I’ve had a couple of Geeky weekends playing with the daughters phone. PLEASE do not try this if you are not happy to damage you phone. Software outlined here is at best unreliable and may leave you with a non working phone
The T-Mobile Rapport phone which I bought a year or so ago had a great PAYG deal at the time with free internet for 6 months. That has passed and I decided to take out a really cheap contract with cashback from E2save. Works out at less that a £1 a month if I remember to send the correct bills back to them. With some cashback from Quidco I might even break even.
Anyway what did I do. Unlocking (Sim Unlock) the phone was harder that I was expecting given the free tools I’ve used in the past for other phones. I had to might the bullet and download DC-Unlocker and buy 10 euro’s worth of credit to unlock the phone. Paying was painful, but the tool itself was pretty straight forward to use. Plug it in and let it identity the phone and run. There were some cracked versions out there but not for this release of the code and would you really trust the exe anyway.
Downloaded from here
So phone U8180 was unlocked and using the Talktalk sim card. It was still a little slow so I thought I’d install Cynogenmod ROM onto the phone and remove all the extra crap that was running and not required. It also got an upgrade of Android to boot. So this again was a little harder than it should have been. I tried Gingerbreak v1.2 whic should have worked or at least people had had success with it, but I didn’t!
So I install the Android SDK from Google. It just gives some tools that are required (ADB i think ) but its easier just to grab the whole package and install. Available here
install SupperOneClick … I can’t remember which site I used, but just Google it. Follow the instructions once its started and it whirs away. You just need to say yes to the install of Busybox. Ultimately it hung at the end of the process and I thought that was that, but unplug and reboot and you have SuperUser installed which is the ultimate goal. Great utility.
With SuperUser installed download RomManager from the market place and install and run it to configure the boot manager. Free version is fine, but donate if you like !
Now its easy, you find the ROM you want to install and copy it you the SD card on your phone via windows/USB mounted device…. Hopefully you are familiar with this process ! A number of guides say use GooManager to locate the ROM’s. Goomanager would not install from the market place so I located them manually. here Note U8160 and U8180 seem compatible and this is the correct place. I used cm-7-20120814-MADTEAM-u8160.zip
When you have the zip isntalled reboot the phone into the boot manager. Hold the power and down volume. Select install from zip option and locate the zip file. Note you select with the power button and move up and down with the volume key. Once select acknowledge you want to install it and hit go. Then select reboot the phone at the end and you are all sorted. Now there is one odd think about cyanogen mod’s in that for license reasons you don’t the google apps (market place etc) which you need and you need to install from a separate zip file. Download from here The rom I mentioned above was Cynaogen Mod 7 rom so I installed this zip http://cmw.22aaf3.com/gapps/gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip
We I hope my thoughts above help someone. Nice phone for the kids… bit slow, but very cheap.