Lolipop (Android v5) on Oppo Find 7(S)(QHD)

NOTE: I am not responsible for any physical damage or loss of *imporatant* data or for wasting your *precious* time. Strictly use the info provided at your own risk.

Oppo caught my eye because of the developer friendliness of the forums. And it is good that it comes recommended by various devs out at XDA. If anybody visits their forums, they would be shocked to see that the custom roms are allowed to be uploaded and discussed about equivalent to their own color os. Now, there are some glaring issues with the device

1. No unified memory(Yes, this is something many of the major brand phone users dont understand. This is becuase all their phones have unified memory). search the public network for more on this.
2. The color OS from oppo is still at JB in its stable version.
3. There is not ETA regarding the upgrade of the phone to KK or lolipop

So, what do we have here?  We have a phone with excellent hardware specs(This is pretty relative since the specs area a moving target), Good build quality and QHD resulution. The display is crisp and clear.

As concerns cooking of custom roms, oppo helps the third party devs a lot and also showers them with free devices to aid them in development. Another plus is that your warranty is not void if you flash a custom rom until you dont damage a hardware component in the process

The roadblocks in development/cooking of custom roms are

1. No Kernel sources(were available, now removed)
2. No blob bundles(as provided by sony)

But, still devs have been succesful in cooking up custom roms and have succesfully built lolipop roms using jelly bean blobs and other pieces from one plus one. So the result is we have working Lolipop roms from Nameless(based on cm) and omni. Both the forums are very active and what rom is chosen is just based on personal preference. Nameless is a bit senior here.

Getting down to business let us see how to flash custom roms on the find 7. There are various roms based on KK for the find 7(CM, PA(official device status), Nameless and many more). The general procedure to be followed can be summarized as below

1. connect the phone with coloros. In windows it will prompt for installing software of the phone. Install it. This will install the necessary drivers.
2. Shut down the phone
3. Press the up volume and power button until the phone vibrates
4. The phone will display "fastboot..." exactly at the centre of the screen
5. Connect the phone to your computer
6. Wait for windows to install the necessary fastboot drivers(required only once, later phone will be recognized immediately)
7. Open terminal . Go to the folder where you have your adb and fastboot executables
8. Run "fastboot devices"
9. This should return a serial number
10. copy the twrp and coloros recovery and rename them aptly into the folder with fastboot and adb executables
11. flash the twrp recovery run "fastboot flash recovery twrp....img"
12. unmount the phone
13. shut down the phone
14. Hold the down volume button and press the power button together until the phone vibrates
15. You will boot to twrp
16. Backup the present coloros and reboot
17. Boot the phone into coloros
18. shut down the phone
19. Press the down volume button and the power button until the phone vibrates
20. if you boot into the coloros recovery it is fine. Otherwise follow the steps from 2 to 13. But use the coloros_recovery.img in the fastboot command
21. Flash coloros v1.2.5
22. This is the version with the modem which plays well with all the custom roms out there.
23. shut down the phone
24. follow the steps from 2 to 13 and flash twrp........img
25. step 14 and 15
26. From now on you know the drill of installing a custom rom(Before installing any custom rom or coming back to color os from custom rom, do a standard wipe(cache, data, dalvik cache))
27. For me paranoid android was of choice for the find 7. The major reason is it being maintained as the "official" device
28. The other major reason being that their releases are sedate and minimal.
29. As for other things on PA check out a video made available on the oppo forums regarding PA on find 7 QHD.



You are now finished with trying and playing with custom roms and now want to return to stock. Just restore the backup you earlier made. Flash back the color os recovery. You are now ready to recieve OTA's from oppo.

My favorite phone Xperia Mini Pro is alive and kicking......

I already have a lot of posts on the favorite phone. I have written all about its features, rooting it, installing custom roms and everything. This post is particularly about the attitude of big corporations and their lethargic attitude towards the customer once a sale is made.

Business institutions are full about various subjects relating to customer satisfaction/customer requirements/repeat customers. Students from these institutions get high packets based on the things they learn from these institutions and are taught about all the ideals of keeping the customers happy.

But once these students end up with big organizations, with a very costly noose around their necks, called the "tie", they are re-programmed to work in the traditional way the whole business is being carried out. The very best example of how these organizations work has been the android eco-system. Being an open eco-system based on apache licence has put into open the negatives of traditional way of customer satisfaction.

Customers these days are over-whelmed with information about products and their features. This information is again adulterated by paid reviews of the product and see that it gets maximum penetration. This is one side of the coin which deals with selling a product to the customer. Now, the android eco-system starts with a sale, while other products end with a sale. Organizations are finding it difficult to assimilate the fact that a sale with open systems, dont end with a sale, in fact it starts with a sale. Customers are eagerly waiting for additional services/product upgrades. So, why are the customers so much demanding? The answer lies in the open nature of the android eco-system

Once a device is released, the kernel code which is under GPL is to be released in parallel. So, what do traditional companies do to continue doing their traditional business? They delay the release of the kernel sources. Now, once the kernel sources are released, there is only one task remaining, build a custom rom for that device with all the updated features available in the AOSP code released.

AOSP is a moving target, being updated everyday with bugfixes and new features from volunteers worldwide. But the device came with a static rom and that is exactly what the big organizations are ready to give you. Well, the customers dont want that, they want their device to be alive as long as it meets their requirement or they can make the device meet their requirement by using upgraded code from the AOSP project.

How do big organizations stop users/devs from doing the above? Create binary only drivers packaged as blobs and Linux supports blobs to be loaded as it is(This is exactly what makes RMS fume on the licensing choice of the linux kernel). Now, without these blobs, the custom built rom would not function out of the box, resulting in a rom, with limited functionality compared to the stock rom which came with the device.

Let me come back to the subject, xperia mini pro. Awesome design for a qwerty phone, little heavy thats it. Its an awesom device. Sony upgraded the software radically only once. They upgraded it to ICS from GB, cribbing all the way about the lack of hardware capability to run ICS throught the build process which took almost an year. After that they orphaned the phone. Another team, the freexperia team which is responsible for bringing cyanogenmod to xperia devices also lifted their hand from upgrading the phones to the next version, JB.  Half hearted attempts were made by them to build cm10 for the 2011 series. Once they saw that the device did live it up to the task, they became serious and we had 4.1 for our phones, then, they stopped and decided that 2013 is too late for 2011

Now, it is the turn of the individuals to expand the life of the device. nAa, did the unthinkable and unimaginable for 2011 devices he started with 3.* kernel and has succesfully built 3.4* kernel for them, But of course he was still standing on giants. You should feel the device in your hands running this fantastic kernel and 4.2.2, the lates branch of android. In fact the 2013 flagship sony devices are still on 4.1.2. The device feels snappy and ready for future android releases. Thanx to all the devs at Cyanogenmod and users/devs at the xda forums, my fav phone has got a new lease of life and is completely rejuvinated.

So, shall we jump to Customer satisfaction 3.0....................

Update:- 14.08.2013

We now have android 4.3 a.k.a Cyanogenmod 10.2 on the Xperia mini pro. Thanx to the efforts of mikeioannina and ofcourse nAa we now have LegacyXperia 4.3 . Go ahead and flash it.