[Galaxy Ace S5830 Android Development] ApriliaM3:
My Ace-Of-Spades v1.0 Story : )

So… I used to be the proud owner of a rooted and modified Samsung Galaxy Ace / Cooper. Now I have a new Galaxy S2 and the Ace went to my girlfriend but not before I put everything back to an un-rooted and stock phone. She didn’t want to have any issues that couldn’t be fixed and was worried that she couldn’t return it to Samsung if it was modified : ) Apparently it’s a girl thing! : )

Anyway, now having the S2, it makes the Ace seem so much slower and the idea of speeding up her phone and just having a play with some new ROMs was more temptation than I could stand. Last night she had fallen asleep and I thought, “here’s my chance” : ) During the afternoon I had downloaded all the stuff I needed including the new Ace-Of-Spades ROM. Armed with this as well as Odin, rooting tools and assorted old backups, stock ROM and a Quadrant Benchmark of around 660, I proceeded to play.

First I rooted the phone and installed CWM 4.0.0.9 which I had tried and trusted in the past. I then made a CWM backup of the system, copied the A-O-S ROM to the SD Card and rebooted into recovery. I followed all the instructions about reset and clearing cache etc. then loaded up the ROM in CWM and proceeded to run it. Here was my first problem because A-O-S didn’t like CWM 4.0.0.9 at all and my screen filled with error msgs followed by the installation aborting. No problems I thought… it probably needed a later version so I hunted around and grabbed 5.0.2.6 and this time the install went without a hitch and I was soon running A-O-S on my girlfriends Ace.

I downloaded Quadrant Benchmark from the market, rebooted the phone again to give the new ROM another chance to settle into its new home and then ran Q-Bench. A few minutes later I was looking at a Q-Bench score of 1460!!! I certainly wasn’t expecting that! I figured I might get a 20% or 30% improvement but it was more than DOUBLE the original score.

There was a lot of stuff missing as you could expect from a new and stripped down ROM but I hope some of it makes a return in v1.1 Things like the display menu missing the option to select your own background wallpaper or the contacts menu not being able to select phone memory or SIM memory etc… but the speed difference on the benchmark was quite amazing and it actually translated into a smoother running system. The fact that most, if not all languages were available was also a nice bonus.

Anyway, I thought there was just a little too many options missing in this build for my girlfriend to accept so I decided to flash restore the CWM backup I had made of her system. I assumed that having made the backup under CWM 4.0.0.9 instead of 5.0.2.6 would not be an issue when restoring using 5.0.2.6 but it seemed I was wrong… I booted into recovery mode, selected restore and chose the latest backup and away it went… but it seemed to take a long time, with a lot more details flashing on the screen than I expected however it completed successfully or so it said. I selected reboot now, got the Samsung logo with Galaxy Cooper GT-S5830 and that’s where it stayed! Bugger!

So now it’s like 2am in the morning and my girlfriend has the pillow over her face to sleep because of the glow of my laptop screen beside her and I’m thinking to myself “why do I even start these BS experiments” : ) Now I pull out the battery, reboot into recovery again and flash the old 4.0.0.9 build of CWM and try restoring the backup again. It says it was successful (again) so I select reboot and the same BS happens… stuck at the Samsung logo. What a pain in the A$$! I tried all sorts of other things but was becoming resigned to the fact that my old phone needed some more serious attention.

Out comes the ever-reliable Odin. Loaded up the old stock ROM that I’d had originally and ran that.

Bingo! She boots up like a champion again… So I rebooted into recovery (CWM 4.0.0.9) loaded the recent CWM backup and ran it. Rebooted again and the phone loaded up like I’d never even started this nightmare : ) Thank @#!%$. By now it was 3:30am but at least I could try and sleep, knowing that I didn’t have to give her my Galaxy S2 until I could fix her phone : )

I hope you enjoyed reading my story and I look forward very much to trying Ace-Of-Spades v1.1

Hopefully I’ll be able to change the wallpaper and select phone or SIM memory etc. in the new version : )