Last updated on 12-Oct-2011
The LG Optimus One P500 has got the scheduled Gingerbread 2.3 update. But as per the feedback of the users, the release has some bugs and the performance is not that good.
Over the past few months I have tried out almost all the custom ROM’s available for LG Optimus One P500 but have found CyanogenMod 7.2 running on Gingerbread 2.3.7 to be the best one for performance, gaming and battery backup. While it has some minor bugs as of now, I have been using it for the past four months and have not faced any issues. 
Pre-requisites before proceeding are you must have already rooted your phone and installed custom recovery on it. Also it is required that you are using the new baseband on your phone.
- Download the latest CM 7.2 nightly available for LG Optimus One from here.
- Shut down your phone and boot into Recovery by pressing the Volume Down, Home and Power buttons together. You can move through the options using the volume up/down keys. Use the Search button to select the option.
- In the recovery menu, select Backup and Restore, then select the ‘Backup’ option. What this will do is backup your current ROM on your SD card, if something goes wrong while flashing the new ROM you can simply boot into recovery and restore your previous ROM using the Restore option.
- Connect the phone to your computer and inside Recovery main menu click the option ‘Mounts and Storage Menu’ and then ‘Mount USB Storage’. This will unmount the SD card so that you can see it in your computer. Backup everything from your SD Card. Safely remove the SD card from computer and then click on unmount from recovery to mount the SD card back in phone.
- Though it is not a necessity for this ROM, I would suggest partitioning your SD card to create swap and ext partitions. The ext partition will come in use if you want to install apps onto your SD card later. This is different from what you see in Froyo versions of Move to SD option. Partitioning will format your SD card, so make sure you backup your SD card as mentioned in Step 4.
- Go back to the recovery menu again and select ‘Advanced’ and then ‘Partition SD Card’. Then select ‘Partition SD’. Create a swap partition of size 0M and ext partition of size 512M.
- Toggle USB from recovery again in the same way as Step 4. Inside the SDcard create a folder named ‘AAA’ and copy the ROM you downloaded in Step 1 into the folder ‘AAA’ on your SDCard. Once done, eject the SD card and toggle USB again to mount the SD Card in the phone again.
- Go to the main recovery menu and follow the below steps one after another to wipe data, cache and system.
- ‘Wipe Data/Factory Reset’ –> Yes
- ‘Mounts and Storage’ –> Format /system –> Yes.
- ‘Advanced’ –> Wipe Dalvik cache –> Yes
The final step is to go to select Install Zip from SD Card –> choose zip from sdcard and then select the zip file you copied in Step 7.
Sit back and relax while the zip is flashed. Once recovery shows that flashing is complete, reboot phone from recovery. The first boot will take quite some time.
Enjoy official CyanogenMod 7.2 / Android Gingerbread 2.3.7 on your LG Optimus One P500.
Update:
The ROM does pre-install Android Market or any Google Applications. Download GAPPS zip from ROM Manager.
ROM Manager –> Download ROM –> Google Apps –> 20110828 Universal
Install from ROM Manager. Select only ‘Wipe Dalvik Cache’ when shown the options in ROM Manager.
The phone will ask you for the Google account you want to phone to be linked to. You can then see Android Market in your app drawer. Search and install the Google Applications you want.
