Newbie: It all got so complicated, so quickly

[ukdutypaid]

If you'd be so kind, just to clarify the following.
I've got an Orbit II, with Copilot. Yes it does feel as if one is part of a club, but there's the topset and the thick kids... I'm the latter.

As I understand it, the Hard SPL unlocks the phone, from it being tied to a mobile network, right?

The O2 II isn't locked so then I don't need it, yes?

Therefore, I can either install all the tweaks and tips thus keeping Copilot, or put another ROM, (is this a type of disk image?), with all the tweaks and tips built in, on it.
In which case I'd lose CoPilot, for I'd have written over the device and voided the warranty, to boot, right?

What actually is the difference between a ROM and all the 'tweaks and tips'.
Is it because if you need to Hard SPL (ie unlock a phone from the network), then you don't have any built in functions left, so you couldn't install the Tweaks and Tips, which would in effect bring all the same advantages.

Look, I know Bebe has managed to do a version of WM6.1 which features threaded SMS and everthing, but I'm still not quite with it, I'm afraid.

The wiki entry for "What is a Hard SPL", just says it's one way of not trashing your phone. Not trashing your phone before you attempt what though?
For I've seen mention of the SIM/CID unlocker as if it's a separate entity, indicating they are two distinct things, created for two different tasks.

I like the idea of the phone looking funkier and working better (God knows what the AMMD is for the Video, but I know there are issues with the video, so having that sounds like a good idea as well. Right?)

Whatever it all is, it sounds like it's been a mammoth job/labour of love and has involved the purchase of two new Polaris phones, but beyond that, I'm all at sea.

(Dons bullet proof vest and climbs into protective Pope Mobile)

[William Richardson]

I think the fact you are asking all these questions juxtaposes that you should not flash your ROM. I myself am in your class and just look on with admiration. With that said, there are many things that you can do to your phone to "spice" things up. I have bought a couple of programs, Astronavigator II, (tells you what the sky at night is above you, My Girlfriend loves it), Fun contact, much more finger friendly than wm6. I also have PZP program. It automatically sets my phone to do things at certain times of the day, i.e at night it switches off, emails and phone calls then do not wake me and GF up, much to her relief! So there you have it, oh btw I have tomtom as have the TC.

The phone works quickly, efficiently and never have to soft reset. 5 years of using WM devices, I have found that idiots like me should just live and let be and use the phone as it is.

This should anser none and all of your questions ;)

Kind Regards,

Will

[TTboy404]

Hey,

I hear ya. I am fat boy too. lol

I can't keep up and these forums use a form o speak, and implications that are not clear. I have no idea of why one of the cubes is called a bunch of letters for instance. unfortunately, we want our phones up to date, and the fastest they can be. But it is not that simple. I agree, I am lost on the spl thing and the sim, but then ??? it is not that clear to me.

Here is how I understand it. It may not be right, but it is an analogy that seems to work. A soft reset is reboot, a hard reset in a wipe/reinstall. As I understand it, the rom is the basic operating system, meaning when you hard reset, that is what loads into memory. Once it is loaded, it can be soft reset ie rebooted without harm. The rom is kept on the device, so when you hard reset, it can reload/reinstall itself without needing to be connected to anything. Disk Image? I guess. If your original rom, from the manufacturer installs copilot with a hard reset, then you will keep copilot. When they cook a rom, they change those installation files permanently. They adjust things, and remove things. they alter hardware drivers per say ie the radio patches you get. If Copilot is not in the cooked rom, then you would lose Copilot. You would need to buy it or download it and install it yourselft. You would have to use a restore disc, hooked to a computer and mobile center, to overwrite a cooked rom back to the original rom in this cases wm6. ROMS are much more of a big deal, as there are bugs and some things don't work as expected. They are faster tho, imho. Tips and tweaks are just that, certain replacements and other alterations. I woul think most tweaks I have seen generally do stay with the device thru soft resets, some don't if you have to hard reset. I keep my tweaks and settings/programs on the storage card incase I have to hard reset. Hope that helps, it may not be correct, but it works for me as a basic understanding level. There is a way to chose what you install as the rom (ie operating system permanently on the phone for hard resets), and i think the term they use is the kitchen. Using the kitchen, you chose this piece of a rom, and that one, etc....all that goes to the permanent part where a hard reset tell it what to read and install. I am not too clear on that one myself. I find using a kitchen fightening and wrought with risk at bricking.

Will has summed it up pretty well.

We buy these phones for what they can do, and they are just not supported by manufacturing like they should be. Our expectations are flavored by the continual upgrades from things like MS and windows upgrades fixing and patching things. I have had two pda (one previous phone). Either manufacturer was the same, limited upgrades and basically no further development on the devices.

