Rebranding: Give Nokia back their phone!

For those of you who may not know, I am a bit of a good golfer. Being a nerd as well, I wanted to see if I could somehow meld the two. GPS location for different landmarks on each hole seems like the best way to do this.

I found a couple of apps for my phone, and I have a bluetooth GPS unit, so it was pretty easy to get the pieces. After installing the software I quickly found that my biggest hurdle was yet to come.

Q: What was it?
A: T-mobile

When I attempted to connect my GPS unit to my phone, it worked just great, the pairing happened in a flash. After launching the application, I was notified by my phone that the application was not allowed to access any external data sources (like bluetooth or the internet). This frustrated me, so I went where I always go: Google.

After Googling for a bit, I found that many others were having similar issues, mostly with Google Maps Mobile, Gmail Mobile, and Opera Mini. They all said the same thing, "go to the applications menu, and select the application and give it access."

And they all had the same response: "the menu item for granting access is grayed out" -- which was true for me.

A bit more digging, and I found that this was referred to as a "security measure" by T-mobile. They did not allow unsigned applications (applications which ran with certificates that were not installed on the phone and approved by T-mobile) to access the data sources.

At first glance, this seemed reasonable (albeit frustrating)...but then I found something interesting. All of these suggestions to "give the application access" had to come from people who were able to do so, how were they able to do it? The answer to this ended up being unlocked phones. I didn't have an unlocked phone. I didn't want to kill my warranty, and possibly end up with a brick by trying either.

But wait...T-mobile said it was a security measure. Why do people with unlocked phones get to get around it? How secure is it if some people are still allowed to do it?

T-mobile's stance began to make less and less sense.

Finally, after much more searching, I found that there are actually 2 levels of "unlocking" for a phone like mine (Nokia 5310 XpressMusic Orange):
1. Full Unlock
2. Rebranded

Full Unlock indicates that you can do whatever you want with the software, you can even run Windows 3.11 on it if you want.

Rebranded means that it is no longer T-mobile's software on the phone, but Nokia's.

Since fully unlocking was alot of work, required special equipment, and could break my phone, it was out.

Rebranding on the other hand turned out to be pretty simple:
1. Update my phone's firmware to the latest T-mobile firmware.
2. Run NSS and change a number inside the firmware (easy*).
3. Re-update my phone's firmware. This time the phone update software let me choose a newer version because it was looking at firmware from Nokia instead of T-mobile.

*Note: I think I used the code for the blue 5310 instead of the orange 5310, because the themes I have now are all blue, and they used to be all orange...oops!

Viola!

Now I have a Nokia-branded 5310. I can use whatever applications I want, and connect to whatever I want from inside those applications.

The GPS did not lend itself like I wanted, so I wrote my own app for my Nokia N810. It has built-in GPS, so it's much better. (More about that in later posts.)

I have a scorecard application that I use now. See it here at Wireless18.

It lets me keep score, and post my score during my round, so you can watch my score live as I golf!