complete backups of, restores, and freezes your apps and app data. Also lets you move to your SD card apps that aren’t configured to move there so you can finally get those space hogs (*cough* Adobe Flash *cough*) from internal storage to external.
• Wireless Tether – Enables wifi and bluetooth tethering for free. Turns your phone into a wifi hotspot. For free! Did I mention it’s free?

And a runner-up that didn’t quite make my “Most Essential” list:

• Quick Boot – One-click reboot and power off, as well as easy boot into recovery or bootloader mode.

And one app which isn’t essential but is awfully useful (and fun):

• ShootMe – Lets you take screenshots of your phone. Check it out: