Increase Your Droid's Speed

Note: This is for Rooted phones only

These days phones are coming with faster and more powerful processors, many of them in the 1Ghz range and some phones are even packing powerful dual core chips.  What most people don't know is that phone of yours is actually not running at full speed.  Most manufacturers lower the speed of the phone in order to conserver battery power or to make sure that the chips don't burn out prematurely or overheat.  Fear not...for those speed freaks out there there is a way to increase your phones CPU speed.  You can also set your phone to lower the cpu speed when you're not using it to save battery life.

Start off by downloading SetCPU from the Android Market.  You can also search for it on Applanet if you have already downloaded that from our previous post.  When you run the program the first time you will get the usual Superuser permission screen.  Just press Allow and you're in.


The main screen shows 2 sliders, one labeled Max and one labeled Min.  Just as the names imply, one sets your phones Maximum speed and the other sets your phones Minimum speed.  What this means is that if you're phones not doing anything, it will be running at the slower speed and conserving battery.  When you start running applications or doing anything on it, it'll kick it up to the Max speed.  If you're more interested in conserving battery power, you can lower both these sliders.  If you want the most speed you can get, set them both to the highest setting, but just be aware that it's going to kill your battery life.  Also, I've found that if you lower the speed too much (below 300Mhz) your phone becomes so slow it's pretty much unusable.  The settings in the picture are what I typically run my phone at.  You can also select an option from the drop down menu and further customize the settings as the names describe.

For those wanting to get a little more advanced, you can also set certain rules for your phone from the Profiles tab.  For example, you can tell it that if it's on the charger just always keep both at Max since you're not worried about battery life.  Or, if your battery falls below a certain percentage lower the speed to conserve your CPU.

To set this up, just click over to the Profiles tab and then press Add Profile.  On the next screen, select the parameter you want to adjust.  Once you have that parameter set, you can will see it on the list with a checkbox.  Just check or uncheck the box if you want your phone to run that setting.  If this seems over your head for now, don't worry about.  It's just another layer to the program that you can play with as you get more comfortable with it.

There are several versions of these types of programs out there but this is the one that I have always had a lot of success with.  A friend recently showed me another program inspired by this with a more simple interface.  Once I've had a chance to test that out I'll post a review of that one as well for people that may feel a little overwhelmed with SetCPU.

On a final note, you will hear people talking about "Overclocking" their devices.  This means that you can run your 1Ghz phone at 1.2Ghz or even 1.3Ghz.  This involves flashing custom ROMS and custom kernals onto your phone.  At this point that's a little advanced for us but if enough people are interested I will start discussing those topics in future entries.