Thursday, November 14, 2013

Android 4.3 Jelly Bean on Xperia Mini Pro (SK17)

Sony decided that Android 4.0.4 is as good as Xperia mini pro gets, and a lot of other phones for that matter. Ice cream sandwich is no slouch, but no thanks to Java, the UI layer can be cumbersome for phones with slower hardware. Jelly bean to the rescue!. With project butter and various software optimizations the UI layer now can operate at 60 fps for a buttery smooth experience.
So how did I get jellybean on my Xperia ? Keep reading to find out. 

The first thing you have to do is rooting the phone, that's a no brainer eh? Find out how to root your device before everything else. It's usually different from device to device. Next up is unlocking your boot loader. Now some devices have factory unlocked boot loaders, if that's your case consider yourself lucky. This is not to say that others are unlucky, but YMMV. There are some devices where the boot loader is not unlockable. Now this is where most of you will choke and it will cost you money to make it unlockable. I had to pay close to 7 euros to Wotan server to get it done online. Mind you the process involves fiddling with hardware so it's not for the faint of heart. Once you are done you can get your boot loader unlocked with Test point method ( Wotan server also uses this).



When everything is done you are ready to flash that shiny jellybean ROM of yours. At the moment I use Legacy Xperia Jellybean 4.3 ROM which is based on Cyanogen mod 10.2 as the daily driver. You have to extract the ROM and flash the kernel file using the Flashtool. Then boot to recovery (CWM) and proceed to flash the ROM. I have the nAa kernel which is really good and fast. If you need more information on how to flash custom ROMs head over to xda-forums.