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The Galaxy Note 5 was released by Samsung last week with the exact same chipset as the one powering the Galaxy S6. While both the devices are essentially powered by the same Exynos 7420 SoC, the newly released phablet gets many extra features and optimizations aimed at increasing productivity and making multimedia consumption more enjoyable on the larger device. Not only that, the new phablet apparently also comes with better memory management and improved performance, thanks to some optimizations carried out by Samsung since the launch of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. As for the Galaxy Note 5 ROM, it also includes SideSync 4.0, enhanced controls for the cameras and various UI tweaks which are absent on the slightly older Galaxy S6.
No wonder then that many S6 users would desperately want to get their hands on the Note 5 firmware. One would have expected the ingenious and resourceful Android developer community to come up with a way to try and port those features onto the smaller-screened Galaxy S6 at some stage sooner rather than later. Now, according to a post on XDA, developer arter97 believes he has managed to do just that. According to his post however, the port is still very much a work-in-progress, with many features still not working the way they are supposed to, including the fingerprint scanner. He also mentions that both the cameras are “very unstable”, while the “many modes are not working” and the video camera is apparently malfunctioning as well. However, you’d expect some quirks from a beta build anyways. While the ROM is now available for one and all to download and flash onto their Galaxy S6 smartphones, arter97 points out that this ROM is specifically for the SM-G920F variant, which is the global, factory-unlocked model.
Anyways, this is not really for the faint of heart, as it comes with the standard set of disclaimers that you get while rooting and flashing any custom kernel. Yes, you can brick your device and void your warranty if you do it all wrong or something goes pear-shaped during the whole process. If you’re aware of the inherent risks, you may proceed to install the Note 5 ROM on the S6. Firstly, you’ll need to install ClockworkMod (or PhilZ) recovery on your Galaxy S6. Then download and save the Note 5 ROM on the phone itself. Normally, you’d save it on an SD card and enter recovery before performing a full data wipe, but since this device doesn’t come with external storage options, we’ll have to give that a pass. The next step would be to flash the ROM and then, flash a custom kernel with Note 5 ROM support. Currently, only arter97 kernel 2.2 supports this ROM, so you’ll need to download that from the source link below. Finally, you may optionally, flash SuperSU.