I’ve just managed to test mobiPad with a W960. The software allows button presses on the Wiimote to be sent to the phone via Bluetooth.
Having it run in the background with Picodrive allows me to play Micro Machines. The quality of the emulator is brilliant and the response time from the wiimote is fast.
Just need to look at some of the other emu’s now.

After my successful debrand your phone for about a £5 (33,618 hits, 104 comments) and then unbrand your mobile for free (11,680 hits, 161 comments) posts. I now bring you the easiest way to de-brand your phone for free.
No more looking for files in folders which are about 41 bytes, no more trying to get the Box.com to download the files, no more running SEUS fifteen times, just 8 simple steps.

But before I begin, here are the usual disclaimers:

Whilst I have successfully converted several Vodafone W960i into unbranded ones, I can’t guarantee that the same will happen to you. If you’re not 100% confident then DON’T do it. All actions are taken at your own risk! Yada yada ya…
There seem to be some issues with the M600, please read the comments first and then judge for yourself if you want to go ahead!

The things you will need to successfully remove the network customisations from your phone are:

• A UIQ3 phone (W960i, P1i, P990i, M600i, W950i)

• XS++ 3.1 (mirror)
• Sony Ericsson Update Service
• Sony Ericsson Data Cable (should have come in the box)
• A computer running Windows XP (Vista may work)

1. Perform a back-up of your phone via the PC Suite (or however you prefer), as you are going to wipe all of the phones C drive.
2. Run the Sony Ericsson Update Service (SEUS), click on the icons matching your phone, when prompted pull the battery out and put it back in, when prompted plug the cable into your phone whilst holding down C (this is either the letter C on the keyboard, the Cancel button or even the @ internet button). Once it’s found your phone it’ll will either prompt you to update the firmware or inform you that you have the latest. Either way, quit SEUS without doing anything else. (This will force your PC to find the drivers required for your phone)
3. Run XS++, click on the SMARTPHONE CONNECT box, and press Connect. The box on the left will tell you what to do, but it’ll be similar to step 2.
   
4. Once connected you now need to select the new CDA for your phone:
   W960 - CDA 162032/1
   P1 - CDA 162022/1
   P990 - CDA 162007/1
   M600 - CDA 162011/1
   W950 - CDA 162014/1
   and hit Run Script. (They all have GW1 in the script name, however you can choose any of the others, but I recommend the Generic World 1 scripts)
   
5. You can now close XS++, I recommend that you don’t touch anything else in XS++!
6. Now run SEUS again, this time do the update on your phone.
7. Boot up your phone to the Sony Ericsson or Walkman startup screens. Goodbye Vodafone, Orange or o2
8. Restore the backup of your phone

See wasn’t that easy.

As before, feel free to put questions in the comment box.

And if you feel like it you can always send a donation via PayPal

Our old broadband seems to have been finally cut off, so it looks like I’m going to be without for nearly a month whilst we wait for TalkTalk to set us up. I can get my phone to act as a modem (and if I’m luckly I can steal Heather’s which has HSPDA), but please be patient if you have any LibDemBlogs/LibDemVoice technical requirements.

Last year I started using Google Calendar to manage my few events which I had. The only problem was that it was almost impossible to update whilst on the move. However Google XHTML’d the site and shrank it down a bit and allowed you to view it on you’re phone’s browser. But I was still missing the key bit. The entries weren’t appearing in my in-built calendar. I started to look into the Google Calendar API, and found it a nightmare. There were so many different methods depending if the event was all-day, just for an hour or repeating every year, so I gave up. However recently I’ve discovered GooSync, they allow your Google Calendar to talk over SyncML. This means that any events I add to the phone are added to Google and vice-versa. The free service allows 30 days of events to be sync’d with your main calendar. The premium version gives you a full year, plus the ability to sync extra calendars including those “shared” calendars. This means that I now have the full Arsenal fixture list on my phone, which is helpfully updated after each cup draw and ammended why Sky change the kick off time. It should work on almost any phone that was launched in the last two years and I would recommend you trying it, even if it’s the free version.

Wandering past the Orange Shop this lunch time I saw this in the window, an advert for the Motorola F3. A pay-as-go phone which costs only £10. But something didn’t seem right, so I took a photo. On the left is the photo, on the right is the offical press photo direct from Motorola.

