Well, my ancient Motorola v330 finally called it quits. I gotta say, it definitely withstood a beating and lasted…jeez…almost 2 years. Wow. I hadn’t really thought of how long it stuck around. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and I was forced to go pay full price for a new phone as I was without one.

I don’t need much from a phone. The way I see it, I’m probably going to have to get a new one in a year or so anyway, so I don’t wanna spend too much. All I require is that it has Bluetooth and can sync up with my Mac. That’s pretty much it. Everything else is irrelevant.

So, I bought a new RAZR v3(r). It’s the same phone that everyone and their brother bought and pretty much put Motorola back on the map, so I won’t go into detail about what it looks like and yada yada. I’m sure you have seen it before.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the phone up to make a call is that the outer LCD screen has a huge T-Mobile logo blaring out soaking up my precious battery time. Well, I’m not gonna drop coin on a new phone AND a service plan and throw in free marketing for them. Hell no. You already have my money. I’d rather soak up battery time with one of MY images, thank you very much.

Enter Moto4lin. It’s one of the few apps that you can use a Mac to mod your phone with…but it’s also available for a number of other OS’es. It allows you to connect to your phone via a USB cable (the same kind that comes with most digital cameras) and view the file structure of the phone.

Tiny little write up after the cut.

There are some great how-to’s found for all phones and OS’es at ModMyMoto.com

Ok, so great…I read the instructions on how to make the change to my outer LCD pic to show a picture of a coffee bean….yay for me.

Now what I really want to do is fix the volume of the phone. The RAZR isn’t all that great volume-wise and I’m always asking the person on the other end to repeat themselves. I had to put a stop to that. To change the volume, you gotta dabble in a bit o’ hex editing via the ‘Seem editor’ in Moto4lin:

Now, that’s one way to do it, but I’d prefer working locally and uploading the file rather then flat-out overwriting the file on the phone possibly rendering it a paperweight. Therefore, I suggest downloading a hex editor like 0xED.

To modify the phone’s volume, download the ‘gain_table.bin’ file from a/mobile/system/gain_table.bin and open it in 0xED.

This is the best part….you can tweak EVERYTHING in the phone. Check out the hex map here:

http://www.themotoguide.com/seemmap.php

So if you wanna change the overall phone volume from ‘7′ (the phones highest by default) to ‘9′ you have to do a search for the offset 3B7 and change the value from ‘07′ to ‘09′. Save it, upload it and boom, you’re done! This will change the master volume for the highest volume setting of 7 only. 1-6 will not be modified. Be careful, you can blow your speaker if you use the wrong value. Remember, it’s in hex…so it doesn’t go to ‘10′ after ‘09′…you’ll have to use ‘0A 0B…and so on.’

Have a look on the map to see what else you can do! My next task is to extend the allowed video time….among many other things.

Keep in mind…you are in extreme danger of bricking your phone, so back everything up and be very cautious. Read the forums at modmymoto.com. Also, it’s not all that easy to make a connection to the phone. You have to know your s/w version, bootloader version and flex version of the phone…along with the USB string to make the connection. All of this is explained in the forums so DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 8:53 am and is filed under Stuff I'm using. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.