Currently I have an iPhone (ancient 2G), and have just bought a Dell Mini3i (600RMB with an 18month contract @ China Telecom), as I donated my 3G iPhone to one of the extended family back home.<\/p>\n
The Mini3i runs an Android variant called OPhone.<\/p>\n
The 3i is a little underwhelming software wise.<\/p>\n
Its quite crap at the moment as its sitting on Android 1.0 (OPhone 1.0), but for all intents and purposes Android = Ophone its pretty much the same underneath.<\/p>\n
There are a bunch of similar phones to this – the Lenovo O1, LG GW880, Motorola something or other (can’t be hassled to go look) etc.<\/p>\n
While I haven’t rooted mine just yet, I have been playing around, and reading the Chinese forums.<\/p>\n
Boot loader appears to be similar on all the devices – its made by BORQ’s in Beijing, and appears to be quite basic.<\/p>\n
Motorola and O1 seem to have the best support for now, the main problem in the Chinese forums is people bitching about being stuck on older versions.<\/p>\n
Some are running 1.6, most on 1.5, and the unlucky few 1.0 “Ophone”
\n2.0 and 2.1 has yet to hit the mainstream here.<\/p>\n
There are people with N1\/G5’s (Nexus 1 \/ HTC G5) on 2.1 though (yes, thats you in Beijing Tom!), pretty much any phone is available, although anything with wifi is essentially grey import from overseas (HK mostly)<\/p>\n
Back to the phone –<\/p>\n
Thankfully you can install any apps as apk’s, no need to hack for that – so its fairly easy to get info on the innards.<\/p>\n
RootExplorer is your friend \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
RootExplorer also allows you to remount partitions r\/w, so root access is fairly easy too. There are precompiled su binaries for 1.5 out there, although I’ve yet to do my phone.<\/p>\n
The Dell mini3 is running on a Marvell Tabor. Fast chip, nice touchscreen, decent resolution, just crap on 1.0. <\/p>\n
Firmware files for most of the “ophones” (except motorola) are mff files.<\/p>\n
The mff files appear to just be compressed images with instructions for how to write the various partitions out.<\/p>\n
eg the Lenovo O1 mff has this in the “mff” zip <\/p>\n
2010\/02\/25 10:53 147,111,936 factory_CHERRY.fbf
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 249 factory_CHERRY.mff.mlt
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 364 JADE_EVB_RawNANDx16.ini
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 327 magic_fbf.ini
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 2,692 magic_fbf_inner.ini
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 10,236,719 mfw.pac
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 54,180 MHLV_NTDKB_h.bin
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 176 MHLV_NTDKB_TIM.bin
\n2010\/02\/25 10:53 858 NTIM_td.ini<\/p>\n
magic_fbf_inner.ini has the layout<\/p>\n
[INTEL_FLASH_DEVICE_INPUT_FILE]
\nNumber_of_Images=24<\/p>\n
[IMAGE_HEADER_0]
\nStart_Address=0x240000
\nImage_Length=0x40000
\nEraseBlocks=1
\nWriteImage=0
\nVerifyWrite=0<\/p>\n
[IMAGE_HEADER_1]
\nStart_Address=0x6900000
\nImage_Length=0xf00000
\nEraseBlocks=1
\nWriteImage=0
\nVerifyWrite=0<\/p>\n
(etc)<\/p>\n
Different phones have different firmware writing software, the Motorola’s are using RSDLite, LG – SML_OMS, CTHall, others something homegrown called Firebolt, which is written by BORQS. I have all the firmware tools already, despite the Ophone8 forums lack of courtesy in sharing, grrr.<\/p>\n
Most firmware tools appear similar though functionality wise.
\nHaven’t played around inside the phone yet to see if its easy to get jtag access, although that was mostly because i couldn’t work out how to remove the top part without breaking it.<\/p>\n
If anyone wants more info, or a firmware dump let me know.<\/p>\n
Hopefully there is some interest out there in the English speaking world for these!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Currently I have an iPhone (ancient 2G), and have just bought a Dell Mini3i (600RMB with an 18month contract @ China Telecom), as I donated my 3G iPhone to one of the extended family back home. The Mini3i runs an Android variant called OPhone. The 3i is a little underwhelming software wise. Its quite crap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,25],"tags":[195,197,196,194],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china-related","category-technical-mumbo-jumbo","tag-dell-mini3i","tag-firmware","tag-mini3i","tag-ophone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":371,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}