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.

Custom roms on xperia mini pro locked boot loader

I, nor any devs or their work can be held responsible for any issues or for damaging your phone. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



This post is directed at people who dont want to unlock their boot loaders
Refer to my previous post regarding rooting and installing CWM on xperia mini pro ICS. Read further if your device is ready as per my previous post.

So, Fed up with the way your device looked and performed. Let us give your mini pro a facelift with these custom roms.

1. MiniCMSandwich Lite AOSP, Get it here, takes the top spot for custom rom on mini pro. The main reason being the majority of the ROM contains AOSP(Android open source project) a.k.a Vanilla ICS. The shocker is the amount of free space in the internal memory after installing the rom. This is a real barebones, vanilla ICS at its best. He has tried to take the best from cyanogenmod, AOSP and sony software and mixed them to come out with a great and awesome mod. People who want to theme their phones keep out. This is a great rom for people who want to run games n their xperia mini pro and install a plethora of apps. Every aspect of the phone is working fine and optimal. Thanx kamarush for a great rom

2. The second spot is a re-spin of kamarush's rom. CyanogenTimeScape. To qoute from his OP "This ROM is a Hybrid of Android Open Kang Project, Cyanogen Mod, and Xperia S ICS. The ROM is basicaly made by kamarush. I just modified it. The major challenge for me was to make the Sony Sound Enhancements work on the ROM. I could figure out how to do it after flashing the ROM more than 50 times on my device for testing purposes.
Other than these, I have provided some cool Xperia S apps in the ROM, to help increase productivity, and level of coolness of this ROM." It is basically a kamarush rom. If you like what DragonClawsAreSharp has done to kamarush's rom, go ahead and install it. The difference is minimal except for facts explained in the OP.

3. The third spot goes to expeacer's ExMIUI. Anybody who has rooted his phone would know the fork of android caled MIUI. Here is a fork of android which cares only about the looks. Yes, the ram usage is nearly twice that of kamarush rom. But you are looking for the good looks and theming, look no further. You can change the look of your phone just by downloading themes of miui website or from the public network and just apply them. It is an excellent attempt at bringing theis beatiful rom to this cute phone. The animations are superb and the mini pro gets a new identity. The only issue here is ram usage.

We have reviewed the best roms for xperia mini pro with locked boot loader. And one more thing, all thes roms feature the aroma installer(think it as a step by step configuration selection during installation) which is awesome. All the roms look good on the mini pro and the keyboard works flawlessly. I cannot end the post without thanking the devs of these fantastic roms. I just hope that these devs continue to love the awesome device created by sony designers. I would like to thank all the devs associated with the vanilla android, AOKP, MIUI and other forks of android. We love you.

UPDATE: 01/08/2012

I would like to add one more Custom rom to this list. That would be real ICS. It is now at version 5.1. This particular rom is interesting because it's major portion is based on Sony's stock rom. Loaded with many mods to make it a music hub. It has the best from the latest xperia phones and other sound improvement mods. If u like the stock feel, but want to extract the max out of your device, then this is the rom for you. Mind you, it is a heavy rom at around 250MB. and the ram/rom usage is on the higher side compared to kamarush's AOSP rom. With jelly bean around the corner by the same devs, this is good rom to try out the stock feel of sony with all the awesome mods. Since we are discussing devices with locked boot loader, this rom has not mentioned its support for locked bootloaders loudly owing to some caveats. After installing the rom, you may lose CWM. The best way to get it back would be to install x-parts from the market. With this you can install CWM back. Once installed, after reboot during the display of sony logo, the LED will flash blue. Just click any button to enter CWM. Thanx again to all the devs who are keeping the xperia series phones alive and kicking.