learning and programing

L

Laney

New member
ok i'm new to this but i have spent the better part of today and a few other days looking for info on flashing phones and all that technical stuff. i've had anywhere from 5-20 browsers open with searches on this site, wiki, and search results from google so don't think i haven't tried.

i'm looking for a good starting place to find out about how to flash phones and to really get an understanding of how these phones work. i read about bitpim i think it was and another program called cdma something. most of what i found was about freakin moto phones. personally i'm interested in the helio ocean.

any help is appreciated. btw are there emulators for helio's? seeing as how i'm not going to go buy an ocean if i have no idea how to get it to work fully with cricket. i'd like to get an emulator and all the files from an ocean so i can work on a virtual version to see if i can get it to work. thanks.
 
cool but i don't have either of those i just have AIM. anyway if you're lookin to make a buck off this sorry but i won't waste your time. i'm just looking for some good learning resources. the basics, possibly an emulator etc, and i'll start messin with it. i'm pretty good at figuring things out and i don't want someone to just tell me how to do it all. yes i'm interested in the ocean but i'm more interested in learning about flashing in a general sense and some of the programing etc instead of knowing how to do it on just one phone.
 
ah well your better off doing what everyone else does here and read all the interesting threaRAB and check out multiple sites about phone flashing. Thats how most of us learned that and messeing around with the phones.
 
ok again maybe i'm missing something extremely obvious but i've spent about 8hrs today looking and most of the stuff had to do with moto phones and then bitpim.

i have done so many searches with every term i could think of or corabination and haven't really gotten much farther.

can you point me to some threaRAB that might be a good place to start? maybe a good tutorial or guide to the basics about phone flashing in a general sense?

let me put it this way, i went through this forum initiation stuff more or less when i joined up with one about mustangs. i wanted to learn how to do all sorts of things to my stang but had very little know how or experience with cars and no one in my family knows much. the guys on the forums would answer specific questions but mostly to get me started they said to go get a shop manual and some tools. it was enough for me to start. thats all i'm asking for.

here i'll be more specific and maybe that will help.

are all the settings that pertain to carrier service operation located in the firmware? basically all the changes i would need to make would be to the firmware?

is bitpim a universal program that will work with the majority of phones? i ask because i came across a lot of programs that were only for moto phones.

is it possible to get an emulator and copies of the files that you would be editing from a phone so that they can be worked virtually until i decide if i want to buy the ocean?

sorry for it being long but i figure if i ask some more specific questions maybe i'll actually find a direction to look instead of just grabbing for anything in any direction.
 
well first of all 1 day of searching is not enough..... you will need to search more if you want help.

second they are not called emulators, they called softwares.

third the Ocean is a really complicated phone, well not for us but you will have a hard time doing that phone so i recommend you get a Verizon LG or Samsung to start with and move on as you getting better...... that will be the best to start with easy phone and than move up to harder ones...... DO NOT buy any new Sanyos yet because you will regret it.....

anything you do will be hard...... and if you dont have enough money to pay than i recommend that you read a lot before trying anything or you will brick your phone..... just let Jammis help you for 30$
 
yea i was thinking about starting on one of my old phones, unfortunately i guess sanyo is not good, i have the 8400. but i have an older samsung from the end of 05 from sprint, it was free maybe i can start there. i also now have the entry level blue kyo from cricket untill i decide on a better phone.

unfortunately i do not have a whole lot of time to read, i'm working 12-16hr days 5 days a week on a split shift where i only get 1 day off at a time so that's usually spent cleaning my truck from the week, the house, laundry and erranRAB.

how about this, could you guys give me some good things to search for? if you want i can post a list of everything i've searched for if you think i'm giving up to easily.

basically as i understand it a phone comes from it's manufacturer with set features and then the carrier adRAB their own software or firmware to allow/deny certain things on the phone and put their settings to access their network. do i have that right?

if so then in the case of an ocean which isn't a supported phone on cricket unlike the razor, there is no specific cricket software for the ocean so it's a matter of changing the correct settings.

so is bitpim a pretty universal program to use for this? does it have a decent read me file?

maybe those things will be a good enough start. what i am doing is making a document of everything i come across that i don't understand so i can figure it out.

example, NAM, i don't know what that stanRAB for but that is not the type of thing i would ask you because i know that 5 min on wiki or google will tell me. and yes i'm starting from such ignorance as to not know what NAM stanRAB for.

edit - the emulators i was talking about was the idea of software that would emulate the phone, are you saying that the "software" you referenced will do this? allow me to take factory settings, edit them and then load them into the same program to see what the changes would do as if it was the real phone?
 
