Well I finally bit the bullet and installed CM7 on my ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco) as well as upgrading from the Gen1 radio to Gen2.

The install all went quite well using the TPT image-and-upgrade method.

Disappointingly my downloaded apps didn’t all reinstall automatically, so spent a while on the Market re-sending them to the phone. Also the paid-for LauncherPro+ didn’t automatically unlock itself, however ROMManager did.

I forgot to backup my SMS’s, but I found that you can unzip your nandroid backup’s data.img using unyaffs and use sqliteman or sqlite3 to open the SMS or contacts databases:

data/com.android.providers.telephony/databasesmmssms.db
data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db

ClockworkMod Recovery 3.0.2.7 now works (doing a nandroid as I write this).

iGo 8.4.2 works fine. I don’t seem to have the charger reboot or GPS issues, although Google Maps caused the phone to reboot the first time.

Update: OK so the phone rebooted once when I yanked the USB cable – but I was overclocked to 710MHz from 604MHz stock at the time!

I’ve extracted the proprietary files from the phone into my cyanogenmod repo and have now compiled my own CM7 for the Blade. Nfc doesn’t seem to cause a problem for a Blade build like it does for the emulator.

Also it seems the platform version is 2.3.4 and the resulting zip is called update-cm-7.1.0-RC0-Blade-KANG-signed.zip, so major upgrades are afoot it seems….