[Blade General] birrbert:
story of a beginner

Dear XDA, dear Forum, dear All! :)

I'm new here and I wanted to share with you my success regarding an old smartphone: the ZTE Blade or the one I have is called ZTE Base 1001 Lutea. It's a phone that came from Germany and I'm the type of guy who doesn't just throw stuff away, instead I try to give it a purpose. I wanted to leave a thank you note for wbaw, but I'm not allowed to post in the development forums so I hope here you'll read the message.

First of all, I'm not a smartphone user, so actually this was the very first time when I tinkered with one; I have my good old Nokia X1-01 and I'm happy with it. Secondly, it might be that I'm digging up a very old topic, but please bare with me and read my story; it might just inspire somebody. :)

The phone originally had Android 2.2.2 running and after I did a factory reset I tried to install apps, but very quickly ran into the problem of low internal storage. I started searching the Internet and found tremendous info. I spent the first half of the day reading and then engaged in tinkering. The first thing I realized was that I need to root the phone. I tried several ways (z4root, SuperOneClick, AndroidRoot,this XDA topic, etc.), but no luck; Root Checker app always came back with the message "no proper root access". Then I read somewhere that I don't need to root the phone if I install a custom operating system (ROM), because those are already rooted. I thought, that's something I should do, because the stock ROM is old anyway and many of today's apps won't install. So, I came back to XDA Forums and started searching for custom ROMs. And basically this is where it became interesting to me, because things started to work out.

Let me list briefly how I got the phone working with a new ROM:

- read this topic to check which ROMs are available for the ZTE Blade

- I decided to go with GingerStirFry Gen1 + Gen2 by Wbaw, because it had A2SD integrated and I read somewhere that if I want to move apps to SD card then this is the best method

- I went to that topic, but noticed that the ROM was marked as obsolete and there's a new revision

- I went to the Ginger SF r4 - ZTE Android 2.35 mod topic and downloaded the ROM

- The XDA topic I linked in the previous paragraph proved useful after all, I needed ClockworkMod to install the new ROM; gathering all the files and programs was a pain, especially the drivers, abd and fastboot, but in the end I got lucky and managed to get a hold of them

- I followed the steps, managed to copy the zipped ROM onto the SD card, started the phone in recovery mode with ClockworkMod, wiped user data and cache and finally installed the new ROM

- A few tense moment and phone rebooted with the new operating system

And that was it. Now I have a newer system on the phone with the added feature of being rooted. What I still need to figure out in the coming days is how to partition the SD card and how to a particular script to have more storage space for apps. There's this topic, but it's too brief for me and I don't understand the A2SD method for Rooted Users. If any of you have the energy to help me out, that would be great.

Probably you ask why am I doing this? It's simple: for educational purposes, for my own knowledge and because I'm a nerd who doesn't want to throw away working electronic devices. :)

Finally, a big thank you for XDA Forum simply because it exists and is helpful with old pieces of info even in December 2014! :)