IceCreamSandwich!
Lately I have been getting increasingly frustrated with my cell phone. My phone is a HTC Inspire 4G from AT&T. The interface has locked up many times forcing a battery pull. It just gets stuck sometimes while entering text on the keyboard. Basically i dont know how I havent slamed it into the desk yet. Reading about Googles new OS versions IceCreamSandwich (4.0) and JellyBean (4.1) has also made me slightly envious that my phone is stuck forever at Gingerbread (2.3.3). Therefore I took matters into my own hands and rooted my phone. After rooting my phone I found a custom rom for my phone which is built on the IceCreamSandwich kernel. As of last night around 1am my phone was rocking the latest IceCreamSandwich Build! 
Heres how I did it……
First lets start out with the basic disclaimer. Rooting and flashing your phone with a custom rom voids any measly warranty you were maybe promised when you got your phone as well as support from service provider and manufacturer. Doing this incorrectly can make your phone un-useable. I do not recommend doing this unless you are 110% OK with what you are doing. Myself, everyone else on this blog and VU are not responsible if your stupid and brick your phone.
Now, Rooting your phone and flashing a custom rom are two different processes. You can have a rooted phone with the rom that shipped with you phone. Rooting just gives root access to the device, basically its like installing sudo for your phone. Like the sudo warning says “with great power comes great responsibility” you can brick your phone in the process.
I used The Advanced Ace Hack Kit to root my phone. One thing you’ll notice is that they say is read the manual alot….YES READ THE MANUAL. I’m generally not a big fan of that but theres so much about this isnt intuitive.
After going through the process to root my phone, I needed to find a custom rom to flah. xda-developers is a forum that has phone models. Once I found an ICS based ROM it was game on. I picked Cyanogenmod 9 there are others that are for my phone and based on ICS but this one I found had the most bugs worked out.
I downloaded the ROM to the SD card in my phone and used ClockWorkMods ROM Manager to boot into recovery mode of the phone and flash a custom rom. After waiting a while for the rom to flash. I had a working phone again with ICS.
Image Credit Abul Hussain
