Hack my Cell

October 5, 2007 10:35 AM

How can I get my Sony Ericsson k750 to a) display 3rd tone letters in Chinese pinyin and b) stop telling me I'm out of memory for text messages when I have another 100+mb free on my memory stick?

When I use CEDICT + DictionaryForMIDuis or a WAP dictionary, third tones pop up as a square. There's gotta be a way to update the unicode/utf8 or whatever character set is on the phone. They blew me off when I called tech support. For what it's worth, I bought the phone in China and have full character - traditional and simplified - support.

Bonus points for whoever can tell me how to put a t9 dictionary for Tagalog on my girlfriends w800.

posted by trinarian to technology (4 comments total)

Sony Ericsson phones have a charming feature. They determine text message capacity by the number of messages, not by the space they occupy. Reach the limit- you're hosed. It's bullshit. Short of major modification, I believe you're out of luck. I'll mail a fancy $5 bill to anyone who figures it out though.
posted by potch at 11:31 AM on October 5, 2007

If you are comfortable doing firmware mods, I believe someone on the esato.com forums has figured out a way to modify the text message limit.
posted by dcjd at 11:40 AM on October 5, 2007

Hey, I faced a similar problem with my Z520A phone. It's totally possible to fix the text message capacity issue.
I would check out this page:
http://myforum.lasyk.net/showthread.php?t=25656

If you don't see what you need there, you can google around a bit for "far manager" (that's the program you need), and "SEFP" (the far manager plugin that lets you change settings). I was actually able to totally re-do the main menu on my phone to get rid of Cingular/ATT's icons, instead making shortcuts to useful things like the alarm clock, calculator, and calendar on the main menu instead.

I believe you need a DCU-60 USB cable if you take the FAR manager approach. This comes with some phones (I used a friend's cable from a w810).

Make sure you remove the SIM card from your phone before you mess with anything! I destroyed my sim card while changing the message storage location on my phone. Basically, this hack gives an alternate path for SMS storage, moving it to the phone's internal memory instead of the SIM card.

The only catch with "unlimited" storage is that sometimes it's a little slower if you have a huge inbox. Other than that, it works great!
posted by mshultz at 8:20 PM on October 5, 2007

no ideas for changing the character set or updating the languages inside?
posted by trinarian at 11:07 PM on October 5, 2007