Huawei Honor 2 U9508

[yoavst]

Huawei Honor 2 U9508

models:

• U9508/Ascend G615 - 1Gb RAM
• U9508B - 2Gb RAM

specs:

ROMS & Official Updates (EMUI):

Official updates:
The official updates ordered by BXXX
4.0.4 Updates:

• B026 (Older versions: B018,B019,B024,B025) - those version come with the device pre-installed. It’s don’t reccomend to install them. Those version are 4.0.4 Android and they are not include Google Apps.
• B107 - This is the official Huawei’s international version. It’s an Android 4.0.4 version Stock (original Google Vanilla UI) which is come with Gapps. Multilanguage version. This version is considered as “Battery Saver” by most of the users in XDA. This version also got the biggest Antutu Benchmark score (15,000-15,500) which achieved in the device.

4.1.2 Updates (Emotion UI):
All of the 4.1.2 updates have the “Emotion UI” interface (more info about EMUI here).
There is only English and Chinese in Emotion UI (Menus).
Right now there is 2 version of Emui - “Emotion UI 1.5” and “Emotion UI 1.6” .
You can download it from here, use google translate.
EMUI 1.5 is the stable build. Emui 1.6 is the development build.

• B544 (Older versions: B541,B542,B543) - This is EMUI 1.5 stable build. it have all the futures of Jellybean and the unique interface. Very stable. Don’t include Google Apps.
• B624 (Older version: B605,B610,B615,B618,B624) - This is Emui 1.6 Development build. This version include a lot of chinese apps. Don’t include Google Apps.

ROMS:

• Xiui 1.2 stable (Older version: 0.9 beta,1,1.1) - based on B624 (EMUI 1.6, Android 4.1.2). All the chinese apps have been deleted. A lot of tweaks. Multilanguage version. Rooted. Include Google Apps. The lanucher is “Smart Lanucher”.
• Hiui 1.0 - Based on B624 (EMUI 1.6, Android 4.1.2). All the chinese apps have been deleted. A lot of tweaks. Multilanguage version. Rooted. Include Google Apps. The lanucher is EMUI launcher and it’s include “ME widget” & others...
• Miui V4 - Come in 2 version - 3.2.1 Based on Android 4.0.3 - 3.2.2 Based on Android 4.1.2 - you can read about MIUI here. Not include Google Apps. Recommend for 2Gb version only
• TouchWiz - Based on B026 (Android 4.0.4). Introducing the known samsung’s interface - “Touchwiz”. Not include Google Apps.

Other Download:

• Kernel for Jellybean version *ONLY* - The updated kernel which in B624 version.
• Recovery6.0.1.9_AscendHonor2.exe - this EXE file is required to replace the Recovery to the Chinese Recovery or back to the Original Recovery.
• Google Apps for Jellybean *ONLY*
• Google Apps for ICS *ONLY*
• SuperSU - Root controller App. You need this app to have ROOT.

Guides:
How to install Official Updates -
Method number 1 - Required EMUI:

1. Donwload official update which come as a Zip file.
2. In the Zip file there is a folder called “dload”. Extract its to the root library of the SD card.
3. Open Settings app.
4. Go to “About Phone” and then choose “System updates”.
5. Choose “Update via SD card” and then “Confirm”.
6. The device will reboot into the “Update installer” and then he will install the update.
7. If the installation successed, the device will reboot into the new version, if not it will reboot into the version which you have right now.

Method number 2 - Required Original Recovery (can be custom ROM)

1. Donwload official update which come as a Zip file.
2. In the Zip file there is a folder called “dload”. Extract its to the root library of the SD card.
3. Turn off the phone.
4. Boot up the phone with POWER & Volume + & Volume -
5. The device will reboot into the “Update installer” and then he will install the update.
6. If the installation succeeded, the device will reboot into the new version, if not it will reboot into the version which you have right now.

How to Replace Recovery -
U9508 have 2 types of Recovery - The original for the official updates - the chinese for everything else.

1. Open setting app.
2. Disable Fastboot option. Go to “Developer options” and enable “USB debugging”.
3. Connect the device into the USB. Choose “USB storage device”.
4. Open “Recovery6.0.1.9_AscendHonor2.exe”.
5. Now you have 2 options - 1 for The chinese recovery, 2 for The original recovery.
6. Write the number that you have choosen and press Enter.
7. If all is OK, the program will do its job - Reboot into FASTBOOT MOD, Flash the selected recovery and then reboot the device.
8. your selected recovery have been installed.

How to install custom ROM -
You will need the Chinese Recovery to install custom ROM.
This guide work with MIUI,HIUI,XIUI,TouchWiz...

