Sunday, September 18, 2011

Install Samsung TouchWiz 4.0 for Galaxy SL i9003

If you have updated to the Gingerbread 2.3.4 and rooted by following posts on my phone, then you would see that there is not much cosmetic changes done to the User Interface, except for the status bar battery icons etc. The easiest way is to update to a new UI is to install any other launcher such as Go Launcher. In fact Go Launcher Ex is very powerful, and it has most of the features you would look for in your phone, and also many themes are available for download. As a second launcher I would always have it on my phone, in case the primary one fails after some updates etc. 

But the battery consumption seems to be very high, may be because of the visual effects. The main reason I wanted to update to new UI theme is that, with Galaxy S2, Samsung had get rid of that icon tiles which would give an iPhone type look. But sometimes the choice of wrong color for the tile makes it look very boring, and some how I am bored with it, and want to get rid of it.

So, I come across this link on XDA, and he has given the TouchWiz 4.0 Launcher apk, which is working fine with my Galaxy SL, and I have obsolutely no issues with it. Few of the Widgets does not work with it, especially the Samsung ones and mostly you don't need them at all, so you can delete them get rid of it.

The install process is very simple,

  • Copy it to SD card via ADB or any other method.
  • Use ADB connection, and login as root.
  • Mount the /system/ as RW
  • There will be TouchWiz30Launcher.apk and TouchWiz30Launcher.odex files, make a back up of them incase if something goes wrong.
  • Replace the TouchWiz30Launcher.apk with the new one downloaded.
  • You need to place the lib file inside the /system/lib folder
  • Use cat source > destination as cp command does not work

Now that most of things work except for Samsung Widgets, There is an Share button when you edit the app drawer, which would cause a force close, you need to fix this.

Download the ShareApp.apk from here, and place it in the /system/app/ folder following the same method mentioned above.

You are DONE, you would have a fully running, low battery consuming Samsung Touch Wiz 4.0 ready on your phone, Enjoy.

The Benefits are as below. 

For appdrawer:
  • column count
  • item count per page
  • free sort mode / alphabetical sort
  • enable/disable colored tile
For Home screen:
  • enable Landscape mode (if you change from off to on -> needs a reboot to take effect)
  • use big page indicator icons
  • whether to show the App names
  • uninstall apps from home screen [on/off]
  • page indicator icon fades off after swiping [on/off]
  • amount of rows on home screen
  • screen count-defaultscreen (starts at 0)
  • amount of icons in dock (not tested with higher numbers then 5)

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