Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Samsung Epic 4G CyanogenMod Notes and Links

Up until a few months ago I very much enjoyed having the Samsung Epic 4G as my personal phone. It is the best Android phone with full QWERTY keyboard that I have ever used, but the hardware is a bit dated and the WiMax speeds were not as fast as LTE, so I decided to upgrade to the Galaxy Note II on Verizon. Samsung stopped updating the software on the Epic 4G a while ago, but the CyanogenMod community has done a great job at supporting the phone and even has Android Jelly Bean 4.1 ROMs with full functionality. I still have friends with the Epic 4G so I thought I would post all the links I used for loading custom ROMs.
Most recent versions (As of January 2013)

Sprint has Steps to activate phone, which includes instructions for activating a used phone. These may not work in CM 10, but I usually put a temporary boot ROM on the SD card that will boot into the stock FC09 ROM
Temporary Stock Boot Instructions:
  1. Boot into CWM5 on your Epic 4G
  2. Install zip from sdcard > choose zip from sdcard > multiboot > FC09 > boot_FC09.zip
  3. WAIT.  It will take a while to boot.  You might see a "com.android.phone is not responding", do not worry, it is harmless.  Wait until Media Scanning is complete before doing anything.
  4. Follow instructions for activating phone or calibrating tilt sensor
You can also revert the Epic 4G to original locked boot loader and stock ROM if you have any issues with the custom ROMs or have to take it in for service/support.
Hope this helps any Epic 4G users out there. If Samsung ever decides to make another Galaxy S phone with a keyboard definitely will consider buying it, but for now I am enjoying the Galaxy Note II with flygrip.

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