Best set-and-forget ROM for Droid Eris?

May 12, 2012 6:13 PM

What is the best (fast, stable) 3rd party firmware for the Droid Eris?

My wife is frustrated by the laggy nature of her Droid Eris. Would installing a 3rd party ROM help make the phone feel snappier? If so, what ROM would you recommend?

Her primary uses are texting/emailing, making phone calls and playing a solitaire app. I would be the one doing technical support for the phone and while I have a strong Linux background I have no experience with smartphones and no desire to fiddle with bug fixes after flashing.

posted by ChrisHartley to technology (5 answers total)

Anecdatally, as someone who wasted most of today on (attempting) this, bug fixes after flashing are the least of the complications involved. At least with Cyanogenmod, there are about 8,000 poorly-written steps involved in flashing a 3rd party ROM. I didn't get through them.

That said, I'll be watching this thread.
posted by rhizome at 6:29 PM on May 12, 2012

You'll have better luck looking at the XDA forums specifically for your phone model. There's lots of ROMs available for any given phone, and not all of them will be ported well to your specific handset.

The Eris looks pretty old, but I'd try to find an Ice Cream Sandwich based ROM if you can. I just flashed a Samsung Captivate with a ICS port from Cyanogenmod, and it's dramatically faster in real world use compared to gingerbread or froyo. That said, the captivate is a more recent phone.

Flashing isn't for the faint of heart - if she's not willing to fiddle and you're not willing to do much support, you might just be better off buying a new phone.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 7:10 PM on May 12, 2012

There's an official CyanogenMod version of Gingerbread for the Droid Eris here: http://download.cyanogenmod.com/?type=stable&device=desirec

Instructions for rooting the device here: http://theunlockr.com/2010/09/22/how-to-root-the-htc-droid-eris-unrevoked-method/

CM7 should be quite stable - more stable than the stock Sense ROM they put on there.

I would not try upgrading to Ice Cream Sandwich, there's just not enough memory, although there might be some non-official ports. Plus ICS will struggle with the Droid Eris screen size.

Make sure you back everything up before you start all this - you will have to delete everything before you install the new ROM.
posted by iamscott at 6:57 AM on May 13, 2012

Have you rooted the phone?

In my experience, you can make phones more stable by just rooting them, clearing the Dalvik cache , and deleting most of the poorly tested/coded Verizon add-ons like VCAST. - Many of them start in the background, even if you didn't activate them.

Try downloading something like Advanced Task Killer onto it and seeing how many vendor apps are running in the background before going the whole nuke-and-pave new ROM route.
posted by Orb2069 at 6:43 PM on May 13, 2012

Thank you for the suggestions. I'll try rooting the phone and running Advanced Task Killer and if that doesn't give sufficient improvement I'll try CyanogenMod.

Note for future searchers, the direct download link to the correct version from the page iamscott linked returns 404. The correct link is here.
posted by ChrisHartley at 4:42 PM on May 14, 2012