Flashing ROMs on X10 mini pro

For the last few weeks, I've been working on my near year old 'X10 mini pro' to install custom firmware on it. Sony Ericsson has already declared that they are not going to provide any further updates on this model. This means I have to remain stuck at Android 2.1 (Eclair) for the rest of my phone's life, or take on the risk of installing custom ROMs on my phone.

Prior to be able to install custom ROM, I did the following activities  (in sequence):

• Get Root rights for the phone
• Unlock the stock bootloader (Though later I learned that this is not 'mandatory' but required if the next step is undertaken)
• Install a custom kernel (Again, this is not 'madatory' to install Custom ROMs)
• Install a software called xRecovery and then install ClockWorkMod (CWM) software.

Once all this was done, I took a full backup of my phone using CWM. This is a very good thing to do. If anything goes wrong during the entire operation, one can simply reboot, invoke CWM during the reboot and then restore the backup. By the way, doing all this will break your warranty and you cannot blame anybody but yourselves if you "brick" your phone. [Brick-ing means, that your phone is rendered so useless that it can only be used as a brick now :) ]

Now one can visit various Android development sites and download custom ROMs. I always follow the xda developers forum. They have a dedicated section for X10 mini pro, so things are real easy. The development community is very active too.

For a complete guide, one can refer to the following link: From n00b to Custom ROM

My phone is now running on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). I skipped Froyo as I knew I would switch to the latest version anyways! Obviously I will skip Honeycomb as it is only for tablet devices, but don't know if the phone's hardware will be able to support Ice Cream Sandwich. And by the time Jelly Cake(?) is out, I will probably have a new phone!

Here are a few screen shots from my phone. I have installed the custom ROM, MiniCM7 Pro. This is version V16 of the software. This version is very stable and almost all functionality are working fine for me.