[Q] Upgrade Nexus One to the Prime or just keep it?

[lchiu7]

I bought the N1 on the day it came out and it's still going fine. Well I must provide soem caveats here so say it's not the original unit. I have gone through 2 RMA's with HTC and 2 paid for repairs for the power button. The last time the power button failed, the repair only lasted abouit 6 weeks and when I complained they sent me a refurb rather than fix it.

For me the only issues for the N1 are
- flaky touch sometimes (go to suspend and back usually fixes it)
- constantly running out of system memory and all apps I can move are moved to the SD card.

So it's either get a new phone or root the N1. Given that the phone works for what I want rooting and a new firmware might be the answer.

So given that I have never rooted a phone or installed new firmware, can people suggest the most appropriate firmware I should be looking at and the easiest way to get there. The phone is currently on 2.3.6 (OTA).

There is so much conflicting information out there it's hard to know what the best route is.

Thanks

 

[Txtraveler]

I bought the N1 on the day it came out and it's still going fine. Well I must provide soem caveats here so say it's not the original unit. I have gone through 2 RMA's with HTC and 2 paid for repairs for the power button. The last time the power button failed, the repair only lasted abouit 6 weeks and when I complained they sent me a refurb rather than fix it.

For me the only issues for the N1 are
- flaky touch sometimes (go to suspend and back usually fixes it)
- constantly running out of system memory and all apps I can move are moved to the SD card.

So it's either get a new phone or root the N1. Given that the phone works for what I want rooting and a new firmware might be the answer.

So given that I have never rooted a phone or installed new firmware, can people suggest the most appropriate firmware I should be looking at and the easiest way to get there. The phone is currently on 2.3.6 (OTA).

There is so much conflicting information out there it's hard to know what the best route is.

Thanks

I have a rooted N1 that I bought in February of 2010, a month after they became available. It was rooted when I bought it on eBay and running one of the CM ROMs. I don't know how to root a phone, sorry.

I DO know how to load ROMs and have variously updated and modded the phone myself. I have been fortunate in that my power button has never failed, but while I was running a series of OTA ROMs (ROMs based on the pure Android released from Google) I noticed that the latest ones disabled the trackball wake feature, meaning that the power button was the only way to wake the phone. I had gotten used to trackball wake with the first CyanogenMod ROM, and so once I learned that the power button was a weak spot, I decided that a CM ROM or a modded AOSP ROM was the only option.

As there were some issues with CM ROMs that took months to work out (see WONK), I went with an AOSP ROM that I found here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1121595 . It's now a dead thread, but the links to the 3.1 version of the ROM is still there. I use the apps2SD version of the 3.1 ROM.

There are several more ROMs that are more recent, but this one is the best one I have ever found. You will need to root your phone and install a custom recovery (like AmonRA or ClockworkMod) to use it, but I have found that everything works well and it is extremely stable. I have over 70 apps on my phone with over 80MB of internal memory still available.

The only problem I have ever had is an intermittent battery drain, which I was able to fix by wiping the cache files (Dalvik and regular caches). The custom recoveries have the ability to do this. Apparently any corruption of the cache files causes excessive battery drain, but wiping them (which causes the phone to rebuild them on the next boot - a 4 minute process!) gives you fresh cache files and fixes the problem.

If you are willing to learn how to root your phone and install a custom recovery, I can recommend that ROM. Once the first part is done, loading a custom ROM is as easy as putting the zipped ROM file on your SD card, getting to the bootloader and telling it to install the zip.

 

[addam360]

Well just so you know, rooting or installing any ROM will never stop the touch input problems. Its my main dislike about the N1. Apps2SD would solve your storage issues though and all the extra little perks of rooting just sweeten the deal.
Replacing a phone is expensive and just not necessary for the N1 yet. May as well root in my opinion. CM7.1 is now perfectly stable, include trackball wake, can support A2SD as far as I know and has some nice extras too.

As well as that it shouldn't be TOO much longer until we get a decent ICS ROM.

Hope that helps you.

 

[lchiu7]

Well just so you know, rooting or installing any ROM will never stop the touch input problems. Its my main dislike about the N1. Apps2SD would solve your storage issues though and all the extra little perks of rooting just sweeten the deal.
Replacing a phone is expensive and just not necessary for the N1 yet. May as well root in my opinion. CM7.1 is now perfectly stable, include trackball wake, can support A2SD as far as I know and has some nice extras too.

As well as that it shouldn't be TOO much longer until we get a decent ICS ROM.

Hope that helps you.

Thanks. I never expected the new ROM to fix the touch input problems. That is a fundamental hardware issue.

I was thinking along the same lines regarding ICS. It's gone AOS now and I now see somebody has built a port for the N1 already. So if I wait a bit if I choose to install some custom firmware, if the reports suggest ICS runs fine on the N1 (to confirm that Google didn't release it because there was a performance issue with the N1 and ICS) then that's the route I will take. In for a penny, in for a pound I guess!

 

[DaXmax]

(to confirm that Google didn't release it because there was a performance issue with the N1 and ICS)

The issue is not because of performance, its the system partition size is not enough... Gosh! Did u know Galaxy Nexus's system dump is 600MB+