I love to flash custom ROM on my android devices due to tons of reasons. Flashing custom ROM can easily tweak and increase your android device performance significantly. Do not blame your old android devices as of its slow performance or outdated, you can make your God-like android phone if you know the tricks & tips. You may not a professional smartphone developer but it is actually easy enough to empower your smartphone by flashing some powerful ROM & Kernel.

Here are the ultimate guides & tips for you as a beginner flash any custom rom on your android phone.

Understand Your Android Smartphone

First of first, you need to understand your smartphone hardware specification. In fact, you need to understand what model of hardware you own at least. This is a must to know you phone model because most of the custom ROMs were built according to hardware models. You may brick your phone if you flash the wrong model custom ROMs. Please take note. Go here to check your complete hardware specification.

Select The Correct Source To Obtain Your Custom Rom

Getting a reliable custom ROM is important to make sure you have everything correct and good in place after flashing it. You do not want a frequently reboot and buggy ROM. Do not download the untrusted ROM from unreliable sources.  I highly recommend you to get your ROM from Xda forum. Xda forum is a well know forum for developers to release their ROM and collect feedback. It is a very good platform for you to learn and understand more on android platform.

Understand All The Android Specific Terms/Names/Keywords Before Flashing ROM

This step may takes you most of the time if you are try to flash your very first custom ROM. I agree that most of the developers like to use very unique name to represent their products and this may confused you if you are new. Anyhow, you will get familiar with it if you intended to learn & try to get used to them. Below are some specific terms/names/keywords you need to look it before use the ROM.

Radio

Kernel

Bootloader

Fastboot

Android SDK

ICS, Ice Cream Sandwich

CM7, CM9, CyanogenMod

MIUI

CWM, ClockWorkMod

List above does not cover all the terms you need but you should have a basic knowledge about them.

Read Comments From The Custom ROM Thread Before Download

In order to reduce your resources to download the inappropriate ROM, read and search the comment of the thread to further understand what is wrong with the custom ROM after some of the users flash the ROM. Try to search the thread with keywords, random reboot, hang, lag, overclock, bug, error, brick, crash. The search result help you to decide which ROM to download and test.

Read Carefully On The ROM Installation Procedures

I’ll suggest you to download & install those custom ROM with full install instruction. This is to make sure you install the custom ROM step by step as you are still a beginner. *Some ROM thread may have none install instruction and assuming readers are understand on the installation steps. I agreed that writing a long installation instruction is redundant to developers if he had repeated doing it.

Prepare Your Needed Software, Hardware & Equipment Before Flashing ROM

Most of the time, you will need to charge your device more than 50% of battery. This is to avoid your phone shutdown during ROM flashing to cause unwanted problem or permanent damage. Besides that, you need a stable PC/MAC & USB cable. Mostly you will need

1. ClockWorkMod on your android phone [Link]

2. Android SDK + Android USB driver installed in your PC/MAC [Link1, Link2]

Download and install them, it will probably make your ROM flashing easy and simple.

Flash Your ROM Now & Enjoy

Flashing ROM is simple if you follow the instructions step by step. What are you waiting for? Start to flash and enjoy your new birth android phone.