I sometimes wonder why has Samsung stated the Spica hardware specs aren’t enough for Froyo since there are at least two roms that I know of that grant us exactly that, running froyo on the Samsung Spica.
A good friend (penadigital) sent me a couple of emails last week mentioning he had installed samdroid‘s alpha froyo package and found it to be pretty good. Some things are still pretty rough around the edges, but it generally works quite well. My curiosity was piqued.
I was kept back from installing it since I have already flashed the phone at least 3-4 times while experimenting different samdroid hacks and quite honestly everything was working fine and I didn’t want to bork it and end up having to reinstall and configure everything again.
Then one day, I found a couple of videos on youtube with folks running the incredibly popular Cyanogenmod on a Spica with links to samdroid’s forums and I just had to go and take a look. From then on I learned that pretty much everything is working with incredible efforts from LeshaK down at the samdroid forums and the Cyanogenmod team. My curiosity could not wait. I downloaded Cyanogenmod 7.2 alpha for the Spica and installed it through the recovery boot I had with samdroid’s root package.
Wiping data and cache (factory reset) kinda sucks but from my first impressions with this rom, it was well worth it. Hells yeah! Everything works pretty much out of the box though I haven’t had the chance to test every single use I have for my phone. There are known issues with the camera and the built in compass but honestly I don’t use either. The camera displays everything in black and white when you take the picture but once taken everything is in colour and the compass is somewhat inverted, north is south and vice versa. There is a
fix for the compass though, still haven’t tried it but should do it once I finish up this post. Go here for a full list of known issues and bugs and possible solutions. None of the issues trouble me since I don’t use those features but check them yourself just in case.
Installation is pretty straight forward if you’ve ever done a samdroid root on your Spica, which you need to install this. Any LK2.xx version will do.
- Download (duh): Find links here.
- Copy the zip file to the SD Card.
- Reboot to recovery.
- Apply any zip from card and choose the zip you dropped there.
- Wipe data & cache (factory reset)
- Format your ext2fs partition
- Reboot (it may take a while to boot and/or reboot a few times)
- ???
- Profit!
And…good news everyone! Updating to a more recent version of this (remember it’s alpha software) won’t require a factory reset.
It’s Froyo, it’s fast (JIT is enabled), it’s quite stable from what I’ve experienced and furthermore you know you want to give it a try. Install it and post your feedback here :)
I’ll eventually update this post with more impressions and/or information on this rom so keep an eye on it.
UPDATE: The Compass/Accelerometer/Sensors fix works, just have to spend a minute calibrating them. You can do this by turning the phone 360 degrees on each axis. This fix has been included in the 7.3 alpha release.
UPDATE 2: When installing/moving applications on the sdcard their corresponding widgets don’t show up when you longpress on your home and choose widgets. This is a Froyo bug, nothing to do with CMod. I fixed this by installing apps that have widgets I want into internal memory (it’s stored in the ext2fs apps2sd partition anyway, I think) Via
UPDATE 3: Replacing ADW Launcher with Launcherpro installing it in /system/app/
su
cd /sdcard
remount rw
cp LauncherPro.apk /system/app/ (<— watch out, it’s case-sensitive!)
cd /system/app
ls (now find the ADWLauncher.apk file and use EXACT the same name in the following command)
rm /system/app/ADWLauncher.apk (replace ADWLauncher.apk with the name you found)
remount ro
Update 4: Roughly 4 days since I’ve first installed CM and everything’s still running smooth, the Undervolting Mod looks atractive but I don’t think I’ll use something that can potentially damage the CPU. I have since the original post installed version 7.3 alpha and it’s running smooth as well.