ZTE Blade / Orange San Francisco

Having tried all the popular ROM's, here's my 2cents, from an amateur point of view combined with the average user's demands.....I hope this helps the novice out there. Open for discussion....

Cyanogen M - loads of 'tweakability', its a Supersized Rom with loads of tools and toys. Negatives: Poor Battery life(latest nightlys have improved tho), Wifi not reconnecting, other small bugs here and there....8/10

Froyo/Swedish Spring/Japanese Jellyfish - Ill group these because they offer the same features i.e. ease of use, reliability and fair/good battery life. It focuses more on the phone acting as a...eh...phone. A good stable runner for the average user....7/10

Portuguese Spring - A supersized Swedish Spring, it takes all that's good from SS and adds some bells and whistles. Battery life, for some reason, is even better than SS, some really nice mods like the notification power widget, there are "white" themes available for those who don't like the blue effect. Most reliable, stable, battery friendly mod I found so its an 8/10

Ginger Stir Fry - A fantastic Rom running 2.3.4... A few small bugs like proximity sensor issue, lock screen, zte alarm. Performance is amazing and battery life is right up there with PS. I'm waiting for a few more bugs to be sorted before I go back to it but I will go back to it. The creator doesn't like the praise he gets for putting it together but still, its a 9/10

Blue Ginger - A flavour of Ginger Stir Fry. A disagreement between this developer and GSF means that BG is hard to source but its out there. Claims of 30% improvement in performance were not proved so all hell broke loose. As a Rom, its a great flavour of GSF, with all the positives of GSF and a few more toys, improved performance in some area's but drops in performance in other area's. If you don't like blue, you won't like this. All in all, its an 8.5/10

Nicely summed up there Damie.....fair play.

No disagreement on your marking either.

For peeps looking for the latest GSF updates, like Beta's 18 and 19, they are available to download with Rom Manager, free version.....

also below mirrors:

http://www.filesonic.com/file/1599609351/gsf-blade-b19.zip

http://www.multiupload.com/6OQ7HB4LA4

md5: bfe7c2ebdcad27f5c6093274d93cfa9e

not sure of changelog......


and WBAW (John Kenney) is a grumpy young man :P

but puts this ROM together very nicely.......:D

irishpancake wrote: »

Nicely summed up there Damie.....fair play.

No disagreement on your marking either.

For peeps looking for the latest GSF updates, like Beta's 18 and 19, they are available to download with Rom Manager, free version.....

also below mirrors:

http://www.filesonic.com/file/1599609351/gsf-blade-b19.zip

http://www.multiupload.com/6OQ7HB4LA4

md5: bfe7c2ebdcad27f5c6093274d93cfa9e

not sure of changelog......


and WBAW (John Kenney) is a grumpy young man :P

but puts this ROM together very nicely.......:D

He's highly strung alright:D

No changelog for B19 yet, I dont think the proximity sensor issue can be fixed until/if ZTE release the source code so I'll be waiting a while until this magic happens:)

For some reason the proximity sensor just would not work for me with GSF. I downloaded Elixir aswell to see if it would give me the same results and it did. Once I put PS back on, it works fine. I
t doesn't happen with every Blade, dirty little bug! PS is more than capable for what I need so I'm not too bothered about waiting for more updates. I usually just change due to boredom:D

Anyone from personal experience recommend a good spare battery? i know there's load on ebay etc but half them don't give the battery amount stated.

Thanks for the rom run down damie really helpful

I got one on adverts for €9. The guy seemed to have a few. Not much you can do about extending battery life except by having a couple of backups.

Today I twice tried to load GSF from

http://www.multiupload.com/6OQ7HB4LA4

both times showed 'install complete' but on booting display just flashed a green android.:(

Loaded Swedish Spring from http://www.mediafire.com/?iv91d1edrd2iytj

It installed and booted just fine

My main motivation for changing from stock firmware is to allow occasional USB tethering. Any one able to point me to the correct USB XP Pro driver for this ?

shadowninty wrote: »

You can just copy the data over to the new one. Should be 99% fine

Was thinking there might be a need to do some sort of format on a new one ?

0lddog wrote: »

Today I twice tried to load GSF from

http://www.multiupload.com/6OQ7HB4LA4

both times showed 'install complete' but on booting display just flashed a green android.:(

Loaded Swedish Spring from http://www.mediafire.com/?iv91d1edrd2iytj

It installed and booted just fine

My main motivation for changing from stock firmware is to allow occasional USB tethering. Any one able to point me to the correct USB XP Pro driver for this ?




Was thinking there might be a need to do some sort of format on a new one ?

If it's over 2GB, the default formatting is FAT32, your original 2GB is probably formatted FAT (16).....

FAT32 is compatible with Android, and you can use Apps2SD, which is fully supported on Froyo(Swedish Spring), check out Market for supporting App2SD App.

No need for ext Partitions on your SD card with the above, works on FAT32.

Also,when copying your existing SD contents to your PC, make sure you copy all files, including hidden files folders and drives, most important.

Check this from Windows Explorer Menu...Tools/Folder options, View Tab.

Also, if you are getting a new SD, you could take advantage of darktremor A2SD, by having an ext-2 or ext-3 SD Partition on the SD Card (about 1024MB).

I would get http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html to do the partitioning, formatting, etc.

Get A2SDGUI if you are going to use darktremor A2SD....:)

It is not advisable to use both darktremor A2SD and App2SD at the same time...choose one or the other, Google is your friend!!!

On USB Tethering, not sure, but the ZTE Windows drivers below worked for me when I was setting up a Vista PC:

http://android.modaco.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_id=72058

Check out this App also, but I think SS supports Tethering natively.

Hope all this helps!!

charlesh wrote: »

MP3 - how difficult was it to replace the screen? did u find a good tutorial on youtube?

Check out this:

http://androidforums.com/san-francisco-all-things-root/389250-japanese-jellyfish-broken-screen.html#post3046548

mp3ireland2 wrote: »

I just had a written guide but that video there above looks good! Can't really remember as it seems so long ago, so it must have been handy enough! think i was a little nervous of the connection at the top, connecting the electronics but it was all straightforward as far as I remember!

And there is also the instruction thread from Modaco, lot's of pics for reference, I'll just post the URL below:

http://android.modaco.com/topic/335578-howtochange-the-digitizer-screen-zte-blade/

Very comprehensive......

And the YouTube Video:

shadowninty wrote: »

Yay! worked

Yup, Thank you all. Wouldnt have got to first base without ye.

Thing now is that what started out as a project to get email on a phone has creeped somewhat. The droid is now :

A Mifi ( dongle now in a drawer )
Internet radio
Talking book player ( public library lets me down load MP3s of talking book )
A SIP phone ( have an account with Blueface )
A handy way to check email

With it doing all of this I'm now thinking that I'll keep my old phone going

Thanks again

0lddog

(How close to the bleeding edge is Gingerbread ?)

Ok here goes I have blade gen1 used jj and am still on the cm 7.0.0 want to change but am going cross eyed at all this download re boot gen 1 gen 2 jargon

I want the ginger stir fry ..in the simplest way possible how do I get it