Doesn’t look like HTC will be upgrading your relatively new HTC Desire to Android 2.2 Froyo any time soon. But fortunately there are a number of stable ROMs out there that are quite safe to install. I found a number of the tutorials and posts of advice that are out there were often incomplete, so this is my guide to how I went about getting Froyo on my phone.

  1. Firstly, you will need an unlocked phone before you start. You may need to contact your operator to get the code and they are entitled to charge you an admin fee for this, I think it’s somewhere around £10 for the privilege. Fortunately I had an unlocked stock HTC phone to start with.
  2. Push the menu button on your phone, go to Settings > Applications > Development and make sure the box is checked to allow “USB debugging.”
  3. Here, I formatted the SD card to get rid of all the junk. This can be found in Settings > SD Card & Phone Storage Settings, first you’ll need to tap ‘Unmount SD card’ and then ‘Format SD card.’
  4. Plug your phone into your computer, change it to disk drive mode. You will need to copy across two zip files (complete – do not extract them) into the root of your SD card. The first is the radio image and the second is your choice of custom ROM. You can grab the radio image from here and the custom ROM is your choice. I opted for and reccomend, OpenDesire which, so far seems way more stable than the official HTC 2.1 with Sense ever was. I used the latest version, 2.1 and you can download it from the author here.
  5. Download and run unrevoked³ – this will give you root access on your phone, allow you to create a backup as it stands now and to flash your custom ROM. I’ve heard it just works on Mac, on Windows you may need to install an additional driver from the website and on Linux I had to run it in root mode for it to detect the phone – if you don’t know how to do this because you don’t normally use Linux and you’re running a Live CD or something, then you need to Google “sudo” and read what it has to say. This program takes a couple of minutes to flash and will keep you updated on what it’s up to on the screen. After this step your phone should now have root access – if this is all you want so you can run certain apps then leave it here. Once it’s done you’ll see a menu – you can get back to this screen at any time by holding Volume Down as you switch the phone on.
  6. Make a backup! Scroll down on the menu to “Recovery” using the volume buttons and tap the power button. Use the optical track pad from here, go to “nandroid” on the menu and create your backup. After you’ve done this – if you fudge things up, you can simply roll right back to where you started.
  7. “wipe data/factory reset” – I forgot to do this initially, being my point about incomplete guides. Not doing so caused my phone to get stuck in a loop on the boot screen after I’d flashed the new images, a disappointing and mildly unnerving experience.
  8. “install zip from sdcard” – first up you want to flash the radio image, probably called 32.41.00.32U_5.08.00.04.zip if you didn’t change the name.
  9. “install zip from sdcard” – again, but this time you want to flash the OpenDesire ROM.
  10. “reboot system now” – good luck… remember you can roll back to the beginning using your nandroid backup if something went wrong.

Enjoy! : – )