There has been a lot of Android overclocking work done over the past few months, even more so since the release of the Nexus One. It has generally come in the form of special overclocked, and low voltage kernels that advanced users with rooted devices can flash or cook into custom ROMs. There is also a well known and useful overclocking app called SetCPU. The app which is available on the Android Market gives users with root access, control of the CPU and how it performs.
Now the Motorola Droid and the European version, the Milestone both come with a capable 600mhz ARM A8 Cortex processor. There has even been reports that Motorola has underclocked some Droids to 500MHz. This really doesn’t give the user enough power, especially with the newer firmware available, sometimes 600MHZ isn’t enough. Once the Droid and Milestone were rooted, devs were able to open up the capabilities of the Droid. There has even been a CyanogenMOD port available for both handsets.
Until now the overclocking has been somewhat of a tedious process, but now there is a simpler way to get faster clock speeds on your Droid or Milestone. Now developer Tiago Sousa has written a simple Android .APK that can overclock your Milestone/Droid to a whopping 1.2GHz. For the most part 1.1GHz to 1.2GHz has been the fastest the phones can run, while still being stable. According to Tiago, the app allows the user to enable the overclock speeds or disable them on-the-fly. Meaning there is no need to reboot after changing speeds. He also goes on to say there is no need for flashing a custom kernel or ROM, the app does it all.
It works by changing several parameters directly in kernel memory to fool both cpufreq and its low-level driver. Like the Droid, the Milestone is stable up to 1.2 GHz, with 1.33 GHz being the best I could achieve, albeit completely unstable.
If you want to check it out you can head over to the milestone-overclock page at Google Code. To be able to use the overclock app, you need either a rooted Motorola Milestone or Droid. You also need the SetCPU app, that I mentioned earlier. That’s it, it’s all pretty easy.
But I have to warn everyone, that overclocking can be dangerous to your device. The same principals that apply to overclocking your PC, also apply here. Overclocking puts stress on your CPU, which in effect could shorten the life of your phone, or even worse brick it. So please be careful!
