When a recent custom ROM build appears for a device that has almost gone down into oblivion, owners rejoice because it is like breathing new life into their old devices. Owners of the Huawei Ascend Mate 2, particularly, will be happy at this piece of news that CyanogenMod, makers of probably the Android world’s most popular custom ROM, have made it possible for the old Huawei device to get a taste of CM13, which is based on Android Marshmallow.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 2 was released in January 2014, almost 2 years to the day, and was one of the Chinese manufacturer’s first phablet devices. It boasted of a 6.1-inch HD (720p) screen powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset, supported by 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage. Not at all bad specs, even for today’s standards – so it was a bit sad that most units never got to update their Huawei EMUI software, stuck on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean.
The phone is actually rated for Android 5.1 Lollipop, but most users have long given up on this device before the official updates arrived. So it’s good that the device is getting some Marshmallow flavors, care of CyanogenMod’s CM13. Given that these are nightly builds, expect some bugs here and there. If you want a more stable build, a “snapshot” release – something close to being very stable – of CM12.1 is also available for the device.
Caveats, you may need to flash a specific version of TWRP’s custom recovery specifically designed for this device’s bootloader. After that, you can flash either CM13 nightly builds or CM12.1 on your Huawei Ascend Mate 2. Check out the files needed at the source link below.
SOURCE: CyanogenMod
I tried the March 14th CM13 nightly. It seemed to work pretty well. The main problem I had the device seemed to suffer from battery drain. I assume that this is due to the rom being in development and not optimized fully. Nevertheless, this was a big enough issue that I switched to the last CM12.1 snapshot. I noticed that battery life was back to normal (what I had experienced with the Huawei 5.0.1 rom).