SmartPhone Hacks, Tweaks, Tips & Utilities

Application and SIM Unlocking

This can range from really easy to a bit painful.  My phone was only Application Locked but many carriers lock them down tighter.  App locked means that many internal services are available only to programs that have been signed.    Some apps fail in fairly oblique ways.  For example, on an app locked phone the Visual Studio Smartphone SDK just fails with a cryptic error message.  It won't be possible to install the unsigned PHM Registry Editor that I'm using in these pages and, ironically, the only solution for some devices registry edits.

If you are lucky and your device is only application locked, this utility will often be all that is required: SDA Application Unlock.  Give it a try, I've used it alone several times successfully.  It'll either work or produce a message "your phone can't be unlocked".  If you get that message, we're back to manual registry hacking but it's easy. The hard part is that registry changes are kind of tough if you can't install either registry editors nor remote registry editors.  Fortunately, HTC has made available a signed copy of the PHM Registry Editor and it's available from: http://www.spv-developers.com/content/regeditSTG.zip.  It'll install easily and, once installed, you need to make the following two registry value changes.  Under the HKLM\Security\Policies\Policies you'll find two registry values that need changing:

• Value 1001 should be set to 1

• Value 1005 should be set to 40

Once those two change have been made you can run the SDA Application Unlock program mentioned in the second paragraph above and it'll succeed. At this point, you are home free.   There is a great web page that covers this in much more detail up at: http://wiki.spv-developers.com/index.php/HTC_Application_Unlock_Guide

Another problem I've seen several times several times is the inability to flash a device from one carrier with an image from another.  The reason why you might want to do this is that some Carriers don't make the latest images available. For example, both T-Mobile and Cingular used to make images available on: http://www.htcamerica.net/support/ but now only Cingular does.  The images that I know about are listed on on the latest ROMs page.  Drop me a note at mail://jrh@mvdirona.com if you know of other ROM images available.

The reason why some folks have trouble flashing if you using an image from a different carrier is caused by some Carriers setting the Carrier ID.  Once the CID is set, the HTC flash loader will detect that the image being loaded is from a different carrier and won't install it. Again, the solution is easy.  Go get SPV Services from: http://www.spv-developers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=236 and chose the "CID Tool".   From there, select reset CID and your home free and will now be able to install arbitrary images.  If instead you get a large negative return code from SPV Services, no worry, this too is solvable: your phone is app locked.  Simply follow the instructions above on app unlocking and, having completed that, SPV Services will run correctly and remove the CID at which point you can install any image you want.

I'm always looking for new tricks, ROM images, or tips.  Please do send suggestions to jrh@mvdirona.com.  I'm happy to credit the source and anything you suggestions you send my way will help the community.

Last updated: 2007.03.25