There’s been quite a buzz lately about an official release of Gingerbread (Android 2.3) from Samsung and, in true style, there have been many leaked ROMs for the Samsung Galaxy S that have been gracing the web. Over the weekend, I decided to bite the bullet and put Gingerbread on my phone.
To be specific, the version I installed was Android 2.3.3 (XXJVK).
OMG.
For an unofficial release, it’s blindingly quick and even after installing a stack of applications (at least thirty) it is still incredibly zippy. Lag is virtually non-existent whilst boot and shutdown times are also very quick too (although the stock boot animation does suffer from quite a bit of stutter but who really cares about that?).
What is more amazing is that the default underlying file system is RFS which was blamed for such poor performance in the past and required the use of lag fixes such as the popular Voodoo solution to restore performance. Samsung have obviously pulled up their socks and sorted out the bugs holding back the hardware from operating at peak performance.
Anyway, here are some links to sites that will help you to install Gingerbread on your Samsung Galaxy S:
- The leaked Gingerbread ROM for Samsung Galaxy S with installation instructions,
- ClockworkMod with rooted kernel for Gingerbread with installation instructions,
- Gingerbread keyboard (as the ROM contains Swype and the Samsung keyboards only),
- The neat CRT power down animation when you turn turn off the screen (with optional battery mod) with installation instructions using ClockworkMod.
For me, this is a whole new lease on life for my Samsung Galaxy S and it makes me wonder what the Samsung Galaxy S 2 will do with this version of Android given the already impressive specifications of the new device.
Of course, there are a myriad of other mods already out there (including Darky’s ROM V10 RC3 from which I have stepped away temporarily) and individual additions that are available out there but I have found the above combination to be a winner.
A word of warning though – make sure you do a backup using something like Titanium Backup. After flashing, I realised that I had forgotten to backup my VeriSign Identity Protection application and data which meant I had no token to login to my eBay and PayPal accounts. Luckily, I had a ClockworkMod backup which I could restore after which I backed up VIP and a few other applications before flashing back to Gingerbread.
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