One would think the 2009 HTC Magic / Saphire would be out of support by now. Stocked with Android 1.5 at launch, and later on updated over the air to 1.6 (Donut), the 32B low-on-RAM device seemed to be forgotten. Customers like me (I signed a 2-year contract with the carrier) installed custom ROMs, most of them poor on performance because of the aged specs. Many of us contacted Vodafone begging for an update, so bluetooth and wifi would work without constantly losing signal, we’d be able to install apps on external memory and, let’s face it, have a more grown up operation system. But no one expected an update would ever come available.
But as of now, Froyo is here for 32B Magics. Vodafone UK and NL are sending the OTA updates (yes that’s two updates) to your mobile phone as we speak. But only.. if you’re still on that 1.6 donut, official firmware. And I’m sure you are not. And if you are like me, either you lost your backup of that 1.6 Nandroid image, or didn’t make one at all. Bad news: the stock firmware is hard to find. I know I was looking for one, and so are many more as can be seen on the forums.
Back to the Good news: tonight I managed to install the official 1.6-by-Vodafone on my Magic, which was running Cyanogen 6.0. Flawlessly, after some research and playing around. And my phone is updating to Froyo right now, over the air.
I will be posting a tutorial in a few days. Please be patient, help is on the way. A tutorial can be found here: How to restore your custom rom-ed htc magic vodafone 32b – a walkthrough.