Verizon powered Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone users doesn’t need to feel that they are dejected as in the due course of this article we will be checking out on how you can make use of the latest Milestone 6 ICS Android 4.0 firmware which is the custom ROM firmware with a huge list of add-ons. All thanks to the XDA Forum Member beanstown106 who has come up with this firmware. AOKP builds have been doing the rounds from quite a while and to provide the purest ever Android experience, the AOKP releases have done pretty well. Please note that this is not an Official firmware released by Samsung Electronics but is a custom ROM firmware released by the third party developers. The best part is that it doesn’t come along with any of the bloat ware and custom OEM themes.
Disclaimer: Follow all the instructions carefully mentioned in this article, we should not be held responsible in any manner if your Samsung Galaxy S3 doesn’t boot up or gets bricked due to not following the instructions.
Rooting your device is a must since this is the custom ROM firmware, also you need to ensure that your phone is installed with the custom recovery image which once rooted then you can download the ROM Manager app from the Google PLAY Store and flash the custom recovery image in your device. To check on whether the device is rooted or not, you need to download the “Root Checker” app from the Google PLAY Store and check whether the device is rooted or not. This firmware should only be applied to Verizon Galaxy S3 smartphone which has the model number as SCH-i535. For your convenience, we have mentioned on how this firmware looks like in your Galaxy S3.
Features of Milestone 6 ICS Android 4.0 firmware:
- Android 4.0.3 — ITL41F
- Unsecure boot.img (stock AOSP kernel)
- Superuser & Busybox preinstalled
- Deodexed
- 180 Degree rotation
- Built in performance/init.d configuration (Thanks Kejar & company)
- CM Launcher/ Power Menu
- CM Brightness slider
- Custom color for anything in RC
- Clock Color/Location: Right, Center, Disable
- Battery Icon/ Color Picker: CircleMod, Bar, Text Only, Icon Only, Icon+Text or None
- Battery Bar in Status Bar or Nav Bar, Bar Thickness, Charging animation
- Nav Bar Transparency
- Nav Bar Button Reorder: Back-Home-Search-Menu
- Nav Bar Color Picker
- Nav Bar Button Glow Duration: Off, Fast, Slow
- Nav Bar: Long press to Search button
- Nav Bar Hide on Lockscreen
- Toggles in Pull Down Menu: Auto rotate, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, Aiplane mode, Vibrate, Silent, Sync, Data, 4G, Tethering, Torch, Brightness
- LCD Density (Careful with this)
- Menu Button location: Right, Left, both, Remove
- Menu Button Visability: Always show, Always show Invisible Icons
- Lockscreen Style: Quad, Octo, Stock
- Lockscreen SMS customizable shortcut
- Lockscreen Horizontal Option
- Performance Menu: (Use With Caution) Max/ Min CPU, Scaling Governor
- Unlock Sceen with Legacy Menu Icon
- Volume Key to Wake Screen
- Volume Key to Skip Tracks
- Long-press back button to kill process
- Disable CRT off animation
- LED pulse settings (time on/off)
- ICS ringtones/notification sounds
- Customize carrier text to whatever.
- Power Menu options: Boot to recovery/ Boot loader, Reboot, Screenshot
- Facebook contact sync integration (must wipe to get this)
- Disable Boot animation
- Keyboard: Volume keys act as a cursor while typing — disable in keyboard options
- Long press home for recent apps (thanks brucekey)
In the process of applying this update, you will have to wipe the data and clear the cache from the recovery mode and in the process of doing this all the user level data in your Galaxy S3 will be wiped off, so ensure that all the data is backed up with the help of below mentioned steps so that just in case if the data gets corrupted or eased, the same can be restored with the help of below steps.
SMS – Use “SMS Backup & Restore app”,
Contacts – Sync with the Gmail application,
Call Log – Call Log and Restore
Images, Songs, Videos, Files – Copy to internal / External SD Card,
APN and MMS Settings – Note down from the path “Applications > Settings > Wireless and Network > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names”
Up next make sure that the battery charge left in your device is minimum of 50% or else there is a rick of device getting turn Off in the middle of firmware update. Enable the USB Debugging Mode too from the path “Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging”.
So once you are done with all the above steps you can now head to the next page where we have mentioned the detailed guide on how to apply this firmware update.