I got myself an HTC Incredible from Verizon last year. Roughly 30 days was about all I could tolerate of the stock software it came with. Verizon (and the other carriers from what I gather), love to plant their mostly worthless software onto your phone right from the get go, which proves to only slow your device down, which in my case was only further compounded by the slowdown that the Sense UI caused. Yeah it looks nice, and it does sort your contacts from multiple services in an idiot-proofed kind of way, but I found it to be more cumbersome than anything.
In order to replace your operating system, you must root your phone. This can usually be done with all but the newest phones at any given time, to varying degrees of complexity. In the case of HTC phones, it couldn’t be easier with Unrevoked. Unrevoked will basically unlock the secure partition of the phone, and provide you with a recovery menu where you can replace the OS, among many other things.
At this point, all you do is download the ROM of your choice, wipe the data and cache portions of the phone, and install the zipped ROM. I personally love the ASOP (Android Open Source Project) varieties, which include the fantastic CyanogenMod. These are the fastest, most stable, most minimalistic ROM’s you will find. MIUI is a good runner up if you’d like to bring over iPhone sensibilities to your Android, albeit with some sacrifice to performance. Both of these ROM’s are in the process of making the leap to Android 4.0 in the coming months, but something tells me it will be a bumpy ride, so I’m sticking with 2.3 for a while.
After that, you just go through the Android setup process, and re-download whatever vital apps you were accustomed to from the app marketplace, like Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter. If you miss some of the fancy software your Phone originally came with, it’s extremely likely you will find it, or a suitable equivalent, on the marketplace, for free or extremely cheap. For example, this one should be just as good as your previous weather and clock interface.
I know that I’ve glossed over a lot of steps that may or may not apply to your specific phone, so I highly suggest you go to the XDA forums, and scroll down to your specific phone, read about other people’s experiences with the rooting process, flashing any given ROM, and form your own game plan.
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