1. Put the ROM on the SD card
2. Go to recovery by Turning off the device and then booting up the phone with POWER & Volume +
3. First you need to wipe all your data, Select the 4th option and then the first option [Wipe Data/Factory reset]
4. Now when your phone is empty you can install new ROM, Select the 2nd option and then 4th option.
5. Now select the Zip file of the ROM.
6. Select the first option, Now the ROM will be installed.
7. Now choose the “GO BACK” option (The last one) and then choose the first option - Now your phone will reboot
8. If the installation succeeded, After few minutes your phone will boot up to the new ROM.

How to install Google Apps or SuperSU -
This guide is almost the same as installing ROM, you just don’t need to wipe your data
This guide is also for installing kernel.

1. Put Gapps/SuperSU on your SD card.
2. Go to recovery by Turning off the device and then booting up the phone with POWER & Volume +
3. Select the 2nd option and then 4th option.
4. Now select the Zip file of the Gapps/SuperSU.
5. Select the first option, Now Gapps/SuperSU will be installed.
6. Now choose the “GO BACK” option (The last one) and then choose the first option - Now your phone will reboot
7. If the installation succeeded, After a minute your phone will boot up with Gapps/SuperSU.
8. You can check it by search in your apps for Google Play or SuperSU app.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUNCXEc3xD4dHJEM21Yd201Z3dydjRwUFRsUUthWmc#gid=0
this F.A.Q made by Yoavst ALL CREDITS GOES TO HIM, THANKS FOR CONTRIBUTING.

 

[sharries]

Huawei Honor 2 U9508 1G

Hi

New to the board and I did something rash and bought a Huawei Honor 2 U9508 8G 1G ram direct from China. Its arrived and looks great and even the camera is a pleasant surprise )

I have some understanding of rooting having owned a HP Touchpad and a Ainol Fire/Flambe but I am no expert and can easily become lost in all the steps.

So my question is...

Can this phone be de-chinesed? I have managed to root it using a tool from BinAry (how cool is that tool!) now I would be happy just getting a UK Google Play installed until the community gets hacking.

Any help appreciated (Mod please move to a relevant thread if necessary)


Cheers
Steve

 

[apnoia]

root

better root this phone by using "root with restore by Bin4Try", if you are on stock 4.0 (it doesn't work with 4.1.2 on this device)

to get gapps including play store fully working just download latest ics version, unpack it and copy files using root explorer. or download
this and assuming you already rooted (and having hisuite or huawei usb drivers installed) connect the phone to pc and run install.bat, look at the display and allow su root privileges when asked

most of the chinese stuff are under /data/cust/delapp, just delete it

 

[sharries]

Cheers

better root this phone by using "root with restore by Bin4Try", if you are on stock 4.0 (it doesn't work with 4.1.2 on this device)

to get gapps including play store fully working just download latest ics version, unpack it and copy files using root explorer. or download
mediafire /?o6r3ytju53885roand assuming you already rooted (and having hisuite or huawei usb drivers installed) connect the phone to pc and run install.bat, look at the display and allow su root privileges when asked

most of the chinese stuff are under /data/cust/delapp, just delete it

Great thank you, I hope it is that simple and wont brick the phone. This is the response from Huawei

Thank you for contacting Huawei device.

Sorry about because there has many different customizations in different countries’ carrier operators’ customized.

So you can’t upgrade your device which has bought in China to a oversea Android version.

And because of the law in China that all Huawei Smartphone which has sold in China all can’t support Google Play.

So your device which has bought in China also can’t support it.

Would anyone else (perhaps mods) +1 this to boost my confidence in the attached files ....

Steve

 

[apnoia]

Great thank you, I hope it is that simple and wont brick the phone. This is the response from Huawei Steve

yes, they need to obey the law at least until they release this phone to international markets, however, technically they do support everything just fine, all languages and the rest, it's just disabled or removed, but you can update it to "to a oversea Android version" see attached screenshots

chances you brick the phone with root and putting gapps are very low, but the risk is still always there. however if you didn't alter the bootloader in most cases you can still restore this phone into a working state

 

[sharries]

Great thank you, I hope it is that simple and wont brick the phone. This is the response from Huawei



Would anyone else (perhaps mods) +1 this to boost my confidence in the attached files ....

Steve

Worked a treat thank you :victory:

 

[sharries]

Thank you so much for the fix.

How did you get the languages? Mine has US English and Chinese only and I need UK

I am planning on buying the 2G 32GB for $405 and I see yours is 4.1.2 Are there any issue rooting that phone?

