Saturday, October 07, 2006
Vodafone branded Sony Ericsson K750i
So Mici bought at Sony
Ericsson K700i. It's a nice phone, but the version Mici got came from
Vodacom and thus was heavily Vodafone branded.
Vodafone branding sucks! They do all sorts of aesthetically ugly things,
like changing the icons to ones that are basically red and white so there is
no contrast and you don't know what they are. They also do some evil
things, like removing the option to send photos via e-mail — they want
you to use their (expensive) MMS gateway. There are no less than five ways
to get to the Vodafone Live
website, from which you can download their (expensive) content. I've got no
problem with the idea of Vodafone Live, just give me the choice.
Since Vodafone's branding restricted Mici from doing things she wanted to do
(and which were possible on other, un-branded K750i's), I did some searching
on Google to try and work out what could be done. I came across the DaVinci Team. They offer un-branded
firmware for Sony Ericsson phones, at a price.
At first I was very dubious. Having some understanding of the implications
of flashing the wrong firmware to a device, I wanted to make damn sure I
wasn't going to brick a brand new ZAR 2000 phone. So I did some searching
around the topic and found lots of other people with good things to say
about them. There were two things that swayed me, however. The first was
that their forum site
provide very frank information — what the implications are, how to
chose the right firmware, what happens if you brick a phone, etc. More
importantly, it tells you how to update your phone in such a way that Sony
Ericsson's own update
service still talks to the phone. This effectively does them out of
revenue, so it's definitely a recommendation. The second recommendation was
from PayPal. The fact that they used
PayPal inspired some trust in giving up my credit card number, and the fact
that PayPal had over four thousand undisputed payments to them made me feel
safer. So I duly handed over EUR 10 (ZAR 102 after charges) for the ability
to re-flash Mici's phone.
The good news is that it all worked perfectly.
I changed the firmware language from VFE2 to EUROPE2, and the CDA number
(which apparently identifies the phone model, firmware, and filesystem) from
a Vodafone one to a generic South African one (the same one that K750i's
bought through MTN use, coincidentally). The firmware went back a version
from where it was — it was running R1DB001 before the change, and
R1BC002 after. But it worked! No more Vodafone branding. Anywhere.
The next test was to see if Sony Ericsson still liked the phone. I used
Sony Ericsson's own update software to re-update the firmware to the latest version.
It picked the phone up as a EUROPE2 language phone, and pulled down the
latest version of the new firmware. So now Mici has an up-to-date phone
with no Vodafone branding. And she can phoblog, which is all she wanted to
do all along. :-)
There are three things that come out of this:
Kudos to the DaVinci Team for a
very reasonably priced (even in .za terms) and efficient service.
Kudos, too, to Sony Ericsson for
making a great phone in the first place, and for providing the ability for
end-users to update their phones.
And lots of dingbats to Vodafone and Vodacom. If you weren't so fascist
about the way you branded your phones, people wouldn't want to remove the
branding. My own Sony Ericsson K700i
is Vodacom branded. The branding is subtle and doesn't break functionality.
It's also still there, despite the fact that I've had the phone for nearly
two years. The K750i's in-your-face branding lasted three days. Learn from
this ...
posted by guy at: 10:27 SAST |
path: /general |
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