Well the image on the left has a nice orange tree on the screen, yet the one on the right looks like a digital calculator. Maybe the press image is showing the screensaver, but no that is the actuall display. It’s the main reason why the phone is only £10! You can read more about the phone here on GSMArena.

Recently it was discovered that you can customise some of the icons on your P990 / M600 or W950 (and I’m guessing the P1 and W960).

The trick involves having files with the same file names in the same location on your memory card as on your Z rom drive. This trick is identical to the one with Fonts.
From the picture on the left, you can see that I’ve changed the bottom status bar icons.

The first steps are to use Swiss Manager Pro or X-plore to copy the original files in the Z:\resource\ folder to your memory card. Then using the USB cable and file transfer mode, or a memory card reader, dump them on your PC.
The files which you can edit are the MBM files. These are multiple bitmaps files which can be opened and created with MBMTool.
In MBMTool open one of the files, then highlight all the numbers in the left and select “Copy image(s) to directory”. In the directory you give, you will now find a collection of BMP files. Using your favourite image editing tool you can change the picture.
Back in MBMTool, delete the old picture and then click on “Add image(s) to list”. Select the file you’ve changed. You will need to ensure with the green arrows at the bottom, that the file is in the same place as the original. Finally highlight the file and press “Change color” and select Color 16bpp.
The next tricky bit is creating a mask file. This will be the black and white file that is similar to the image you’ve just replaced (normally +1 in the file name). Every pixel which is black makes the image transparent, every pixel which is white will show the solid colour of your icon. Any grey colour in between will be a mix of the background and the image. Again as before in MBMTool delete the old mask file, replace with the new mask file and this time “Change color” to Monochrome 8bpp.
Repeat for every icon you want to change and then Save your file (you may need to change the properities of the file to stop it being from Read-Only).

The final step is to copy the file structure onto your memory stick, so you have something like
D:\resource\ZSBLIB\ZSBLIB.mbm

Now reboot your phone and enjoy your icons.

If everything goes wrong, just delete the files from your Memory Stick and everything should return to normal.

I’ve created some packs below in which there is a new signal status bar, duracell battery icon, the arrow on the left has turned into the Sony Ericsson logo, the Task Manager icon on the right is now a nice yellow star, the Wifi icon is a more visable red colour, mute looks like the one from Windows XP and the 3G icon actually makes sense.

For those who want my icons, try these two ZIP files. First has the MBM files, the second the BMPs.

Jan 2008 Update - A new EASIER way to flash your phone for FREE, which also works for the W960 and the P1.

WARNING: Doing this could brick your phone!
Whilst I have successfully converted a Vodafone M600i into an unbranded Australian, there are several reports of it not working and phone being broken. All actions are taken at your own risk!

Following on from my most sucessful blog post ever, we now have a method to debrand your UIQ3 phone for free.
No more Vodafone or Orange customisation!

However this method is slightly more complicated than using KulanKendiClient, so if you’re not too sure for only €6 KulanKendiClient is still worthwhile.

As per anything which involves changing the phones firmware any action you take on your phone is completely your own choice. If you’re not 100% confident then DON’T do it. I would recommend that you read the comments for opinions from other users before starting.

1. Perform a back-up of your phone via the PC Suite (or however you prefer)
2. Run the Sony Ericsson Update Service (SEUS) and update the firmware of your phone. Even if you have the latest firmware DO THIS! You’ll need to Continue anyway and confirm mulitple times.
3. Download the patch file for your phone from here.
   For the P990 use P990_CDA162007/1_R9F011_Generic_World_1.rar, for the M600 use M600_CDA-162011/1_R9F011_Generic_World_1.zip and for the W950 try W950_CDA-162014/1_R9F011_Generic_World_1.rar
4. Unzip / Unrar these files on to your Desktop (or any temp folder)
5. Here’s the tricky bit. Open c:\Program Files\Sony Ericsson\Update Service\db\13740270\ and make a backup of the blob_fs folder.
6. Now open the blob_fs folder and sort by file size. Right near the bottom you should have a file sized about 353 bytes (if you hover over the 1kb files a tooltip window will give the exact size). Right click this and select Rename, now hold Ctrl and press C (copy).
7. On your Desktop find the file you unzipped which is about 353 bytes. Right click and select Rename, now hold Ctrl and press V (paste).
8. Repeat for the file which is about 413 bytes.
9. Now drag the two files from your Desktop in to the c:\Program Files\Sony Ericsson\Update Service\db\13740270\blob_fs\ folder, and press Yes to overwriting the files.
10. Re-flash your phone with SEUS, pressing Yes everytime you are asked “Are you sure?”. This will now rewrite the CDA of your phone.
11. Turn your phone on, press next through all the setup screens, then pull the battery out.
12. Now for a final time re-flash your phone again with SEUS. This will now download the Generic firmware for your phone and install it.
13. Turn your phone back on again and enjoy the debranded menus

