TMo Vibrant phone upgrade to Gingerbread

June 12 2011, 1:20am

Image via Wikipedia

My first Android phone was a G1 when they first came out, eventually, I got tired of waiting for TMobile to get around to upgrading the OS and followed a path others blazed in hacking the G1 to Android 2.1. It worked well and showed improvements in speed and stability. A little less than a year ago I upgraded to a Galaxy S Vibrant, it was a good phone, but once again updates from the vendors fell behind Android releases. TMobile finally released an update to Android 2.2 that was not an over the air (OTA) update, but had to be downloaded and installed though the Samsung Kies program. I went through that process, and it ended up making my phone run worse, and killed some programs such as the Contacts and Messaging apps. I found work arounds, but was not happy with the update. Today I decided to break down and hack my phone with the most current Cyanogen mod. Unfortunately  as it did last time, using my Mac seemed to be a bit of a pain. I used the instructions provided for Vibrant’s on the Cyanogen wiki. First the Heimdall program used to flash the rom, wouldn’t start up because of a problem with the QT library it used, I was able to fix that by downloading and installing the QT library here.  Unfortunately while trying to flash the new rom, my phone locked. I was finally able to get it active again using Odin and the info from this page, and borrowing my daughters Windows laptop. I tried to flash the phone again from my Mac but the Heimdall program could not see my phone, so I ended up using my daughter’s  laptop to flash the rom and get the new OS up and going. Once I got the new Android Gingerbread 2.3 OS up and going, it seems quite responsive and faster than the Kies based 2.2 update, and even than the original 2.1. I will post an update here after I have had a week or so running my refreshed phone.