A Brief Encounter with Cyanogenmod 9 on the HTC Wildfire

I’ve been using CyanogenMod 7.2 quite happily since the last few months on Wildfire A3333. I recently tried to connect the stock Email application to a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server for my corporate Email.


When setting up the mailbox and accepting all SSL certificates and seting up a Password/PIN I still get the error

"This server requires security features your phone does not have"

This primarily seems to be because Android 2.x does not have this flavour of encryption – “full Storage card encryption”

This has been provided in Android 3.0 and in ICS 4.0 onwards for handsets

The relevant documentation is at http://code.google.com/p/cyanogenmod/issues/detail?id=3172



So I decided to upgrade to CM 9 for Wildfire and see where it takes me.

First and most importantly – do a Nandroid back up of the existing ROM and settings. You’ll revert to the backup many times. Also export phone contacts to a file which you will need to re-import later.

The version of CM 9 I used can be downloaded from here http://cm9-wildfire-s.googlecode.com/files/cm-9.0.0-RC2-CRYPTOMILK-ALPHA7-marvel.zip



After installing CM9 – the first impression was a neat boot logo which plays for the 3 minutes or so it takes to boot up the phone.


After that the phone was really really slow. The default launcher to show all apps and Dialer take over 5 seconds to respond.
Seems like the A3333 is just not cut for this ROM due to having only a single core CPU. Any reboot of the phone always takes over 3 minutes.

I tried using the Zend Launcher instead of the default Trebuchet and exDialer instead of the Stock dialer. This made these 2 functions much faster.

Also uninstalled some apps using the Solid Explorer. Some of the features were good - like longpressing an app allows it to send a shortcut to Home screen.

I tried encryption which I knew will slow down the phone even more. Most forums say this takes a long time, so I left it overnight with the charger plugged in.

I tried this process twice, and it still would always show the In Progress screen for encryption and not complete this even after taking 10 hours uninterrupted.

I followed the steps at How to encrypt


So finally I had to give up encryption, and revert the ROM to the backed-up CM 7.2

Using CM 9 gave me some neat apps which I now installed on 7.2

First, I didn’t like the Gallery app in 7.2 (it shows zoom buttons instead of pinch to zoom) so updated that with QuickPic
I also installed Solid Explorer which allows removal of apps even from /data/app and /system/app instead of File Manager.