Old Phone - new Android
I've been increasingly frustrated by the speed at which my old Smartphone has been responding lately and wanted to find a solution before heading into the new year. The phone is a 2012 HTC One S and I'm well used to it but the usage is getting sluggish and I was wondering if it would be better to wipe it, or replace it.
I looked at a replacement M8 handset for €499, or a budget chinese smartphone for under €200 as options. One thing I was interested in however was to try to use an unofficial Android variant I'd been hearing about. I'd never tried unlocking my phone before except to use other operator sims, rather than the one I'd purchased it with. Cyanogen Mod had been one I'd come across a few times but I had NO idea how to go about installing it. Turns out it WAS as hard as I suspected!!! But next time around it will be easier and I'm keeping notes in this post to help me and anyone else out interested in the activity!
Needless to say this is unsupported by Google, the smartphone manufacturer and anyone else! The risk is poor quality phone calls, crashing phone, malfunctioning devices etc. There was only one way to find out though!
So Cyanogen has a good wiki with walk through for most main phone types. They also have an easy installer but this had been recently pulled due to a security issue. I had to go old school.
I used Easy Backup & Restore to take a backup of my contacts, messages etc. and put the backup file on the SD Card.
The main wiki page for Cyanogen is as follows:
https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Main_Page
They have forums here:
http://forum.cyanogenmod.org
There is a list of pre-compiled builds or you can make you own (!). I used the Latest Release and Recovery build for my phone as listed here:
https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=ville
If you can find you own smart phone in the list on the left at least you know you're not on your own! The Forum has a sub section dedicated to each phone. Read first to see what the known issues are and you may or may not encounter them but best be forewarned!!
The main install guide I used was:
https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ville
This walked me through the main steps except unlocking the HTC itself. I needed to create an account on HTCDEV for that:
http://htcdev.com/bootloader/
Now I seemed to need a Linux O/S. I tried using Ubuntu 5.10 on VMware Workstation but the USB kept dropping as "unrecognised" when the Phone was booted into "fastboot" mode. I ended up installing Ubuntu on my Intel NUC using a USB created with rufus:
https://rufus.akeo.ie
This takes the Ubuntu ISO and puts it on the USB in Bios or UEFI mode. I used UEFI and after the install, Ubuntu was up and running. I could now plug in my HTC to the NUC and start getting the tools to operate. After pointing at a local update site in Ubuntu I could install adb & fastboot:
apt-get install android-developer-adb
apt-get install android-developer-fastboot
(I think they are the commands above, Ubuntu will help you if you try to use the commands and the packages are missing).
HTC's site offered a fastboot binary as part of the unlock process and I used this instead of the downloaded one to retrieve the unlock code from the phone.
If you enable USB Debugging you can issue a command "adb reboot bootloader" and once rebooted the command "fastboot device" should list the phone. Try "fastboot oem device-info" or "fastboot oem get_identifer_token" to get the key. Put this into the HTC site (you need to be logged on and have a verified dev account) and remove any spaces and INFO words and it should email you a bin file. Give this to Linux and follow the remaining steps from the HTC dev site to finish the unlock process. Sorry, I didn't think to record the steps but it's well documented. I'm sure there's a similar process for other phones.
Now, you can use the downloaded Recovery File and once that is up and running you upload the main image and Google Apps image to your phone and choose the upgrade option for each, browse to the files, and reboot:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps#Downloads
I installed the main OS, then installed the boot.img, booted into the new OS and then went back to recovery mode to install the Google Apps I'd forgotten about!
Next it's Restore time. I used Easy Backup & Recovery and the only issue was having to reselect the backup file each time for each category I wanted to restore. Doing this a few times I got back all my contacts, call history, messages etc. By installing Google Apps which gives you Google Play access I could install my favourite apps, download a new Theme from Cyanogen and away I went. Phone call quality was fine and photos also worked. The SD Card preserves a few things like my photos etc but all told it took about a day to go from 4.1.1 to 5.1.1 and I've now been able to install some Apps that wouldn't work on the older Android OS.
It's still day one so don't know how this will work out but the smartphone is more responsive now and flows between menus and apps very nicely. The new UI breathes life back into an old phone and despite the learning curve it was worthwhile and saved me some money. I'm also bloatware free which was another bonus. I had to skip updating all the crap apps I didn't want but couldn't uninstall before. Would I do this with a brand new phone? Probably not, but for an older one where the manufacturer has stopped releasing updates for over two years and you are wide open to security vulnerabilities, this may be one way to respond, while getting better control options not normally exposed to end users.
I hope this gives you an insight into the process. It may be possible to do this with Windows but I found the Ubuntu approach interesting and had the spare hardware once VMware Workstation proved unsuitable.
Thanks to everyone over at Cyanogen Mod for all their hard work and for opening up later Android versions to those of us with older handsets! They are working on CM 13 which gives Marshmallow, mine is now using 12.1 which is Lollipop. You can opt for more beta releases but obviously be prepared for bugs and stability issues.....
