No Fear! Upgrading Your Cherry Mobile Nova From Eclair To Froyo

15.9.11 The Reporter 2 Comments

One of the more intimidating things that an Android user can do with his or her phone is tinkering with the OS itself. Rooting, the process of changing the Android OS installed on your phone with a custom Android version that you can download online, is scary for most users. It could void your warranty, or worse, you're at the risk of bricking your phone.

On the other hand, there's another way to upgrade the OS of your phone with a little less risk of bricking it: using a ROM that your phone's company provides on its website.

Surprisingly, for a local cellphone company, Cherry Mobile has it together in some ways by providing the best support that they can. Sure, hundreds of irate customers walk through their support centers every day screaming invectives at the poor customer service reps, but you'll have to admire the company for working on being as thorough as they can be with their support.

Take for instance providing a Cherry Mobile Nova-specific ROM upgrade from Eclair to Froyo. We came across this post by The Technoclast: Update Your Cherry Mobile Nova To Android 2.2.1 Froyo. From there, we downloaded the ROM file provided by Cherry Mobile, and then updated our Cherry Mobile Nova unit.

In less than 15 minutes of our day, our formerly Eclair unit now became Froyo. No need to go to the Cherry Mobile Support Center and line up among the irate customers. No need to get irate ourselves because the wait is too long and the toy phone is in the technicians' hands. It was a fast, slick, straightforward process.

Here is what we did:

1. We backed up all the notes, contacts, diary entries that we've created on the phone. Thankfully, Color Note has a backup function, so all other notes from other apps went there. Google automatically syncs contacts, but we still backed up our contacts to the SD Drive.
2. We made a list of all the apps we've installed on the phone.
3. Fired up the software. Watched the video. Followed the instructions on Cherry Mobile's website. Waited.

The phone blinked a new Welcome message in no time. We went through the process of re-registering our Android back on Google, and after that, the headache of reinstalling all the apps began.

The point is, it's simple, and it's doable.

Just make sure that:

1. You've backed up all that you can back up.
2. Your phone's battery is at least 15%.
3. Your computer is not in danger of running out of battery or going onto the Blue Screen of Death.
4. Neither computer nor phone shuts down in the middle of the process.

The computer we used for updating, though it was a mere Fujitsu Stylistic C500 running Windows XP, was able to get through the whole process. It gave the warning message "running low on virtual memory" a couple of times, but in spite of that, everything went well.

The process was faster than expected.

And mind you, a GIRL on our team was the one who worked on this process.

The bottom line is, a software update is doable. Just make sure you have the right conditions, follow instructions, and nothing should go wrong. Good luck!


Thanks to The Technoclast for making the tutorial and showing (and convincing us) how easy and straightforward it is to upgrade the Cherry Mobile Nova. Now you have two accounts of people successfully upgrading their Cherry Mobile Nova from Eclair to Froyo! 

If you look in the Technoclast's post's Facebook comments discussion, you'll note that other people followed the guide and were successful too. 



Video Credits: The Technoclast