4.0.4 Update

afrozeke

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I disabled everything mentioned in this thread and continued to get SODs. I finally had enough and rooted/romed it. Been running SuperNexus for a week with no SODs. Battery is pretty good too.

I'm one if those people that dislikes rooting and dealing with roms. So this was literally a last resort. My phone was completely useless at least once a day. This was my last straw with Sammy. They have great software on release day and then muck up the works supporting updates. Blame AT&T if you want the phone says Samsung and they should fight for their customers' satisfaction. They don't. After this phone finally bites it I'm going Nexus. As long as it's not a Sammy Nexus again.

I wonder how many people think this is a hardware problem and are re-upping a 2 year contract to get a new phone. Face palm.

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canesknights

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I disabled everything AT&T and also still receive SODs. I'm also going to go with SuperNexus, as I think it will be the closest to the Nexus 7, whose OS I really like.
 

barotropic

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I disabled everything mentioned in this thread and continued to get SODs. I finally had enough and rooted/romed it. Been running SuperNexus for a week with no SODs. Battery is pretty good too.

Hey, afrozeke, can you keep us posted on how well your phone is doing with SuperNexus? Like you, I don't relish rooting and ROMing my GSII, but I have no other choice, as I have no confidence that 4.0.4 will be fixed. So I want to make sure the risk and effort are worth it. Also, do you have any guidance/references (on the dummy level, please) on the process getting SuperNexus running?

Thanks!
 

afrozeke

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I'll keep this thread posted.

There is one issue that doesn't affect me at all. Netflix doesn't work on SuperNexus 2.0. I don't ever use Netflix on my phone so it was no biggie to me.

I'll post all the steps I took later tonight. I'm no good at tutorials however so it is better to do what I did: Head over to XDA and read about all the options.

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natehoy

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Six days after disabling the crapware, my wife's phone has just slept itself to death. Given that it was happening at least once and sometimes twice a day before disabling it, it's a significant improvement over the stock 4.0.4 with crapware enabled.

But now it's time to choose a ROM. CyanogenMod 9/stable? 10/nighty? Or does anyone else have one they particularly like? As vanilla android as possible would be nice.

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afrozeke

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How I got rid of 4.0.4

***Do any of this at your own risk. I?m not an expert at rooting or installing anything.***

Like I said I?m not good at writing tutorials. I?m going to keep it at a high level. We all know how to search forums and watch Youtube videos so please do those things for details. I?m not going to post links either. Not sure of the forum rules. Also, I?m sure I did one or two things I should not have but hey this worked for me.

Rooting: There are many options for rooting the I777. The easiest process I found to achieve root quickly was the Exynos exploit app. Side load that bad boy and press one button. You are rooted.

Decide on a rom and a kernel with cwm recovery. The rom will replace the initial kernel so just pick a kernel that is known to work.

I downloaded this kernel: SiyahKernel v2.6.14

It?s a gingerbread kernel. Be prepared for your phone not booting. More on that later.

I chose and downloaded this rom: SuperNexus 2.0 - I777 - BUILD 1 [01-01-13]

I picked it after reading the thread and not seeing that anyone had any major issues. Plus it had zero Sammy stuff in it.

I also downloaded the GAPPS package compatible with this rom: Google Apps JB 12-12-12

Now all of this is on my SD card.

Install Kernel: I paid for and installed the mobile odin app. Yeah it?s $5 but I did not want to deal with PC drivers. If you can deal with those there are free options.

Using mobile odin I flashed SiyahKernel v2.6.14. Once this is done the phone will not get past the Samsung Galaxy S 2 splash page. You need to pull the battery and hold power/volume up/volume down at the same time to boot into cwm recovery.

From within cwm recovery flashed SuperNexus according to the instructions and also flashed the Gapps.

All done reboot and sign in.

You?ll notice I didn?t mention backing anything up. I?m fully in the cloud and didn?t have anything important on my phone. YMMV as flashing requires a factory wipe. I also could not care less if my phone was ruined because I was hating it anyway. Now I kind of like it again. :)

Day 8 no SODs.
 

mviglesias57

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barotropic

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Thanks, afrozeke and mviglesias57! I'm switching my SIM card to my old iphone 3GS for a few days (I'll just hold my nose), and getting for work on SuperNexus for the SGH-i777.
 

natehoy

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Thanks for this. My wife's phone is back up to a sleep of death a day, even with the stuff disabled. Time to seriously research ROMs...

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barotropic

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For those interested, I followed afrozeke's advice, and rooted my GS2, then installed the SuperNexus ROM. It's a beautiful thing, seeing Jelly Bean 4.1.2 running on the SGH-i777.

