Following an email sent by my friend penadigital quite some time ago I finally made the jump and installed SpicagenMod Beta 2.1 on my Spica. I had been avoiding it since I had everything working just the way I wanted and most of the time it takes a few hours and a good dose of patience to install a mod and get everything working the way we like it again.
I was actually kind of forced into it, the previous install I had got borked. I was running out of memory and as a consequence getting that annoying little low memory warning that keeps popping up. I uninstalled some apps and cleaned the app cache but I was still low on memory. This is partly because of the way Apps2SD works and I still don’t fully understand it so I thought about booting into recovery and wiping both dalvik cache and regular cache. I was then presented with an endless loop of reboots, lovely. Then I remembered that email and figured this was as good a time as ever to give it a try.
The end result is a much much faster phone, even better than the previous mod I had installed (Cyanogenmod Beta 8.4 for the Spica). Everything works fine so far, excluding the compass which for some reason was already pointing south and saying it’s north in the previous mod so maybe it’s some phone related issue. I don’t use it that much anyway, so sod that. I also installed a few other mods. Intercept 3D driver, LIBSQLite Update and Yonip Kernel. Links are at the end of the post.
Installation procedure is pretty straight forward, copy the zips to the sdcard and apply them in recovery. Though some times it isn’t necessary I like to do a full wipe just so I don’t leave any of the “bad stuff” lying around that could possibly screw up something in the new install.
Right after install I immediately noticed it much faster and snappier, phone/contact app loads almost instantly as well as some other little things that I guess you only get to notice once you’ve used this phone for a while. Still haven’t had time to gauge battery life but I’m charging it almost every day now so..not important unless it only lasts half a day or something like that.
I did notice that right after activating Apps2SD some stuff gets a bit sluggish and I think that’s because the sdcard’s speed can in no way be compared to internal memory, but it’s the only choice I have in order to install all the stuff I want without running into lack of space issues. It still feels a lot more snappier than with the previous mod.
In conclusion, if anyone out there is wondering if SpicagenMod is worth it or not…it’s most definitely worth it.
Linkage:
SpicagenMod-froyo-BETA2+2.1 Patch or SpicagenMod Kitchen
Note: Picture is courtesy of penadigital. My current kernel runs with 24bpp and the screenshot app only works with 16bpp or 32bpp.