Cyanogen CM7 snap from Steve at borough11.co.nz

So it was only a few months ago when I got my A8183 Telstra flavoured Desire to use on Telecom XT, and like many people the first thing I did was flash it with a pre-rooted stock ROM, mainly to upgrade to Froyo, and secondly to remove all of the Telstra branding/apps that served no purpose outside of Aussie.

Now Gingerbread has been out in developer circles for quite some time, and the people over at CyanogenMod have released their first RC for the Gingerbread version of their mod; CyanogenMod-7 (CM7).

As per usual, there is a basic set of instructions which I followed with minimal issues, I’m just going to elaborate on that in the hope that someone who was 50/50 on doing it gives it a go (And also so I can remember how to do it next time…), as really, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t be doing this to their phones.

First off, a note to those who are paranoid with the A8183 850MHz versions of the Desire (Like I was) and this or any other mods breaking their reception. As far as these modifications are concerned, there are only two different types of Desire, the GSM (Bravo) and the CDMA (BravoC). Even though the Bravo GSM A8183 version uses a different frequency, it still uses the same radio files as all of the other Bravo GSM phones, so you don’t have to worry about breaking the radio by doing these upgrades.

Secondly, this ROM is based on vanilla Gingerbread. Not only will it completely remove your phone of HTC Sense, it contains a lot of extra features and enhancements. If this is a worry for you, then don’t do this mod. After having used CyanogenMod for a couple of days myself now, I can’t say I really remember what I got with HTC Sense that I don’t have now, and I’m starting to wonder how I would do with out the extra features.

Make sure you check out their website and are happy with the extra modifications before installing this on your phone. They also support a lot of other devices, not just the Desire. Also last but not least, this will completely wipe your entire phone, so make sure you have your contacts/etc backed up or synced somehow.

Alright, if you don’t already own a Desire (uh..) or you haven’t rooted your device, make sure you follow Step 1 and Step 2 of my earlier post.

Step 3 – Flash your Desire

1. Download CM7-RC1 for Desire from here, and the latest stock Radio from here (Original locations here and here respectively).
2. Rename the CM7 download to “cm7.zip” and the radio download to “radio.zip” and copy to your phones SD card.
3. Turn off your Desire, and turn it on holding down the Volume Down button, which will boot you into the Clockwork Recovery screen, which looks like this.
4. Backup your phone.  Using your phones volume buttons as up or down buttons, scroll to the “backup and restore” option, and do a backup. If for what ever reason the rest of the process goes horribly wrong, you can go back into this screen and do a restore to get it back to this point.
5. Scroll to “install zip from sdcard” and locate the ‘radio.zip’ file that you placed on there earlier. After this has installed, scroll to “reboot system now” – This will return you to your old phone OS, but with the upgraded radio file. Confirm that you still have reception, and reboot into recovery mode again.
6. Factory reset/wipe your phone by using the “wipe data/factory reset” and “wipe cache partition” options.
7. Scroll to “install zip from sdcard” and locate the ‘cm7.zip’ file that you placed on there earlier. After this has installed, scroll to “reboot system now” – Your phone should reboot with the CyanogenMod 7 splash screen into the Gingerbread initial phone setup screen.

That’s it!

Now, there are a couple of issues that I’ve noticed that are worth mentioning in case anyone else has the same;

1. On first boot, phone has no menu bar, and no apps appear to work. This happened to me straight after I had flashed the phone, all that is required is to reboot into Recovery and repeat step 6 above.
2. Overnight, the battery appeared to run dead. There is a known issue with the RC build regarding the Wireless Sleep Policy, which appears to have fixed the problem:
   1. Set “Wifi Sleep Policy” to never
   2. Browse to Settings -> Wireless & Networks -> Wifi Settings
   3. Press Menu -> Advanced and set Wifi Sleep Policy to Never
   4. Press Menu -> Save

I’ll update this post with any other issues, as/if they happen.