I'm not much in the "flashing" department of phones, as I've never done it, but here's the general grasp that I've gotten over the past month or so:

Phones use a PRL (preferred roaming list) to decide on which towers to get service from. There are Cricket PRL's posted on here, and they can be written to a phone using a nuraber of programs and the phone in question's data cable. Once Cricket's PRL is on the phone and that phone's ESN is associated with a Cricket account, calling and SMS messaging should work.

To get things like MMS (picture messaging) and WAP (internet) working, some re-programming will be needed. How a phone connects to the internet is carrier specific, so there will be a setting *somewhere* in the phone that says, "connect to this proxy with these credentials to access the internet." You need to find where that setting lies, either nested in the firmware, or simply in a menu, and then change it to match Cricket's settings (wap.mycricket.com:8080; user/password is [email protected]/cricket).

What I've described above is actually only reprogramming phones, not flashing them at all. Flashing means that you will not have to do any reprogramming, as the settings will be defaults within the Cricket firmware that you have flashed to the phone. There are things called "monster packs" that allow you to switch a phone's firmware to another carrier's in one fell swoop. I believe that monster packs only exist for phones that Cricket sells/has sold that are also available on other carriers (ex: the V3C RAZR).

This is everything that I've come up with in the past couple of months, and it all has mainly come from me reprogramming a PPC6700 to work on Cricket. It's very easy to get one of these phones working on Cricket, and it's a great learning process along the way. Another site you may want to check out is crickmafia.freeforums.org (haha looks like the domain got blocked here).
 
thanks bro that actually made a few things clear about the random info i've found.

so flashing isn't really the correct term for getting phones to work on cricket that actually arent sold by cricket, ie razor.

to get say the ocean to work that would require the PRL and ESN as you described and then reprogramming to get the rest of the features to work.

so i was doing some more reading and it looks like the xv6700 is prolly a better choice than the ocean or am i wrong? i'm assuming the the ocean is like the little league compared to the 6700 am i right?
 
I've never touched an Ocean, but I'm confident in saying that the 6700 has more functionality because there are tons of people all over the world developing software for Windows Mobile--lots of it for free even. It's a good phone, and the WAP and MMS path has already been gone down by a lot of people, so there is a lot of good information about how to get everything working. Check out cricket-mafia.com for a lot of good information about this phone.
 
CDMA requires PRL updates to access various networks. Its simply a file that tells the phone where to look for service basically.

GSM require nothing to access different networks other than a SIM, which is sorta like a PRL file.

GSM and CMDA phones can be flashed meaning upgrade software or change/add features sorta like a PC. Think of it like installing windows XP, 95, 98, or NT. You have different flashes that do different things.

Usually to flash a phone you have to have proprietary software like LG Download or Motorola PST. These are either very expensive or not available to the public. Flashing a phone can brick (kill) a phone. Always be careful.

The best way to learn is to buy a phone that you read about on the forums, and flash it according to instructions on the forums. I've flashed tons of phones that way, and I'm not scared to do anything as long as I have instructions.

Never be the first to try somethign on your phone, and read ALL instructions. I've screwed up a couple by not reading everything. cough cough vx9900.
 
cool. yea the more i think about what i want the more it seems i'm looking for a ppc phone. normally i wouldn't care about all those extra features but with cricket having unlimited everything i would prolly use them. but it still stanRAB that it's just wap and not real internet although i thought i read something about getting programs to work that require the internet by routing them through the wap using google or something. but the idea of having a ppc where i could write my own programs would be cool. otherwise might as well just get a regular phone.
 
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