Galaxy Mini S5570 downgrading Gingerbread 2.3.4 to Froyo 2.1

After I saw the latest release Gingerbread 2.3.4 in samfirmwire.com about a month ago, I decided to upgrade my Galaxy Mini from Froyo (2.1). I upgraded without any hassle. The experience was quite good. The phone was faster and also the touch response was really good. I was happy with that :D

But, as Bangla is my native language and I use it a lot in my online activity including twitter, facebook, forum, etc - it was a must have support for my phone and I had that in my default ROM (S5570DDKC1). Although I had rooted my phone and installed a new font. What problem I faced that, the gingerbread build of the ROM didn’t have support for complex script rendering. Although it was an Asian build, but it was lacking complex script rendering support. So I couldn’t see Bangla clearly on the Gingerbread. Replacing the DroidSansFallback.ttf font was showing the characters, but rendering was faulty. So I decided to downgrade my Android OS to the Froyo stock ROM. I tried two Gingerbread ROMs that time, one is S5570ZSKPB - China build and the other one was S5570XXKPK - Russian build.

So, what I did next is - download the official ROM and install with the mighty Odin :D . But the problem was, it didn’t boot after installing Froyo. After installing, it comes with just a black screen and nothing else, no samsung logo or anything. But Odin can detect it. I was confused, why it doesn’t boot? As the power button and any combination key was not working (including the download mode combination), I thought I bricked my precious phone :( . But then I found a way, removed the battery, pressing volume down+menu+power and again inserting the battery, the phone comes to download mode again. Then installing gingerbread boots fine, but when I install Froyo, it doesn’t boot.

The problem was, the bootloader of the Gingerbread was updated version than Froyo. So it replaced the Froyo bootloader and when I was installing the Froyo ROM, the Gingerbread bootloader was refusing to boot again. So I had to somehow replace the bootloader with the Froyo bootloader.

You’ll see that, what ROMs you get in samfirmware is only a single *.tar file. So I had to find a ROM that comes with a bootloader too. Luckily, samfirmware has this one. You’ll see the last part of the ROM page is “Provider Samsung S5570 Firmwares”. Those ROMs come with 4 different files. I downloaded the “S5570XWKE3” ROM and found the following files:

1. APBOOT_S5570XWKE3_CL991862_REV02_user_low_true.tar.md5
2. CODE_S5570XWKE3_CL991862_REV02_user_low_true.tar.md5
3. GT-S5570-CSC-ERAKE3.tar.md5
4. MODEM_S5570XXKB2_CL968961_REV02.tar.md5

Installing this ROM with Odin did the trick and my phone was again back to Froyo. As now I’ve the Froyo bootloader, again I installed the Indian ROM S5570DDKC1. And again I got the nice Bangla support :D

This font rendering part is keeping us away from using the latest build. Android developers should really give us a way to choose what language we want to use, may be with some external application or some another way. I see posts in Google android group, XDA developers forum and other android forums - people are shouting about this issue. But no solve came till now. It’s really depressing, we badly need it :(