The Galaxy Y has always had a soft spot in my tech filled heart, with it being the first phone that I purchased with my own money (£57 from Tesco Mobile on a Black Friday deal, back in the day). I loved and hated the phone for over a year, moving onto its big brother the Galaxy Ace (S5380i, another weird phone that has too many variants. Like who wants a “La Fleur” Galaxy Ace? Jesus…) and then onto the Note and S series later on in life.
So when my partner was clearing out some of his childhood boxes, he stumbled across what described itself as a Galaxy Y, yet looked a bit…odd
The first thing I noticed was the enlongated homebutton, rather than the traditional square that Samsung were using for the Galaxy Y. Then it was the Carrier branding from O2 that really stumped me, because as far as I was aware, these phones were never branded from the get-go.
I pulled its back cover off and took out the battery, and there it was. “S5363” emblazoned on its IMEI label. Confused, I googled this to find that it was indeed a Galaxy Y, but it wasnt my Galaxy Y if you know what I mean.
The S5363 and standard S5360 share a lot of similarities, actually they are identical internally and externally on its rear. The only difference being the weird home button shape on the front, making it a real pain to find screen protectors for it as it was rather uncommon (almost unheard of on XDA other than a few random posts asking if something was compatible with their forsaken device).
With it being identical internally, I thought why not try standard S5360 firmware on this device. I loaded up ODIN (use 3.07 for this phone as 3.10 and above refused to even see it) with the firmware for the S5360 and hit flash. It worked perfectly and to my surprise even changed the initial splash screen to match the firmware. As far as the phone was now concerned, it had never heard of its weird model number before and worked as if it had always been running it.
I thought I would push this a bit further. So I wondered…“would a cyanogen ROM built for the S5360 run on this device?”
Yes. It does, but not without initial issues actually getting it onto the device.
Issue #1 – The Galaxy Y has no user accessable storage built in. So I spent 20 minutes wondering why it wouldn’t show up in my file explorer. Just buy a small capacity SDCard (I had a 4GB lying around that I used for this)
Issue #2 – The TWRP version suggested to use with this device is impossible to use before you flash S5360 firmware, as it will constantly throw “Error 7 (incompatible device)” at you. I found that flashing S5360 firmware, Flashing CWM and then flashing TWRP from within CWM was the best solution for this.
Issue #3 – I dont know how I did it, but I bricked it, and not in a nice way either. I bricked it to the point that even flashing stock firmware with ODIN resulted in a device that still bootlooped due to an incompatible filesystem being on the /data partition. Thankfully I found a “recovery flash” set of flash files which included a totoro.pit file to repartition the device completely during the flash process.
Issue #4 – I forgot to network unlock the device from O2 before doing this. Really stupid move on my behalf. Thankfully I still have a cracked semi working version of NSPro which managed to unlock the device in less than a minute (FLASH STOCK FIRMWARE BEFORE DOING THIS!)
After strumbling around these issues for a night, I now had an S5363, which thought it was an S5360, running CM9 (Android 4.0.4) quite happily.
Whats its use case? Nowadays, literally nothing other than a novelty. You could use it as an MP3 player, but you are limited in player options. The build in Apollo player works OK, but sometimes has an issue pulling album art that other players can see without issue. A leaked beta version of VLC built for ARMv6 is floating around on XDA. While this does work and can see album art, sadly it doesnt have a media controller available on the lockscreen or notification bar.
With Android 4 being cut off from signing into Google Services (I found a workaround here, but untested as I have fat fingers and got annoyed with the tiny keyboard trying to input a full web address into a tiny box) this device is really relegated to a “Look what I can do” type of device, rather than saving it from ewaste and regaining functionality. But do with that what you will.
Links:
S5360/S5363 Repair Firmware with .pit file (totoro.pit)
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