Steve

 

[apnoia]

you probably can try morelocale2, but I prefer to do it natively, it works well for me on 4.1.2 emui beta and I suppose it will work on 4.0 as well

find this file /сust/channel/cn/xml/hw_defaults.xml look for white_languages string, delete those lines with Chinese and English only, and uncomment white_languages where all languages specified.

it should look like this

<string white_languages="zh_CN,en_GB,en_US,pt_PT,es_ES,fr_FR,de_DE,ru_RU,it_IT,zh_TW,zh_HK,es_US,pt_BR,ja_JP,sv_SE,nb_NO,da_DK,tr_TR,cs_CZ,sk_SK,hu_HU,pl_PL,el_GR,et_EE,lv_LV,lt_LT,sl_SI,fi_FI,mk_MK,bg_BG,hr_HR,ro_RO,ar_EG,sr_RS,vi_VN,in_ID,bs_BA,uk_UA,fa_IR,th_TH,ms_MY,nl_NL,ko_KR,en_AU"/>

the only drawback is that you need to make factory data reset (no need to clear sdcard though) in order to make the changes to take effect.

remember if you break the xml formatting it may break something in the phone settings, so you might need to restore the whole firmware

Thank you so much for the fix.

How did you get the languages? Mine has US English and Chinese only and I need UK

Steve

 

[sharries]

Thanks again, I added one further question to the above post, you must have read it before I edited it...

I am planning on buying the 2G 32GB for $405 and I see yours is 4.1.2 Are there any issue rooting that phone, or better still how do you root the 4.1.2 if you cant use bin4ry?

Steve

 

[apnoia]

Not sure about 32GB version, I've seen only 8GB ROM which can be extended with sdcard only, with 1GB or 2GB of RAM, which cost around $380 now or $30 more with express shipping.

As of root and 4.1.2 version, I've got that on some Chinese site, there's a dev there who making prerooted rom images for U9508 based on EMUI beta. But my phone came with stock 4.0.4 version installed by default. I've installed 4.1.2 myself and customized it a bit for my needs, including languages, gapps, etc.

Thanks again, I added one further question to the above post, you must have read it before I edited it...

I am planning on buying the 2G 32GB for $405 and I see yours is 4.1.2 Are there any issue rooting that phone, or better still how do you root the 4.1.2 if you cant use bin4ry?

Steve

 

[gerstavros]

apnoia, does greek (Ελληνικά) language work? Also, where did you find 4.1 rom?

 

[apnoia]

apnoia, does greek (Ελληνικά) language work? Also, where did you find 4.1 rom?

Yes, it does have Greek in the menu, but I can't tell for sure if everything is translated well. Huawei customized 4.1 and added it's own launcher, and called all this EMUI. It's still in early beta and not publicly available though. I will make a guide on how to update to 4.1.2 but a little bit later.

If you've got this phone and want to enable your language in stock rom, try with "white_languages" method I've posted above.

 

[gerstavros]

Yes, it does have Greek in the menu, but I can't tell for sure if everything is translated well. Huawei customized 4.1 and added it's own launcher, and called all this EMUI. It's still in early beta and not publicly available though. I will make a guide on how to update to 4.1.2 but a little bit later.

If you've got this phone and want to enable your language in stock rom, try with "white_languages" method I've posted above.

If you set greek and it's not in english, then it's ok! Nice, i 've not bought yet but i ''ll order by christmas probably for a friend

 

[Mark Chia]

My Experience with the U9508

I just bought this last week while I was in Beijing. The salesman sold that for 1900 RMB but after paying I found that it was a locked version and I had to pay additional 200 RMB for an export set. The normal China Mobile and other phone shops don't carry this model and can only be found in their geek pc/handphone commercial district. Even then the shops there don't carry physical stocks but must run upstairs to the export offices.

This phone has it's own Huawei Shop which is crap and the first thing is to root it with the Bin4Try method. Then comes the big problem when I tried sideloading the Google stuff. Everything installs but won't run. I found out that the root System/Apps folder is non-writable so all the stuff that I tried installing didn't make it there. In a separate thread I read about using the ES Root File Explorer and reset the file permission of that directory. Copy the needed files to the SD card first and then use ES to rewrite the folder permission and copy the files over. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfam7mCOAAo)

Good to go! But only after much anguish since I did everything on my own without this guide. BTW, there's a very good app called APK Extractor from Play. This repacks installed apps on your old phone so you can email it off to your new phone to install when you don't have Play initially. I find that this is faster than loading from SD card.

It's not as smooth as my Nexus 7 but it's a really cheap and good quad-core phone. Yah the camera has a weird and unusual focal length. It's got a bright screen like Samsung too so that's a bonus.

apnoia I would really appreciate if you can put out your guide to 4.12 help.

 

[n1m4i]

gapps issue

Hi,
I've received my Huawei U9508 2G today \o/
I've got it from China, from an internet seller (merimobiles, to be precise). I didn't ask for it, but the first time I turned it on, it was already rooted. There was also a special installer for useful apps such as morelocale2, the google play store and google synchronization services.

