Many people wanted to know if it is possible to port the HTC Sense in any other smartphone or not. Since there are many other smartphones available in market, it must be possible to have another smartphone with Sense too. I am writing this guide to tell you how it can be done. The first thing that you should know is, that this whole process is very hard and a small mistake can mess up the things badly.
The first thing that we need is a smartphone with similar architecture as that of HTC phones with Sense in it. The smartphone which you have chosen must not be powerful than the HTC phones neither of lower quality than it. You will need to use CM7 to replace the ROM with main operating system with Sense. So in other words, you are using CM7 as a base. This process will include of removing data from one ROM and inserting new data in it.
Open the Sense and the base, which is CM7 in different windows in your computer. Now copy the boot.img file from base to Sense. Make sure that you make a backup of the original boot.img file in Sense in your local hard drive. Now go in /system/usr and you will need to replace the keylayouts and keychars from Sense with the one available in base. This will just configure the key binding and key configuration of the base ROM with Sense.
Now search for dsixda's kitchen on internet and download it. Once done, start it and in the menu you get from the terminal you will need to go to decompile. You need to decompile the boot.img. You have to decompile the boot.img from both CM7, which is the base and Sense. Now in the RAM disk of both, CM7 and base, find init.rc. Here you will have to export the BOOTCLASSPATH to the top. Now it will generate a series of lines in which you have to do some editing. You will now find a line in the base’s RAM disks code which says ‘export BOOTCLASSPATH’. Replace this with same line from the Sense’s RAM disk code. Now you will need to add a2sd in init.rc. The dsixda's kitchen will prompt you t recompile every few seconds, but ignore it.
Go back to the menu of dsixda's kitchen and go for recompilation of the ROM> But don’t create a newROM. Just merge the currently made ROM with some other fresh ROM of Sense. Find ‘thunderc_unsigned_030812_163939.zip’ on internet. It has some important files that need to be exported in the ROM which has been just installed with Sense. You have to copy paste following files at /system/bin.
- a2sd
- bash
- apps2sd.hlp
- busybox.a2sd
- chka2sd, jita2sd
- launcha2sd
- starta2sd
If the Sense works properly with all these files, then its fine. But if not then you will also have to add ‘sh’ to it. Change he permissions of all these files to your preferred settings. In the ‘thunderc_unsigned_030812_163939.zip’ which you downloaded, you will find a file which will set the permissions of file to appropriate state. The name of the file is ‘move_cache_sd’.
Now you can boot the smartphone which you have chosen and flash the new ROM in it. After flashing, you can delete some bloatwares that might be present in /system/app folder and in /system/media folder. Reboot your smartphone and you will have fully functioning Sense in your non-HTC phone.
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