It was a harrowing experience to upgrade my phone/pda to wm6 out of fear of bricking it. My phone came with wm2003. Bricking if you don't know, is leaving your device in an usable state...it is caught in limbo somewhere, and will not work.

Advice, wait a while, keep reading. Since things are hard to understand, keep reading and don't be in a hurry. Eventually someone will ask a question, in one forum or another, that inadvertanly answers one of yours. Check out the hacking forums, nice tweaks in there. And yes, they kinda of leave out steps. Keep Pocket Controller, it lets you tweak the registry, and see your device on your desktop. Even MS was impressed, troubleshooting a bluetooth issue. MS loved they could control the pda themselves using remote desktop. MS sent the name of that progie up the chain of command. They loved it. You can screen shot and all sorts of things. It come in handy trying to explain things. Once you feel you can risk losing the phone/device, then consider upgrading to new rom and try some of the tricks/tweaks. I know I don't want to waste 700.00 or more dollars to brick something. I think most of the time, they can get the bricked phone back, but not 100% certain of that. I study the reset and etc procedures and print them out, before I muck with the rom. I consider what I do to the phone very carefully. I was so scared I would ruin my phone.


And the other thing i say, is if you tell people you are a noob at this stuff and have a hard time understanding, they generally won't flame you too hard. Really. Just explain yourself, and give your disclaimer, and they won't be too hard on you. As you have seen, they may not fully explain things as clearly as you like, due think that is just the nature of the people and the way they think, not a personal attack or lack of anything, but they won't be rude.

As you said, this forum is run by the topset, and we are thick ones. They do astounding work and some of us just look up at them and admire. But they will help you. Keep reading, and keep trying to understand, it gets better with time. And don't be in hurry either. I see two post already of people bricking their devices already. And one guy seriously bricked his to the point of no return it seems.

[ianl8888]

Therefore, I can either install all the tweaks and tips thus keeping Copilot, or put another ROM, (is this a type of disk image?), with all the tweaks and tips built in, on it.
In which case I'd lose CoPilot, for I'd have written over the device and voided the warranty, to boot, right?

For I've seen mention of the SIM/CID unlocker as if it's a separate entity, indicating they are two distinct things, created for two different tasks.



As I understand it (and I've loaded HardSPL + a modified ROM on my Polaris), the SIM/CID unlocker is for those devices that were purchased from a telco and therefore locked to that company (pernicious behaviour, btw, but they offer low purchase prices to tie customers in). If your device was unlocked at purchase, then this issue doesn't bother you.

The HardSPL load is designed to prevent you bricking your device with a crook modified ROM - this obviously pre-supposes that you will load modified ROM's. If you want to do this (ie. try modified ROM's), then loading HardSPL 1st is a no-brainer.

Why would you want to load a modified ROM ? The short answer is that the marketing depts of the manufacturers load the devices with all sorts of fluffy software crap. They do this in the released ROM. So to remove this junk - and have the device fast, responsive and with enough room left to do what you want - the gurus here modify these ROM's. [Of course, some people like the fluff]. The manufacturers also occasionally release ROM upgrades, but development is done mostly in forums like this.

CoPilot 7 ? Yes, flashing a new ROM will kill this, because the DeviceID changes when a new ROM is loaded. But if you visit the CoPilot website before loading a new ROM, you can deactivate your current license and then reactivate it after installing on a "new" device. In fact, CoPilot is one of the few commercial apps to cater for ROM upgrades with honour. CoPilot doesn't care how many devices you install on, just that only one at a time is actually capable of running.

[TTboy404]

Here are your acronyms to understand what they are doing and talking about. This may not be right, but alot of this came from the Hermes. It seems someone was looking to run linux on his hermes i think. I am still kind of digesting this information now. Remember I told you look around?

Here are your definitions to help you understand.

AKU - Adaptation Kit Update: they usually patch up existing bugs and enable several new features. Each newly released AKU pack retains fixes found in previous versions of AKU

CID lock (aka vendor lock): put on your device by the manufacturer to prevent installation of a ROM not released by them. CID is a vender lock, the post above talks about that. It is placed on you phone to deliberately prevent you from changing the rom. It is vender specific it seems. I assume the Super CID tells the device to ignore that lock or overwrite the vender lock all together, or it might just tell it to ignore the error code. That is what I am seeing. This seems basically related to full administrator priviledges account for the device. it seems the CID was located on a secure area on the radio. People had bad flashing to the radio upgrade and corrupted their CiD essentially bricking some of their phones.

