Tag: XT

ASUS Garmin A10

I got one of these phones when they first came out – they were pretty awesome back then, however over time they have been orphaned on older, vulnerable iterations of Android and they simply don’t have what it takes to be a primary device any longer.

Because of this – I’m currently looking to root the phone and install upon it a modified ROM which will give me *just* what I need to turn this into a useful device for sitting in the car.

I got one of these phones when they first came out – they were pretty awesome back then, however over time they have been orphaned on older, vulnerable iterations of Android and they simply don’t have what it takes to be a primary device any longer.

Because of this – I’m currently looking to root the phone and install upon it a modified ROM which will give me *just* what I need to turn this into a useful device for sitting in the car.

Step #1 – Hard Reset to Factory Defaults.

  • Turn the phone OFF
  • While holding the volume UP button, press and HOLD the power button
  • Keep holding the buttons until ‘Clear User Data’ is displayed in text on the phone’s screen.

The phone will continue to boot after factory resetting the device (note, items on the Micro SD card will NOT be affected – you would need to reformat that independently yourself.

Step #2 – Find a ROM.

  • The new firmware needs to enable the more recent features of Android without overtaxing the processing power or battery capacity of the aging device…
  • Suggestions?

Getting an XT USB Modem working in Ubuntu

Given that I’m rocking Ubuntu 10.04 on my beloved ASUS EEE 1005PE, I had a need to be able to use my Telecom XT T-Stick (a.k.a. ‘ZTE Corporation MF636 HSUPA USB Modem’) via Ubuntu.

The issue with these particular devices is that they respond to the system by default as a CD drive or USB hub so Ubuntu (with the stick in it’s native form) doesn’t see it as a modem device.

To turn off the function, and make the device a nice simple USB modem, you can do some jiggery pokery using ‘usb_modeswitch’ to switch off the autorun feature…

OR

you can send the AT command “AT+ZCDRUN=8” to the modem.

I chose option two and used a windows machine with a terminal client, but for anyone wanting to avoid using windows, you can achieve the same result* using minicom (sudo apt-get install minicom)

*let me know if you choose to do this as it’d be nice to include the command lines used for completeness of this guide.

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