Nokia 6300: de-branding, upgrading, Linux

Source

So I just got a new phone. My contract with Fido was up, and I was just going to let it go and stick with my V360 till the Neo1973 is available in a really usable form, but my boyfriend decided he wanted a 6300 so I extended my contract and got it, and now he decided he doesn't want it really so I figured I'll use it rather than selling it. It's a fairly nice phone: very thin and light, pretty snappy, has that lovely Nokia interface. It also has the one thing I was missing on the V360 - a decent audio player. The V360 almost does, but it doesn't let you sort by album and it doesn't support standard (m3u) playlists, so you have to create playlists *on the phone* for each album you transfer, which is a massive pain. The 6300 sorts by album, so it's a complete non-issue. I made a quick patch for hal-info to support the phone (in USB storage device mode) as a music player, and submitted it upstream. Until it gets merged upstream and your distro's packages are updated, if you have this phone, just apply that patch to 10-usb-music-players.fdi (probably in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop ), restart HAL, and whenever you connect the phone in USB storage mode it should be treated as a music player, and you'll be able to drag-and-drop songs to it with Rhythmbox, Banshee or Amarok (they'll be transcoded to an appropriate format on-the-fly). I love HAL. With the help of several threads at HowardForums, I was also able to mostly de-brand the phone (restore the features Fido locks up, like the email client and MP3 ringtones) and upgrade it to the latest firmware, 5.50. De-branding is pretty easy: get NSS, plug in the phone, run NSS, click the magnifying glass, go to Tools and do a full factory reset, unplug the phone, restart it. To upgrade the firmware on a phone provided by a carrier like Fido, you also have to change the phone's product code to one of the ones used by the phones sold direct, unlocked and unbranded, by Nokia: the update applet refuses to recognize an update is available if you leave the product code as-is. There's a list of product codes here, I used 0537621. To change the code with NSS, go to the phone information tab, check the 'enable' button next to the Code field, type in that code, and click Write. Then you can run the Nokia Software Update tool (available from the Nokia U.S. or Europe site) and it'll let you upgrade to firmware 5.50. After doing that you may need to re-do the factory reset step. Of course, all this stuff will destroy any data saved on the phone, so back up your contacts (to SIM card or to the Nokia Windows backup) first. The Nokia Windows tool identifies the phone by the product code, so either change the code before doing the backup, or backup before doing anything, then temporarily change it back to the original code once you've done all the upgrading so you can restore the backup.

Comments

stse wrote on 2008-01-09 12:41:
Do you know if it is required that you have a Nokia DKE-2 cable in order to do a software update using Nokia Software Update? I tried using a regular data cable that I normally use with flash card readers, but that doesn't work. Actually, what happens to me is that the phone is recognized by NSU and then the new firmware/software is downloaded. Just as it starts to install the software, the phone turns off and eventually disconnects from the computer. The Computer then says that it could no longer detect the phone anymore and tells me to reconnect. But when I eventually turn the 6300 back on and retry, the software says it can't install it.
adamw wrote on 2008-01-09 12:59:
I just used a regular USB cable. I don't know what the problem is for you though, I'm afraid :(. Try asking at a popular forum, like HowardForum or something.
kahkah wrote on 2008-02-18 20:54:
Hello...i have gone through the steps u said and everything worked...it's just when i press the "to go" button on the left corner it freeze and i don't get the the listing...do u know what's the problem ?...thank you