RIL - Radio Interface Layer.

RUU - ROM Upgrade Utility: Its the s/w used on your PC to do a ROM upgrade for your PPC. I assume this can be the default utlity or a kitchen program. The default you can find pictures of, it is generic and just tell you are flashing. The kitchen program, i canceled once, had options to choose.

IPL - Initial Program Loader: Its the bootloader for PPC. It boots up SPL. Bootloader. Basic operations.

SPL - Secondary Program Loader: By inferenece only? Hard SPL then stands for a forced control over the secondary Program layer. You can make it load something else when it boots. It seems the newer factory SLP would want to reference the CID or only properly signed files, thus limiting what you could actually do with your phones.

WWE Edition - World Wide English Edition

XIP - Execute-in-Place



It seems while trying to unlock the Hermes, they were using a radio upgrade and somehow got this Super CID. See above about CID. So it seems there was a reverse engineer done with a legitmate unlocker program. This unlocker program was installing certifcates and changing the device to a lower bootloader it seems. That bootloader ignored the CID or converted it to full priviledges. they also figured out, some bad flashing can be undone....the CID was stored in a secure area on the radio. A bad radio flash corrupted part of the CID. Once they converted to a different bootloader, they could reflash radios...thus unbrick some phones. They have replaced the bootloader with this Hard SLP. The new SLP converts or tells the phone to ignore the CID when upgrading a ROM or other things. It appears HSPL v1.13 also keeps track of bad blocks of memory. That version also reflashes bad blocks or corrupted files with fresh versions as well. It also respecs completely bad blocks, i am thinking that means, the os is not allowed to write there. The you can reflash anything to the device. Or so it seems. But again, depending on how bad you muck up your phone, some things are not repairable.


That is what I am seeing right now. Still reading. It is all out there. Just google the terms above, and slowly you will find the threads and start piecing it together.

Seems this Hard SLP is important for ROM ugrades. Still reading about it. I am post like 500, out of 1000, and trying to keep track of it is difficult. Lots of interjections of what people did wrong. Very confusing.


I did tell you read, read read, and you will find the answers to your questions, it just takes awhile and it hard to understand becuase of the lingo.

[alipi2007]

v nice. u guys need to read som basic stuffs. it will help u, & u don't have to worry about u,r phone. u can upgrade, u can change things with full confidence. xda-developers have wiki pages, i think it will help much. keep readingggggggg. soru 4 my english :D

[pistonripper]

You won't lose your copilot if you use the original HTC ROM....I put the original HTC ROM (which is much better than the O2 ROM)...added a few standard registry tweaks..runs NICE..reinstalled Copilot7 (from the 2577 folder on the SD card) reactivated it..(did not need to deactivate it) and everything is fine. If you need to got back to the original ROM for whatever reason...reflash it and then flash with originalSPL file.

You can reactivate copilot as many times as you like (the only thing I do before reflashing...mor as a precautionary measure...is backup the SD card)

If you use a cooked ROM ..then I think you have to deactivate Copilot and reactivate it on the new install.....but I'm sure the experts will know better.

[ianl8888]

If you use a cooked ROM ..then I think you have to deactivate Copilot and reactivate it on the new install.....but I'm sure the experts will know better.

Agreed - I've had to do that a number of times, from both modified ROM changes and device changes, but it's easy and painless.

[ukdutypaid]

People, I'd like to thank you for taking the time and trouble to provide your very useful responses. One does read of course and things like lego bricks begin to click into place. I don't even have a car, so quite why I'm so obsessed with CoPilot, I don't know. Okay I giggle when listening to one of the ladies (through headphones), on the bus, but other than that.. lol.

I didn't know you could actually download CoPilot from the site though, I'll check that out. I've 'funked it up' a bit using the HTC Home cab and Slideunlock. Tempted to play with one of the Cube .cabs...(The one it comes with is pretty rubbish if you can't change what the cubes link to and the icons)

Yes, Yes I'll search for the original O2 rom, before I play anymore...
The actual HTC rom, sounds like a safe bet though, cos then you get the proper funky screen..
Don't want to clutter (anywhere actually) the hard core threads with stupido questions. I'll look, I'll read, I'll learn...
As one of you has said, these things aren't toys (lol) and I don't want to be left looking at a $700 £350 quid (non contract Orbit), that I can't use...

I think Bebe wm6.1 is going to stay undownloaded for the time being!

I'll leave the topset, to carry on.. Wouldn't mind getting rid of the "Streaming Media", program mind. Errr, it does/streams what exactly, anything at all?