Flashing is a dangerous and nervewracking process that, unless carried out precisely, might brick your precious gadgets. It fills me with a nameless sense of dread. However, driven by frustration from books that kept crashing and the need to always carry a bent paperclip with me, I decided to upgrade my firmware on the Bebook. After browsing the Mobileread and Bebook forums and finding the most recent official firmware wasn’t particularly stable either, I decided to go for the open source ereader firmware OpenInkpot. Despite its latest public release being only at version 0.1, forum opinion appears to be in favour of OI due to its greater stability. And then I decided to take the plunge and just go for the version 0.2 snapshot. Whoo, living on the edge! (They say it has more features and that it is stable enough anyway).
So far I’m really liking how much control I have over the way the ebook is displayed and how I now have text search. No crashes so far but early days yet. Only gripe is now I don’t have a “recent books” reading list.
On most occasions when I ride the tram, people ask me about my ereader. I always heartily endorse the Bebook. Hey, I only ran into problems with crashing a good few months into usage and even then I think I could have survived without flashing it. The other day a man sitting next to me asked if I was reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I must have drawn his attention since I was giggling so much. Intense black humour. I did feel a bit guilty about laughing so hard about people dying. (But not as guilty as laughing during American Psycho.)
Besides the occasional screen freeze which I attribute to never turning my phone off, my email settings for the last couple of months always disappear from my phone. It is bewildering. I finally knuckled down to upgrading my firmware today. My firmware has been outdated for, oh, 2 years, so you can see how eager I am to flash things.
There are a number of helpful guides on Sony Ericsson/mobile phone forums such as Esato, SE-NSE and Top Sony. Afte doing some background research (tedious and technical for a n00b) I decided to flash my K800i phone with K810 firmware.
First, a bit of background on my phone. I’m on Hutchison 3 in Australia. I had originally debranded it with Wotan and installed generic Hong Kong region firmware on it so I could type Chinese characters.
Here’s the lowdown:
EROM CID: 49
EROM Color: Red
Phone ID: K800
Region: HONG_KONG
CDA: CDA102511/85 R4A
Firmware Version: R1ED001
I never actually type Chinese, and all the guides use Generic Europe 2 firmware (appropriate for Australia too). Europe 2 firmware is more available so it just seemed to be the path of least resistance.
How to flash a K800i handset on 3 Australia with K810 firmware:
- Backup phone contacts with My Phone Explorer.
- Install USB Flash drivers.
- Install XS++. This is the program used to flash the phone.
- Follow this tutorial. You can download the necessary MAIN, FS and Custpack files from Top Sony or 4shared. I like 4shared because you don’t have to register and there are no download limits, but it doesn’t have the complete set of files that Top Sony has.
- Restore backup in My Phone Explorer. You may have to change the COM port in settings so that MPE is accessing the right port.
- Go to three here, enter in your handset details and the operator settings for email will be sent to your phone.
It’s actually quite a straight forward process once you understand what you’re doing. And if you know what you’re doing, it should be done in under an hour, easy. Because no one ever knows what they are doing (otherwise, you wouldn’t be here), I’m assuming you’ll be researching multiple guides and figuring out what the heck a CDA and CID is. It took me FIVE HOURS, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Here’s my current phone status:
EROM CID: 52 [yep, I had to upgrade the CID]
EROM Color: Red
Phone ID: K800
Region: EUROPE_2
CDA: CDA102568/11 R8A
Firmware Version: R8BA024
Everything works well, and I’m pretty happy with my non-buggy handset. I am enjoying the new camera driver, and Photofix, which is like “I’m Feeling Lucky” in Picasa, is not bad. Track ID is fun. The “show current location” beta function in Google Maps now works, probably because gMaps thinks the handset is a K810.
Since I’m all freshly enthusiastic about modding phones and that, I might try to install new camera drivers and acoustic drivers next. The Kopritis driver is looking pretty good. Check out this site for K800 resources.
…I originally meant this to be a sidebar minipost but it blew out.
