Rooting Xperia Play

Harps

Just looking for a bit of guidance here, I've been reading up a lot over the past week about rooting on the XDA Developers forum and thinking of giving it a shot. I'm a compete novice on the subject though think I've got a basic grasp of it by now, my main reason for wanting to do it is just to get rid of all the bloatware on my Xperia Play because of the poor internal memory. I might look into more advanced stuff like cyanogenmod later though apparently it can cause stability problems for gaming so ill need to do more reading

I've found a method of rooting using superoneclick which looks easy enough though it seems I might then have to unlock the bootloader which looks to be more complicated and risky.

Anyone here rooted an Xperia Play or know if it's worth the effort?

Thargor

I rooted it which was easy and put cyanogenmod on it but bear in mind you'll lose all that sony gaming stuff, the list of games that opens when you opened the controller. cyanogenmod wasnt worth it in my opinion, no obvious gain in battery life and loads of minor glitches with the keyboard half appearing and other little niggles like that, it definitely wasnt perfect. The gamepad still worked fine in games though, seemed to be already set up whenever I played a SNES emulator and that kind of thing which was nice.

Root it and delete anything you dont need anyway, there was a lot of crap on that phone and it was very pushy about always being on or informing you when it did something, worth doing that on every phone. there's no risk unlocking the bootloader thats just a disclaimer people put on their tutorials so they dont get sued, everything is recoverable these days pretty much.

Harps

Thanks, think I'll go ahead to try and get all the pre-installed games and stuff off the internal memory, even with only a handful of apps installed my available memory is rarely above 60mb which has always been a pain

Are there any other particular advantages to rooting it then if cyanogenmod isn't worth it? I've read about overclocking to improve performance but I mainly just use the phone for 90's emulators that already run smoothly so I'm not too pushed on that

Thargor

Well you need to root it to uninstall that Sony stuff and any other bloatware that came preinstalled to free the memory up in the first place, that stuff is always locked otherwise, the uninstall option just fails, apart from that the phone will be identical if you're not unlocking to install CM or others, as I said I didnt feel CM was worth it.

I remember the memory issues now that you mention it, mine was a bastard for that even with CM installed, I used to use apps like these to clear the memory when the phone locked otherwise it used to start stuttering whenever it went a long time without a reboot:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.infolife.cache&hl=en

ED E

The play didnt get ICS no? If its still gingerbread (Android 2.3) then superoneclick is great.

Yeah, with that phone a bootloader unlock isnt worth it as the DRM keys do something, other phones you just lose trackID so nobody cares.

Harps

Its still on 2.3.4 yeah, apparently they couldn't get games to work properly on ICS so cancelled the upgrade.

I rooted it last night with superoneclick which was easy enough, ran into an immediate problem this morning though! All apps I moved to the sd card (just using the normal in-phone method) have either disappeared or stopped working after a reboot. I've read that the moved apps should be in the .android_secure folder but this is empty on the sd. A few apps still show up on the phone but when I click them they either immediately force close or just show up as that greyed out sd icon.

Is there any reason rooting would cause this to happen or is it more likely just a faulty SD Card? Its a new card so I have no reference as to whether it worked before I rooted

ED E

Yeah, where did you get the SD?

Harps

eBay, 32gb card for €16 so it wouldn't surprise me if there's a problem with it

ED E

Ebay is chock full of fake SD cards. Its probably dud, and your apps may thus be gone.

http://memoryc.ie/ or http://www.mymemory.co.uk/ are good options(and still good value).

Harps

Got a new SD card this morning and everything seems to be working fine now, I managed to free up about 100mb so that'll make a massive difference. All my previous apps installed plus a new launcher and I've still got 130mb free. I might try the link2sd method to get Facebook and others in the card as well but happy enough with that for now, think I'll take your advice and leave the bootloader alone

Blade

Thargor wrote: »

I rooted it which was easy and put cyanogenmod on it but bear in mind you'll lose all that sony gaming stuff, the list of games that opens when you opened the controller.

Need to free up some memory on this phone myself. If I just rooted it and didn't unlock the bootloader or put a mod on it, would I automatically lose all the Sony Gaming stuff? I'd rather keep some and just delete what I want off it.

Edit: Just tried to download SuperOneClick v2.3.3 from shortfuse.org but AVG is saying there's a virus in it?

Thargor

Only Cyanogenmod or any other Android rom will delete the Sony stuff because you're completely overwriting everything rooting and removing various annoying calendar and messaging apps is fine, just find out what the Sony game stuff is called and dont touch it. No clue about the virus alert, probably a false positive, grab the app from a torrent site instead if you're worried...

You can put the Play back to sony stock at any time anyway by just repairing it in the Sony PC Companion software iirc.