I rooted in December 2010 and installed KaosFroyo 37. It had all gone pretty well for me, except for the fact that I was constantly fighting with the amount of free RAM, and even though I used Apps2SD extensively I was often needing to delete Apps that I wanted to keep, such as Swype.
Furthermore since early February I've had an odd problem that I'm able to send texts, but unable to receive them [any ideas why this might happen on Verizon?? Perhaps something to do with Google Voice? But I thought it might have something to do with KaosFroyo, so I decided to move forward to GSB ]
This morning I installed GSB, using the following extra-cautious procedure. I already owned a licensed copy of MyBackupPro, so I used that instead of buying a Titanium Pro license, although the latter is generally acknowledged to be better for this task.
- Backed up all apps to the SD card using MyBackupPro
- Took screenshots of all my 7 screens (using drocap2, to make it easier to reproduce my environment later on)
- Copied entire contents of SD card to computer
- Moved ASTRO to RAM (was Apps2SD) to facilitate management of ROM files if needed
- [ at this point, after clearing all Froyo caches, I had 35MB of free RAM ]
- Unmounted, reformatted, and remounted the card
- Downloaded GSB, GAPPS and Cache2Cache on my computer and copied them to the nearly empty SD card's root directory
- (didn't need ASTRO, as it turned out)
- Reboot in recovery mode
- Nandroid backup
- full wipe of data+dalvik
- Flash GSB
- Flash GAPPS
- Flash Cache2Cache
- Rebooted, successfully into GSB
- [ one point of potential confusion: after you enter your Gmail username/password, it tells you that there's a deferrable Market step. In fact, when you finally perform this step, it's the GAPPS configuration. I loved this ... I don't use gmail on my phone, nor do I use Facebook ]
- Copied MyBackupPro's backup onto SD card
- Restored all apps using MyBackupPro
- Reboot
- Selective restore from SD card's backup
What's good: there's a ton more RAM available. Using the same programs as before and using Apps2SD judiciously, I got up to 92MB of free RAM (a huge increase from 35MB). And I was able to move things to the SD card which wouldn't move in my KaosFroyo environment, namely Amazon AppStore and Phandroid.
For some reason my Wifi settings were retained but my Bluetooth settings were lost. Perhaps I didn't restore all the correct SD folders, but I wanted to take the opportunity to clean house a bit. Most of my widgets were inoperable and I had to delete them and restore them manually. Nice exceptions were widgets associated with AppsOrganizer (which has a clean backup via MyBackupPro) and LauncherPro's Android Agenda widget.
Apparently MyBackupPro restored all the apps to RAM. This would've been bad if I was still short on RAM, but avoided the complexity which some Cache2Cache users have complained about with regard to restoring apps which were previously installed using Apps2SD.
What's bad:
- QuickAppCleanCache is now incredibly slow when examining/changing a single app's settings, e.g. moving it to the SD card. It now takes about a minute to see the memory usage of that app ... worked instantaneously in KaosFroyo.
- Bluetooth voice dialing no longer works well. Has anyone else observed this?
- I installed the Swype beta (thanks to increased RAM!) but it failed saying that I was using a version of Swype designed for a different phone, and should contact swype.com for info on how to proceed. Has anyone else seen this? Or conversely, a successful Swype installation with GSB on an Eris?
- Still can't receive text messages :-( I certainly don't blame this on GSB, but I had hopes.
Thanks to the developers! And thanks to all of you for any suggestions/feeback regarding my lack of text messages, and the Swype and Bluetooth voice dialing issues. Overall I'm very pleased with how smoothly it's gone for me.
