Zumaki

finally got out of my Samsung Moment and into an EVO. I'm stoked.

I love this forum and look forward to learning/contributing. I have been lurking the last few weeks while I researched new phones, and I see a few old names here

I looked at the stickies and whatnot, but a few things go unanswered:

1. do I need to root the phone to get good battery life?
2. Is there a way to root without custom kernels and stuff? Like to just be able to freeze the bloatware with titanium backup or something?
3. can I customize the LED(s) besides which types of notifications make the red one light up?

Also, I had been looking forward to Sense but I'm already missing a few 'vanilla' features. Never saw that coming. I'm going to stick it out a bit and see if I get over it, though.

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As time goes on, I'm becoming more confident in my assertion that Sprint Store reps have no idea what they're talking about.

ExSaint

Hey Glad you joined the Evo Crew!!
Answers to your questions:
1. Yes, i have noticed a big difference on battery life when rooting. It also depends what Rom your using. Different roms do different things.
2. Yes, their are root only apps that are able to freeze and remove bloatware.
3. I'm actually not sure about LEDs i haven't seen or heard anything about customizing LEDs although i havent looked into it either.
Stick Sense out, trust me you will like it. Alot of good benefits.
Hope this helps.

CriticalCritic

Congrats and Welcome Zumaki! I've been wondering when you were going to leave the Moment Forum and if you were going to come over to the Evo side

1. Not necessarily. You can get good battery life (12-15ish) just by tweaking a few things, such as syncing. But in order to get GREAT battery life (Over 24hrs) you're going to have to root.

2. Sure. But keep in mind, you're coming from 2.1, and a few things have changed in 2.2, such as apps really cannot be killed.

3. Yep. In fact, there are two LEDs at the top of your phone. I've read that you can customize them... but I don't recall where the apps are to do that... sorry.

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novarider

There is an app over on xda called wimax notifier. It activates a led that's on the RIGHT side of the speaker. It works for text/sms. I use that for text and the one on the left for email.

Since rooting and using setcpu to underclock the cpu I have great battery life.

You can flash a rom that's stock but has the crap removed.

Zumaki

Neat. I'll start looking around for that stuff. There's a lot to wade through.

I would dive all-in and just get a neat looking rom but I keep reading about how updates are messed up if I don't keep stock apps and stuff. It's a different world with the EVO, since I kinda like the HTC stuff and would appreciate updates, whereas I didn't feel like I missed anything when I flashed a custom rom on the Moment (not much update support from Samsung).