Android Open Source Project!!!

My Xperia X10 was my main phone, mainly because of better battery life and a more comfortable form factor. But after I got CyanogenMod 7 on my Motorola Milestone the battery life gap was closing and fast!
The biggest flaw of the X10 though was the painfully outdated Operating System (OS). It was still running Android 1.6 Donut! I had Android 2.3 Gingerbread running in my, older and not flagship phone, Milestone!
Something had to be done about that, and it was a long time and after a lot of broken promises and delays from Sony Ericsson that finally Android 2.1 arrived to the Xperia! Yes Android 2.1!!! That's not exactly ideal but it's much better than 1.6. From 1.6 to 2.1 there's a great leap performance wise and with battery life.
But right after getting Android 2.1 to my Xperia it was slower than when I had 1.6 on it! Yes, again Sony dropped the ball and really bloated up the OS making it sluggish and disappointing...
But then the X10 developers started to pick up the ball that Sony dropped...
The XDA forums had the answers again, and some great developers started tweaking the 2.1 release from Sony to get a good experience on our phones. One of the best 2.1 ROM's can be found here.
But that wasn't what we wanted, we wanted more, we always want MORE!!! So the great Jerpelea and the great zdzihu started working together and managed to get Android 2.2 Froyo working on our beloved Xperia!! That was great news... Although 2.3 is a nice upgrade there are no major features that you don't have on 2.2. 2.2 on the other hand had Flash support that 2.1 lacked!! That's big, just ask any of your friends that have an iPhone or an iPad that can't access some sites because they don't have flash...
But that wasn't all they did, it wasn't a Sony Ericsson 2.2, with bloatware, Timescape, Mediascape and other things that slow your phone more that it helps, it was Android Open Source Project!!! That means it was a clean, nothing but pure Android!! That's what the Milestone had when I bought it almost a year ago by then, but that was a much lighter better looking phone with a better hardware with it!! This ROM completely revitalized my X10 and made using it an enjoyable experience again!! And that was not all, for now I could change pretty much anything I wanted to make my phone look and act the way I wanted it to...

PS: Sorry for the long gap between posts, I'll try and get back to a post a day, but I've been a bit busy lately...
PPS: The app I'm recommending today is Total Commander for Android, it's still beta but it's one of the greatest file managers for Android out there, it's free and has no ads!! Click here for a more detailed description.
PPPS: I still have Google+ invites if any of you guys want it...

Now the real fun starts!

I've managed to get paid apps to work on my phones and I've got root access, now it's time to start messing around big time!
I've started really reading the XDA  forums and started to understand how Android works. I had a Motorola Milestone with Android 2.2 (Froyo) and my Xperia X10 with Android 1.6 (Donut). The Milestone had stock android and was running smoothly, but the battery life was very bad. I had real problems getting through the day with it. The solution came from one of the greatest apps I know in the market: Titanium Backup, with it I could freeze and uninstall system apps. Freezing an app is a less definitive solution to uninstalling. It stops the app from working without actually removing it from your system folder, so if you have a problem after freezing an app you can just defrost it...
So I started freezing the bloatware that was installed on my phone. After I froze a hole lot of apps I've never used and some lame games my battery nearly doubled!! Now was time to address the X10 problems...
The Xperia was laggy and also had a bad battery life, but this time the biggest blame was on the Timescape interface, if sucks battery like there's no tomorrow!! So I froze a hole lot of it, the Timescape app, the Mediascape, and other pointless apps. But the one thing I froze that made the biggest difference to me was the face recognition for the camera, I never used and it worked non stop on the background eating away my battery. The full list of apps to remove after you get root access can be found here. Now that I have a much better battery life with my phones there's no way to improve it....or is there?? That's when I found out about custom ROMs...

PS: You can only freeze apps with the pro version of Titanium Backup. It's not the cheapest app on the market but you'll not regret getting it for a second!