Gingerbread on Sprint's HTC Hero

Well, like a lot of folks on the East Coast, I'm snowed in. And what better time is there to mod your phone? Owning one of the older Android phones, the HTC Hero (CDMA), I was excited to check out the performance improvements (and Chrome connection options) available in Android 2.3, otherwise known as Gingerbread.  While not perfect -- the GPS and camera still remain unfixed -- the alpha version of the mod has come a long way.  Much better than stock 2.1. Details after the break.

To get root access on my phone I used a program called z4root. After that, I downloaded ClockworkMod Recovery, directly from the Market. Clockwork allows users to boot into a special recovery mode where 3rd-party roms can be installed. I used it to install latest alpha of AospGBMod, along with a special version of gapps that was released Christmas Day. But I did have to cross some hurdles.

First of all, make sure to use the partitions menu to format everything but your sd card before installing Gingerbread. I also wouldn't recommend installing the gapps zip until you've successfully booted into the OS at least one time. After installing gapps, I also formatted the sd card before the reboot, just to be safe. Things mostly worked as expected except for the browser -- which crashes if it loads Google Mobile. Just change the default home page to get around this.

On a side note, the version of Google Books I installed from the Market just seems to exit automatically. I'm not sure if this is a Gingerbread issue, or an issue with the mod itself. Chrome to Phone wouldn't play nice for me either, but I've had issues with it before.