Gingerbread Upgrade

Wednesday, 11 July, 2012

Well I finally took the plunge and, 18 months on from installed Froyo (Android 2.1), finally upgrade to Gingerbread (Android 2.3.5). Having spent a long time getting all the apps set up as I wanted and repartioning the memory to gain extra app space, I was loathe to replace what was a very stable setup. Anyway, the lure of an update got the better of me and my first port of call was the list of available ROMs (and the install guide for the San Francisco). This actually showed an extremely limited list of available ROMs for the first generation San Francisco, largely restricted to Cyanogen Mod. Clearly this list isn’t that up to date and visiting the ROM Forum is a better bet. I plumped for Swedish Snow which is a relatively lightweight 2.3.5 ROM - it is for second generation phones but, crucially, uses the Total Phone Transfer System (see install guide) which does the entire upgrade in one hit, BOOT, RECOVERY and ROM all at once, as well as the ability to change partitions. For Swedish Snow it upgrades a generation 1 phone memory layout to generation 2 and then installs the full OS. All in about a minute and then boot up. The only checks to do is that you have a generation 1 phone and that the downloaded ZIP file is not corrupt (MD5 checker).

And…. it just works! The ROM is well packaged, useful selection of apps and, so far, very stable.

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