Unlocked my Motorola Defy

Locked phone!

I have a 3yr-old Motorola Defy, and recently upgraded to another model. This Defy came from Personal (carrier in Argentina), and I wanted to use it with a SIM from a different carrier (Claro). When I put that SIM card... a message would ask for "Pin de desbloqueo de red de la tarjeta SIM".

The phone was usable (apps, wifi), but no mobile signal was picked.


Tried PUK code, known short PINs, asked the subsidy password to my carrier, and nothing worked.

(Interestingly enough: Unlike other people's experiences, I phoned Personal and after verifying I am the owner of the phone, they just gave me the subsidy password in a couple of minutes. Unfortunately, it did not work with my phone).

I suspect the code did not work out of the box because my phone was re-flashed long ago, I had installed Cyanogenmod 9 to get Android 4.x.

System Settings / version

I tried some "baseband selector" but this did not help. I think this option is the same thing available in Cyanogenmod options menu -- you just select the frequencies, but the phone is still locked.

So after looking for hours (days), I found one solution based on installing some update from the recovery menu. I had not used this for a long time so it was all fun and scary... again.

The source is this 51-pages forum in XDA. The solution uses a file named ICS_Defy_softunlock_v1.3(EPU_U_00.59.01).zip, and it is called a "soft unlock". I am documented what worked for me:

Pre-requisites:

• To flash CM9, I had already rooted and installed 2nd-init. I did this long ago, and it is the only actual requisite.
• I had CM9 previously installed - so the "ICS" version of the patch worked for me (and not GB for Gingerbread). I believe both CM7 and CM9 work.
• As shown in my System Settings page, my base band version is EPU93_U_00.59.01, exactly what this soft unlock requires. If yours is different, you may need to install the baseband update as well (from the same XDA forum).

Steps:

1. Reboot in Recovery mode

   

   Shutdown menu / recobe

2. Select "Install zip from SD card" and "Choose zip from sdcard"
   
   
3. Pick the ICS_Defy_softunlock_v1.3(EPU_U_00.59.01).zip file and confirm.
4. Reboot your phone without SIM card (or with the original one -- not the target carrier SIM!)
5. Once fully rebooted, power off, insert new SIM card, and start the phone again.
   
   It worked for me! The screenshot shows the phone in Claro network now.

Working with new SIM

I read that this, being a "software unlock", is not persistent across ROM changes. So if I ever replaced the current CM9 in this phone, I might need to do this patching again.... Hopefully this blog post will help me at that time!

Thanks xdadevelopers!

ODroid U3: Hello Android

I got an Odroid U3 , a tiny, low consumption and yet powerful computer. I want to replace my dead Raspberry Pi which acted as mediacenter, and add some gaming to it.

It turns out that knowing what to install is not totally trivial. There is a myriad of images, different linux and android versions. I am documenting what I started doing:

• There is a big collection of image links here.
• I downloaded an android Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0.3. (The 4.1 and 4.2 versions were said to not work from SD cards; which is what I bought (eMMC is more expensive)).
• The actual installation steps are here. Some clarifications below...
• First, one needs to burn a .xz image:
  xz -cd ./IceCreamSandwich-4.0.3_CouchPotato-U2-HDMI-SD.20140101.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk0
• This image is from a small SD, and I needed to resize to my 16Gb card. The partition to enlarge is some FAT32 in the middle, so there are quite a few steps involving backing up contents and copy them back. Details here.
• What takes time is (1) to burn the .xz, initially. The backup is just about 250Mb in size

My first impressions:

• Android runs smooth, some games are nice too. But I already found some cons...
• I cannot have my USB external HDD get recognized. This one has two ext4 partitions (full of movies I was using with my old Raspbmc). Some "StickMount" and "Paragon NTFS" are installed, and I tried others, but no luck yet.
• XBMC was slow to play a 720mb from a pen drive (fat32, it did work). Another player pre-installed in this image worked ok, with hardware decoding.
• Three times already, Google Play was stuck and unable to download new stuff from the android market (some error shown in the notifications). The only solution I found from the forums is to wipe Play's data from android Settings; then remove my gmail account, reboot, and start over adding my account and re-downloading stuff.
• The whole UX is far from ideal. The OS thinks it is a tablet. All UI is oriented to dragging, pinching, using huge amount of scrolls -- as if your fingers were on a touch screen, and not moving a cursor on a big TV. Totally awkward on a small touchpad from my wireless keyboard. Games expect you to touch everywhere too... not to press keys. I guess this is android!

I just read there is a GameStation Turbo including XBMC with CEC support (for my TV remote) and some games too.... It seems to be linux, too, which I will like more. Going to try out the next few days!

Cut my SIM to MicroSIM size

I bought a new phone, with the surprise that my SIM ("Mini-SIM", formally) would not fit: This and other new phones use Micro-SIM (or even Nano-SIM) format. The chip contacts are the same, just with less plastic around.

You mobile carrier company should be able to swap your SIM card or just cut it with one of the many automatic clippers around. Some of them charge for this -- I am sure they would, in my country. And, there is the hackish way which I am of course always up to: cut it yourself!

There are many posts about this on the web. I just picked one of the mostly linked templates, and cut it. Here is the before:

And the after:

(I sorry - this is not the card after cutting - just the leftovers: the card is in my phone now!)

If you are careful, I think it should just work. It was not such a complicated or exact work to me.

My only advice, maybe a refinement on what I read, is that you mark the cuts with a cutter (and a metal ruler) before really cutting, which I did with regular scissors. The lines you "draw" with the cutter are perfectly thin, better than using a marker or pen.

This was no software hacking. Tangible stuff this time!