I was very happy with it... until I've realized that some google apps just wont work. For example, Google+ tells me "Couldnt connect to server" when I open it, then I click OK and then it shows me the list of synchronized google accounts, I select mine and it goes again with "Couldnt connect to server" (I'm connected and can access other internet services...).
Mytracks asks to install "google play services" but when I do, I get an error: "incompatible with other application using the same shared user id". Google maps won't allow me to log in neither.

So I tried to reinstall the gapps using the method of the first post from apnoia, ... and nothing worked anymore, not even the play store... I figured this was because of the files rights. So after a busybox chown root:root *.apk, I have got the synchronization of gmail contacts, calendar and google drive working. But apart from that, I'm back to square one.
I also tried the script from apnoia with another image, namely gapps-ics-20120429-signed.zip from goo.im but I think that's not better.
Now, there are some issues that I don't think I had seen before: right from the android's start, youtube, google talk and google partners services crash with no action from me.

Sometimes I have a notification: "permission required (for account xxx@gmail.com)" but if I try to open it, it doesn't do anything. I've found another guy facing the same issue with the smartphone (www[dot]swedroid[dot]se/forum/showthread.php?p=1194895 -- I don't speak swedish neither, thats why I didn't reply ).

I'd really like to get the google apps working well. No one has got the issue here ?
Do you think that a factory reset would fix this ?

Thank you!

 

[apnoia]

n1m4i, yes try full factory reset, should help with your issue. otherwise reflash firmware, root and install gapps

btw, I think not a lot of people have this phone outside of china yet

 

[kimon60]

4.1.2

My U9580 2G will arrive in a few days from China.
I suppose i will also run into the same problems with the others users,as it concern
the Play store and Google apps.
I also would like to read the guide for the update to 4.1.2 multilingual rom.
Apnoia,can you please make the guide for us?

 

[n1m4i]

n1m4i, yes try full factory reset, should help with your issue. otherwise reflash firmware, root and install gapps

btw, I think not a lot of people have this phone outside of china yet

The factory reset did the trick! Thank you
At least google talk. I'll edit the post if there remains some issues yet.

Well, for those who want to try the factory reset like me... Be prepared to have to configure the phone while it's all in chinese :silly:
Just kidding, actually you can change the language to english pretty soon in the wizard.. but still, that's a bit confusing for the 2 first screens...

 

[Mark Chia]

Have you tried my approach to copying the Google files right into the systems/apps directory? That solved my problems.

Hi,
I've received my Huawei U9508 2G today \o/
I've got it from China, from an internet seller (merimobiles, to be precise). I didn't ask for it, but the first time I turned it on, it was already rooted. There was also a special installer for useful apps such as morelocale2, the google play store and google synchronization services.

I was very happy with it... until I've realized that some google apps just wont work. For example, Google+ tells me "Couldnt connect to server" when I open it, then I click OK and then it shows me the list of synchronized google accounts, I select mine and it goes again with "Couldnt connect to server" (I'm connected and can access other internet services...).
Mytracks asks to install "google play services" but when I do, I get an error: "incompatible with other application using the same shared user id". Google maps won't allow me to log in neither.

So I tried to reinstall the gapps using the method of the first post from apnoia, ... and nothing worked anymore, not even the play store... I figured this was because of the files rights. So after a busybox chown root:root *.apk, I have got the synchronization of gmail contacts, calendar and google drive working. But apart from that, I'm back to square one.
I also tried the script from apnoia with another image, namely gapps-ics-20120429-signed.zip from goo.im but I think that's not better.
Now, there are some issues that I don't think I had seen before: right from the android's start, youtube, google talk and google partners services crash with no action from me.

Sometimes I have a notification: "permission required (for account xxx@gmail.com)" but if I try to open it, it doesn't do anything. I've found another guy facing the same issue with the smartphone (www[dot]swedroid[dot]se/forum/showthread.php?p=1194895 -- I don't speak swedish neither, thats why I didn't reply ).

I'd really like to get the google apps working well. No one has got the issue here ?
Do you think that a factory reset would fix this ?

Thank you!

---------- Post added at 05:26 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:24 AM ----------

The Beijing phone stall guy was surprised that a foreigner goes into China just to buy a China made phone. He definitely is not a phone geek.

 

[n1m4i]

Have you tried my approach to copying the Google files right into the systems/apps directory? That solved my problems.

Yes, that was kinda the apnoia's solution. Finally that's what did the trick but I assume there were some conflicts with the seller's softwares that prevented it from working before the factory reset.

Conclusion: if you've commanded your phone from merimobiles, don't waste your time, flash the gapps right away and factory reset the thing before installing apps on the phone...