When it comes to Sony, the first impression that comes to our mind is its impressive features like its picture clarity in photos and video shoots. Continuing to impress its users, Sony has came up with a mid range Android Smartphone “Sony Xperia P” which was announced officially in February 2012. Regarding the specifications, it has screen resolution of 560 x 960 pixel, PPI of 275 on 4 inches LCD display. It has 1 GHz dual core processor and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread with 1 GB RAM. With no micro Storage Device expansion support in the smartphone, it has an on – board storage capacity of 16GB which is manageable. The rear camera is an auto focus one with 8 MP with LED flash and the secondary camera is the VGA one. It has a non – user replaceable battery which is of 1305 mAh.
Overall, it can be inferred that Sony Xperia P cannot be categorized in under powered Android Smartphone. Though it runs on a older version of Android Gingerbread, it can be upgraded to the higher versions of Android 4.4 Kitkat OS by rooting it and installing Cyanogenmod 11 custom ROM. As the process of rooting and installing of custom ROM is not official, you can precede it at your own risk. It being an unofficial process, it may void the warranty of Smartphone. They won’t receive any official firmware updates after installation of custom ROM.
If you are willing to taste Android 4.4 Kitkat operating system on your Sony Xperia P (which may never get it officially) you can go through the below process installing Kitkat based Custom ROM on your phone. But before that, lets have a look at its few important pre-requirements:
Pre-Requirements:
- First of all you should backup your entire data stored on the phone (not the sd card data) because while installing the Custom Rom, we need to perform factory reset which will surely deleted everything from your device.
- Charge up the phone’s battery atleast 60%. Phone should not get drained during the installation or it can be bricked.
- Download Xperia P USB Drivers and install in on your computer.
- Download Quick Boot tool from here and install it on your Phone.
- Download the Cyanogenmod 11 custom ROM and copy it on your Phone’s SD Card.
- Download Google Apps from here and copy it on your Phone’s SD Card as well. make sure you copy both files in the root directory of your SD Card so that it can be accessed easily.
- At last, ensure that your phone is rooted and custom recovery installed.
Once ready, lets move to installation process.
Process to update :
1. Connect your Sony Xperia P to your PC.
2. Copy and paste the ROM kit to your storage space.
3. Copy and paste Google Apps kit to your storage space.
4. Disconnect your phone from your PC.
5. Run the app “quick Boot tool” on your sony xperia P and select the “recovery” button to boot the phone in recovery mode.
6. Once the phone is booted in recovery mode, perform data/factory reset, wipe dalvik cache and wipe the cache partition.
7. Choose the option “install zip from sd card” from recovery menu.
8. Choose Cyanogenmod ROM kit that you have saved to your external card and confirm the selection.
9. ROM will be installed and now you have to select the same option again and choose google apps kit and confirm the selection.
10. Now google apps kit will be installed, now you can reboot your phone. It might take a longer time to reboot because its going to be the first reboot after installation of the custom ROM.
Congrats!!! There you go with a successful completion of Android 4.4 Kitkat Custom ROM installation on your Sony Xperia P. Peform the required settings and enjoy the latest Android OS.
