ZTE Blade: how we got to sane Android 4.1.2

    Amazing devices are sometimes produced by different companies. In the recent 2010, ZTE launched a new smartphone called Blade. The device belonged (and, by the way, belongs) to the budget segment, and, therefore, does not shine with its characteristics. You can find the characteristics themselves on the same Yandex.Market .
    The smartphone was produced in two forms - European and Chinese. Chinese was equipped with 256 mb. RAM, and the European - 512 MB.
    For 2010, it was an excellent budget smartphone, equally good both in price and quality (except that the 1250 mAh battery let us down), it worked out of the box on 2.1.

    Time flies, the android is updated, the device is updated. 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.5 - did not take long. The device received the official CyanogenMod version 7. But here comes a new round of Android evolution - version 4.0, and our device is out of work. Qualcomm, which produces codecs for decoding for different processor architectures, has announced that it will not release new codecs for devices with ARMv6 CPUs. the fourth android used exactly the new versions, then there was no question of updating the speech. Sadness ...

    But suddenly a topic appears on the MoDaCo website in which the author posts links to the assembled CM9 for Blade. This is where the thorny path begins.

    I will not touch on very early builds, because I bought this phone in March 2012. This is where I start. On June 15, the same topic appeared on the same Modaco by authorship of the user KonstaT (even then he was known on the forum for his own builds of the stock ZTE firmware), in which he uploads his builds CM9. A long and persistent correction of broken opportunities begins (some of our compatriots had a hand in this). Gradually, the build begins to grow into opportunities, changes, and more and more begins to look like normal CM9. Those same codecs from Qualcomm were replaced by third-party ones: there was no hardware video encoding / decoding, but the system worked.

    In parallel with this, on July 17, KonstaT creates a new topic.in which he begins to upload CM10 builds. But the problems are the same - there is no hardware c / d, a braked interface. And after all, what’s the funniest thing - if you could close your eyes to it on European devices, then the Chinese just went to bed - the lags and brakes were terrible. Plus, the so-called “Project Butter”, which accelerates the interface, did not work.

    And here, on October 24, on the w3bsit3-dns.com forumOur compatriot under the nickname Ganster41 lays out his assembly, in which he fixed the hardware c / d. Perhaps we can say that this is where a new round in the development of builds for ZTE Blade begins. On the same day, KonstaT updates CM10, and after 7 days a new build of CM9 appears (unfortunately, the last one). Well, in parallel with this, work is underway to accelerate and improve the system, and even at the "Chinese" new builds begin to work reasonably well.

    January 1 (: D) KonstaT launches its build CM10.1, which greatly surprised and pleased the community of owners of ZTE Blade. And on the 8th, he releases the latest build CM10 and focuses on 10.1. By the way, at that time 10.1 worked faster on the Chinese than 10. But not the point. January 20, daemond user announces the continuation of work on CM10 and releases his build. It is worth mentioning that in parallel with the development of "clean" assemblies, different developers ported others: Paranoid , AOKP , MIUI . And now we will smoothly switch to January 27, the Paranoid assembly. The author uploads a new build in which we see the coveted lines:
    Enabled hardware vsync
    Project Butter complete
    (Credit to Daemond)

    This is a breakthrough! Having downloaded this assembly, I was simply stupefied: the interface acceleration really took place. Yes, what - in my opinion three times. D:

    Actually, when writing this post, I was inspired by respect for people like KonstaT, Ganster41, Daemond, narkoman88, sanek1804 , who really were able to unleash the potential of the device and do what ZTE and Qualcomm could not do (after all, they wrote a petition to them, even two).

    That's all, dear Khabrovites, that's all. I beg you to answer the question - do I need to attach screenshots from the phone or not (they just are in themes with firmware). Thank you very much for your attention, I will be glad to any constructive criticism.

    PS I completely forgot to mention the young tital, who first began porting the branch at number 4 for this device.
    PPS Misled himself and others - Project Butter appeared in 4.1.2, so moved it a little lower by July 17 :)
    PPPS Here is my comment with a brief description of the different android builds.

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