I'm still re-installing apps and getting things organized, but so far it's smooth and stable. Battery consumption seems a little high, but probably about the same as before the 4.0.4 ICS update. (Despite all its other flaws, 4.0.4 had impressively low battery consumption, in my experience - except when it went berserk!)

I'll report back if I find any show stoppers.
 

barotropic

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I've had the SuperNexus ROM running for 4 days now - all I can say is, beautiful!! The phone runs better than it ever has: absolutely stable (the most important criteria after 4.0.4), pure Nexus jelly bean OS, good battery performance, and all features work as far as I can tell.

Heads up: My comments refer to the SuperNexus ROM (JB 4.1.2, build 5. The dev has a new version out, with JB 4.2.1, but it seems to have a couple of growing pains, so I'll wait a bit on that one. You can read all about it here: SuperNexus 2.0 - I777 - BUILD 1. And if you use and like any flavor of SuperNexus, consider a donation to the 16-year-old genius who does the work (paypal link on the thread referenced)

It was a little stressful for this amateur to learn and complete the root/ROM process, but well worth it. Guess I can at least thank AT&T for forcing me to learn to hack my phone.:D
 

afrozeke

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I'm at or near the two week mark now. Very happy with a rom vs 4.0.4. I think I can keep this phone around for at least another year now. And yes definitely help out whoever creates the rom of your choice if you go that route. Even beer...errr soda money is better than nothing.

Over and out. :D


Sent from my SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2
 

natehoy

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I installed SuperNexus 2.0 on my wife's phone. Only problems so far have been a failure to detect time zone (she set the time zone manually) and unreliable data (I changed the APN settings to the " phone" APN this evening and we shall see tomorrow).

I had tried CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly, but it didn't recognize the SD card so the camera refused to work. Yeah, I know, it is a nightly. That's why I bailed to something a little less aggressively beta at the first sign of trouble.

Speaking of the camera, my wife loved the camera app on SuperNexus. Though, funny moment, she asked 'where's the zoom control?' I didn't know, but I said, 'well, for consistency, if expect maybe pinch-zoom?' You should have seen her face light up.

It's the little design details that really shine. No fancy controls, just zoom like you do in any other app.

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mulasien

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In case anyone cares, I too have been plagued by the 'sleep of death' after 4.0.4. Disabling ATT Smart Wifi decreased the frequency, but did not fix it. I did read on the XDA Developer's forum that another possible cause was: look in your all applications list, see if there are two 'clock' apps, disable one of them and clear data on the other. Apparently, duplicated clock apps were wrecking havoc. I'll have to see if I can find the thread.

For me, though, I just got sick of it enough to root my phone for the first time and load Cyanogenmod 10.1 on it. Blamo, problem has gone away and I'm wondering why I haven't done this sooner. It's like having a whole new phone again (that actually works!).
 

natehoy

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Followed Afrozeke's general directions and got SuperNexus on board. We shall see.

OK, so we're now a solid week and more into SuperNexus 2.0, and so far the reports are good. There has been precisely one unexplained "needed to press the power button for a long time to start the phone" event. Other than that, it's been rock solid.

The one odd thing we ran into was loading the latest Google Apps caused the gallery not to sync with the server, so none of my wife's Picasa photos were visible from her phone. I had to load a patch file to make that work, and it reverted the camera back to a somewhat older and less fancy version.

But so far my wife is pretty happy with the phone on the whole. Much happier than when on the 4.0.4 update.
 

frozencloud

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Just checked my apps, had 2 calendar & 2 clock apps, disable 1 each, will see if that stops SOD......

At first, when i disabled those apps u mentioned, the AT&T crapware and I was still getting 2-3 SOD a day min. However, when I removed my Nova Launcher and went back to TW, the SOD stopped. So check if that helps.
 

natehoy

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My wife was using the stock launcher and still had them. I don't know if i had ever disabled the second clock, though. Once disabling most of the at&t stuff failed to resolve the problem, I needed to solve the problem and ROMed the phone.

She was not amused by missing phone calls and messages. After a week of trying to solve it using stock tools, she was pretty upset. And rightfully so.

This update was a nightmare, and I'm so thankful for the aftermarket folks who write stable, reliable, nexus-stock ROMs.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums
 

njr

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Aug 20, 2010
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I disabled the duplicate clock and calendar apps yesterday, and haven't had SOD since. Was averaging at least twice per day. Cautiously optimistic! :)

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2
 

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