How to Upgrade The Huawei U8150 IDEOS to Ice Cream Sandwich

I recently wrote about how to upgrade the Huawei U8150 to Android 2.3.x, Gingerbread and buoyed by the overwhelming response that article has gotten over the last one month, as I promised, here is a follow up. This time round it is about upgrading the Huawei U8150 IDEOS to the latest Android 4.0.4, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. 4.0.4 is the latest iteration of ICS even though Android 4.1, Jelly Bean is already out.

You can decide to upgrade to Gingerbread first then upgrade again to ICS or upgrade your Huawei U8150 IDEOS to ICS directly from Froyo. Either way, it works just fine. I have tested that on a couple of devices both ways and there weren’t any hitches. Read about how to upgrade to Gingerbread here.

Disclaimer

By rooting and flashing custom ROMs you are voiding your warranty and if you don’t follow the outlined procedure below correctly, may end up with a bricked device. Either way, try the procedure below at your own risk. Neither I, nor the developers of the ROMs you are flashing can be held responsible in the event of any damage.

Note

The custom ROM I have provided for download and use in this article is ICS Ideos. There are various Ice Cream Sandwich custom ROMs that I have tested but they all seem to be laden with numerous bugs. This is the best I found and I will give updates to it when they are released by the developers. Almost everything works fine here except the usual FM radio. Wi-Fi works fine as well as Bluetooth, the camera and all the sensors in the Huawei U8150 IDEOS. Other ICS ROMs have the camera, GSM and UMTS ports not working because they are based on CyanogenMod 9 which is currently not yet stable on many low end devices. ICS Ideos uses the stable CyanogenMod 7 thus everything is working and for those who enjoyed the Gingerbread upgrade, you will like this one even more.

Due to the low end nature of the U8150 IDEOS and the ROM being based on CM7, you will realize that the hard buttons that are a major feature of ICS are missing; this is largely because of the hardware deficiencies of the device.

I have included GAPPs (Google Apps) so that you can download and install them after upgrading to ICS so that the Google services which are at the heart of Android as an OS are available immediately without a lot of hustle.

The “idiot/ideot” as it is infamously referred to  in Kenya, is getting some ICS love.

Requirements

• Download the ICS Ideos ROM here [LINK 1]
• Download Google Apps for ICS here [LINK 2]
• ClockworkMod recovery installed on your device. If you don’t have ClockworkMod recovery installed then refer to my earlier post on how to upgrade to Gingerbread and use the steps outlined there to flash to ClockworkMod using ROM Manager app.
• Before proceeding, make sure you have charged your device to at least 80%. Battery failure while installing could result in a brick (Read disclaimer above).

Procedure

(You will notice that this procedure is almost the same as the one followed during the upgrade to Gingerbread, I have gone through it once again for clarity purposes). I assume that you have already rooted your device, installed ClockworkMod Recovery and are ready to go.

• Do a nandroid backup of your existing system. Don’t know how to do it? That too is covered here. Transfer the folder containing your backed up files to a safe place preferably to your PC or other storage media other than your phone’s sd card. The backup folder can be found at mount/sd-card/ROM Manager/clockworkmod/backup and will have a file name like “2012-07-03.18.43.48” (without the quotation marks).

NB: This procedure  is not necessary and can be safely ignored. However, if you are not a pro like me and others and are doing this process for the first time, then I strongly recommend that you do a nandroid backup, just in case things go amok somewhere.

1. Transfer the files you have downloaded above (as outlined in the requirements section) to your phones’ sd-card. Save them in the root of your sd-card, i.e not inside any folder. Just save them.
2. Reboot your device into recovery using ClockworkMod. Don’t know how? It is explained here.
3. Once in recovery mode, use the volume up and volume down buttons to scroll through the options. You can also use the phone’s middle button to scroll up and down.
4. Select Advanced then select wipe Dalvik cache. Confirm that you want to wipe your Dalvik cache. This will wipe your device’s Dalvik cache.
5. Go back to the main recovery menu using the phones’ default Android back button. Select wipe cache partition. Confirm that you want to wipe the cache partition. This will wipe your phone’s cache.
6. Still on the main recovery menu, select wipe data/reset. Confirm that you want to do a factory reset.
7. Here is the most important part: On the main menu of ClockworkMod recovery, select install zip from sd (as downloaded from LINK 1 i.e. icsideos_(cm7 mod)1.4(1).zip) in the next window.
8. You will be taken to a screen/window showing the contents of your sd card. Scroll down to your downloaded custom ROM and select it. Confirm that you want to install it. Wait while your custom ROM is installed.
9. Once the installation is complete, press the back button and select install zip from sd
10. You will be taken to a screen/window showing the contents of your sd card. Scroll down to your downloaded Google Apps zipped file (as downloaded from LINK 2 i.e. gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip) and select it. Confirm that you want to install it. Wait while Google Apps are installed.
11. Press the back button and select reboot system now.
12. You should wait for between 4-6 minutes for your device to boot up properly using the newly installed custom ROM. If it does not boot up in that duration, then redo the whole process. It means you missed something somewhere.
13. Once it has booted successfully, you will be taken through the familiar steps of logging into your Android device.
14. That’s it! You have successfully upgraded your Huawei U8150 IDEOS to Ice Cream Sandwich.
15. To confirm that you indeed have successfully upgraded to Ice Cream sandwich go to Settings > About Phone and make sure you can see the Android version as 4.0.4. (Check screenshots).

One More Thing

The custom ROM comes pre-installed with ADW theme which gives your device an ordinary look. For that extra step to have everything look ICS, I recommend you install Holo Launcher (Google Play Store link).

Check the screenshots here.

**UPDATE 1**

For those of you that are disgusted that ICSIdeos is based on CM7 and want something better, I have uploaded MIUI that I tested and found to be okay. You can download it here and try it out

**UPDATE 2** 16th October 2012

Over the past one month I have been testing the latest release of the ROM, ICS IDEOS. It is version 2.0 of ICS IDEOS. It fixes many of the bugs that were there in the previous release. Since it is an update to the exiting ROM, the link posted on this update will be the only one that redirects to a download page on the same. The old ROM still remains in the links posted earlier on this post so that every interested reader gets a chance to choose which one to go with. There is nothing big in the update but the bug fixes and inclusion of the Holo launcher that I had previously recommended for download and installation separately into the ROM by default. So grab the ROM here [LINK 3] and see what changes that are there. Many thanks to the ICS IDEOS team who have developed this custom ROM.

Strongly Recommended:

How to Root Android Devices

How to Upgrade the Huawei U8150 IDEOS to Gingerbread