An Insight into the Motorola Phone Modding Community ---------------------------------------------------- Written by leethacker Tuesday, 31 May 2005 Coming from SonyEricsson and Siemens phones, I was at first really disappointed, when I bought my current phone - a Motorola Razr V3 - earlier this year. Most things I have taken for granted like doing firmware updates with my own computer at home, or the ability of using skins/styles to make my phone more individual where not available at my brand new Motorola phone. I have to admit that I thought of bringing the phone back to the shop where I bought it, but fortunately I discovered the Motorola Phone Modding Community before doing this stupid thing. Now, month after my somehow "wise" ;-) decision, I have a completely different opinion about Motorola phones. I found out that they are the best "moddable" phones one can buy for money, and that firmware updates with my own computer at home are indeed possible. As I know that there are many people out there, who are disappointed about their Motorola phones, I'll give you a short insight into the secrets of the Motorola Phone Modding Community, to show what is possible with some basic hacks. Skins Let's start off with a function most people want: The possibility to change the appearance of the phones GUI. My Razr V3 and most of the other Motorola P2K phones* offer only three boring skins* when coming out of the box. And unfortunately there is no way of getting more skins onto the phone - at least without a little hack. ;-) Thanks to the guys at www.motomodders.net I got the program P2kCommander into my hands, which allowed me (and will allow you) to view and modify the whole file system of the phone. With this little tool uploading skins (which you can get for free from as well) is really easy. Basically all you have to do to upload a new skin onto the phone is to put the *.dat and *.ski files of which a skin consists into a folder (with the same name as the *.ski file) in the directory "/a/mobile/skins/" on the phone (Fig 1). [FIG1a.jpg] Fig 1 - Uploading Skins with P2kCommander As you can see on the right side of Fig 1 I have added two skins to the stock Moto skins (Moto, Neon and Techno): A Mac OS 9 skin, and the really good looking black MotoModders skin. You can see in Fig 2, how my phone looks with enabled Mac OS 9 skin. Cool, right? ;-) But changing the menu appearance, the wallpaper and the screensaver is not all you can do with a skin. Some skins even offer custom sounds, custom start up and shutdown animations, custom icons and animations and custom cl.gif's*. For example die-hard Windows fans have the opportunity to use the Windows XP Mobile skin, which offers all the cool stuff mentioned before. Other cool things you can do ... Skins are great, but there are also other awesome things you can do to improve your Motorola cell phone. I will mention some of them here in short (please note that not every trick will work with every phone): Deleting unwanted files: Many Motorola phones like the Razr V3 have no expandable memory. And with the (only) 5 Megabytes user accessible memory the Razr has, every Kilobyte you can get free is worth gold. The problem is: Nearly all manufacturers of mobile phones and nearly all cellular providers put lots of useless stuff like wallpapers, screensavers, ring tones, videos or ugly branded skins onto the phone. And most of this stuff is locked - which means it cannot be deleted. Well, cannot be deleted without a little hack. ;-) Just use P2kCommander, and you can delete all useless files and change the file attributes of every single file on the phone. Needless to say how useful this little trick is: Some people in the net managed to get up to 9 Megabytes of free space on their Razr V3 by deleting unwanted content. J Custom Funlights: Users of the Motorola V600 probably know what funlights* are. Funlights refer to a sequence of flashing lights on the phone which are activated by an incoming call or event. Custom funlights mean: You can create your own sequences of flashing lights and you can choose the colours of the flashes. All you have to do is to modify the "/a/mobile/audio/funlight.pat" file with a program called "Funlight editor". Seem editing: The possibility to do seem edits* is definitely the most powerful option a Motorola phone modder has. Cause the so called seems control all vital functions of the phone. Let me give you a few examples what you can do with seem edits: * You can force the phone to save short messages in the phones memory instead of the SIM card, which results in a highly increased number of short messages you can store on your phone. * You can activate the video capture option in some old flexes*. * You can activate and deactivate SMS delivery reports. * You can set custom cl.gif's and custom start up and shutdown animations. There are so many things controlled by seems, that it's absolutely impossible to mention all of them in this article. Take my advice and visit xlr8's website about seem editing. I guarantee that you will be impressed by what is possible with the change of some bits in the seem files. Firmware Updates As most readers probably know, firmware updates often fix software bugs, improve the performance of the device and sometimes contain new features that were not available in prior software revisions. Let me give you an example: The older software revisions of the Motorola V3 were only capable of playing videos (no capture function!), and the phonebook search was pretty awful. With the newer software revisions these two major flaws were fixed, as Motorola added some awesome new features: Video capturing (Fig 3) and multiple letter search in the phonebook; That's a pretty cool update, right? ;-) But that's not a quarter as good, as what some Eastern European hackers managed to flash* onto the Motorola E398, which is on the market for as long as a year. Believe it or not, but somehow they got a leaked beta firmware of the rumoured "Apple iTunes phone" E790 in their hands and wrote a guide how this beta firmware can be flashed/flexed on the E398. They even gave the iTunes-modded E398 a new unofficial name: "i398"; I'll better don't talk about the legality of this mod with a leaked beta software - judge yourself. ;-) But it shows what is possible with a simple firmware update. When you want to know more about flashing your phone and the tools you need for doing a flash, you should visit www.motomodders.net and www.howardforums.com. * Common terms used by the Motorola Phone Modding Community: cl.gif: This picture with the dimensions 96x80 pixels is shown on the phones outer display, when the lid of the phone is open (The standard cl.gif is the Motorola "M"; My phone shows "Hack the planet!" which is pretty much cool ;-) ). Flash: A Flash is a file that contains new code for a phone (mainly the phones operating system). By itself, it does not change or affect the graphics or settings of the phone. Flex: A Flex is a file that contains graphics, settings and Java midlets (Java games / applications). Funlights: Refers to a sequence of flashing lights and screens on the phone that is activated by an incoming call or event. Amongst many other tools Funlight Editor is the best choice for editing funlights. P2K: Refers to a type of command that is used to communicate between computer and phone. Nearly all modern Motorola GSM phones since the V600 (V620, V635, Razr V3, E398, ...) are called "P2K phones". Seem: Seems are "storage containers" for phone settings. Each setting is stored as a single bit, which can have a value of 1 or 0. P2Kman and a normal HEX Editor like XVI32 are a good choice for doing seem edits. Skin: Refers to a collection of files (including at least one *.dat and one *.ski file) that changes the GUI (graphical user interface) of the phone. This includes, but is not limited to: Menus, Wallpaper, Home Screen Layout, Icons and Animations. Please note: Phones with a software version that begins with "TRIPLETS" are not compatible with skins (for example the Motorola V600). Skins can be uploaded to the phone with P2KCommander. Last but not least I have to mention: Be careful, because you can easily f00bar your phone with the information provided in this article. And yea, you will definitely void your warranty by doing any modifications to your phone (that includes installing skins, editing the seems, flashing the phone, ...). But hey, which phone modder really cares about that?! Now it's time to "pimp your phone" ... ;-) Links http://www.motomodders.net (the best place to visit when you want to pimp your phone) http://www.xlr8.us/hofo/ (xlr8's seem editing guide) http://xlr8.us/hofo/map.txt (xlr8's seem map) http://www.howardforums.com (many phone modders hang round here) [FIG2a.jpg] [FIG3a.jpg] Fig 2 (left) - Is this really a Mac? No, but a phone with a kick ass OS 9 skin! ;-) Fig 3 (right) - A Motorola Razr V3 with enabled Video Capture function