I’ve been running a rooted G1 for a month now and there are some gotchas, glitches and lessons learned I wanted to share.

Change From Rooted TMobile 1.6 to CyanogenMod 4.1.99 (based on Donut 1.6)
After a few weeks of reading about Android and rooting, I came across CyanogenMod many times. I decided to switch over to CyanogenMod and the ROM image is solid and stable.

What CyanogenMod does is make my G1 a “developer phone.” One of the best things of having a developer phone is the ability to turn on process monitoring. (Very similar to running task manager in Windows) … It is interesting to see the processes which are running during the normal operations of the Android phone.

The only negatives from other ROMs are (1) reboot causes a loop and (2) Touchdown email application crashes on network change.

(1) Whenever I power off my phone, or reboot, the process takes 3-5 minutes and goes through three reboots before settling and connecting to T-Mobile. It isn’t a big issue because once the phone is up, it is stable. Just more of an annoyance.

(2) Second challenge is with the email application Touchdown. It is not the application because Touchdown works on other ROMs without this issue. Everytime I have Touchdown running and my network shifts from 3G to EDGE and vice versa, the app forcefully closes. Rather painful since any email not yet sent is lost.

I have tried a new Radio image and will try soon to update CyanogenMod to 4.2.

The Class of MicroSD Matters A Lot
I never thought about it, but after several slowdowns and app crashes I took a look at my microSD card (carryover from Blackberry). I had a class 2 2GB microSD card and was using part of it for my phone’s cache.

After reading a few posts on xda-developers, I realized part of the unstableness was due to my phone’s cache on a slow microSD card. I upgraded to an 8GB Class 6 microSD card and Cyanogen 4.1.99 has been running smooth ever since.

Best Application for Tweaking Android
The single best app for rooted phones is Startup Auditor, well worth the 99 cents. (In fact, to date, it is the only Android app I have paid for) … a close second and very useful is the WiFi Tether app (very handy for the iPad and Laptop on the road)