Pictures:
Before

During

After

Please leave comments below if you get this to work, as I would like to see how well it’s if works. Also if you are having problems please let me know which phone you have and if you leave an email address I can reply to you directly.

Looks like TomTom have released an update to TomTom Navigator 6 for UIQ3 (P990/M600/W950). This update can be found by plugging your phone into your PC whilst TomTom Home is running. Unfortunately it looks like TomTom Home is actually unable to install the update though.
So here’s my step by step guide.

1. Plug your phone in to you PC in File Transfer Mode and run TomTom Home.
2. Download the update.
3. Unplug your phone.
4. Uninstall TomTom from your phone.
5. Find the cab file which would have been downloaded on to your PC (should be My Documents / TomTom / HOME / Downloads / ttn.symbian.UIQ3.6021.8120.cab)
6. Use Unzip software to unpack the cab file.
7. Plug phone back in to PC in File Transfer Mode.
8. Via MyComputer open the Memory Card.
9. Drag-and-drop the 4 folders and install.bif file on to your Memory Card (say yes to any Replace prompts).
10. Unplug your phone, wait a short while and follow the prompt to install TomTom.

To be truthful the only difference I can see is the option to switch between Left and Right hand modes, and I’m guessing better memory handling, but not much else.

Jan 2008 Update - The new EASY and FREE method is here, which also works on the W960 and the P1.

Jun 2007 Update - Feel like doing it the hardway and for FREE? New step by step guide for the P990 and M600 here!

Got Vodafone, o2 or Orange branding on your Sony Ericsson smartphone? Slightly annoyed that those who have the Generic version have had several firmware updates, whilst your service provider has limited the functions of the phone? Well now you can change the phones version to the generic one via USB on your own PC for only €6.
Now I can’t confirm that it actually works, nor does anything I say mean that I’m liable, however these people on esato and these on my-symbian are extremely happy.
Remember any action you take on your phone is completely your own choice. If you’re not 100% confident then DON’T do it.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Perform a back-up of your phone via the PC Suite (or however you prefer)
2. Download KulanKendiClient.exe
3. Give it a try to ensure that it runs on your computer.
4. Purchase a credit for €6 (you only need one)
5. Sit back and wait for KK to contact you with your username and password (you may have to wait 24 hours and weekends don’t count, be patient)
6. Run the software
7. Turn off your phone, hold down the C button (or back button if you can find C), plug the phone into the PC via the USB cable. (Don’t worry if it thinks your M600 or W950 are P990s)
8. Tick change CDA and enter CDA162007/1 (P990i) or CDA162011/1 (M600i) or CDA162014/1 (W950i)
9. DON’T tick anything else!
10. Press Flash Phone
11. Wait a short while
12. Turn the phone back on. You should now have an extra CDA.
13. Wipe your phone via the hidden service menu. Up * Down Down * Down * -> Format internal disk
14. Run the Sony Ericsson Update Service, you should now see that you have a Generic World One phone. Hit the Update Phone button and follow the on-screen instructions.
15. Wait 10-20 minutes
16. Turn the phone back on. Bingo phone is now brandless.

Hope this helps those who are stuck, or have been visiting this blog looking for the answers.

Updates
7th March 2007 - I can now confirm that this works after testing it on a friends phone.

Yesterday we saw Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire go to jail for voicemail tapping. When the story first came out I remembered something that I did 7 years ago. A hall mate Lisa was on BT Cellnet, the same network as me. Taking a guess that she wouldn’t have changed her default pin I called her whilst she was on the phone, got through to the voicemail message, pressed the correct button, entered the default pin and then went around the options. I chose record new message. For two days people calling Lisa and getting through to her voicemail couldn’t workout why they had been diverted through to Dominios Pizza.
Back then it was easy, and it seems that it is still easy for journalists to do the same trick.