Re: Samsung u420: Did I just buy a very sexy peice of crap?

I am new hhere but i want to say that all the information here has helped tremendously!!!My question is : Is there another cdma phone made by samsung that has successfully been unlocked? If so, can the firmware from the unlocked phone be overwriten to the
u420? Just a thought.

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread before I'm pretty sure it was mentioned for pic but you can get ring tones and pics for wall papers on to your phone with BitPim, a usb cable, the drivers for the phone, a good audio editor program, and a photo editing program. I must first thank Desheffer for getting me as far as I did and for all his work. Like he said, first download the
DMA_Driver.exe, which you can find the link to on one of Desheffer's previous posts as I can't post links yet, and install it, you'll need to restart your computer after that. Then install, BitPim. After that is all done hook up your phone. You wont be able to find the exact model, so go to "View" on the menu bar and click on "View File System" you should only have to do it once as Desheffer mentioned, the on the left hand menu, click on that and a folder icon labled "/" should appear, click on that, then click on the "brew" folder then the "shared" folder, then the "mp" folder which should be the folder that contains all of your images that are in the "My Images" folder on your phone. This how ever isn't the folder where you can store pics from you computer to your phone. To get to there you need to click on the "lk" folder then the "mp" folder you can then transfer pics from your computer to that folder by right clicking the farthest right menu and selecting "new file" then simply browse for your file. Like Desheffer said make sure that the filese are either .jpg or .gif and are sized 176px x 182px, you'll have to restart your phone for it to register that is has the new file. As for getting ringtones, what I have done is similar to what he has done I take the song that I want to be my rington and take it into my audio editing program, I use Acid Music, I've never used Audacity but if it's free it's worth it. I then chop the song into a 20 to 30 second portion of the song the convert it to MONO with a 32 Kbps, 22,050 Hz setting as an mp3 file. After that's done, go back to BitPim and go through the same sequence as with the pictures but this time click on the "ms" folder which will show nothing unless you have has a sound sent to you in a text and have saved it. Right click on the the far right menu like you did with the pics, then "new file" then find the song you just edited and select that. You'll have to restart the phone like you did with the pics for the phone to register that it has this new file. It will now be in the "my sounds" folder on you phone and you can just go through the motions on the phone to set it as a ringtone for what ever you want, hope this helps some people. Thanks again to Desheffer for all he did and for the valuable info.

good info!

Hello! All the information in this thread has been very helpful, and I was able to get my phone to connect once or twice. However, the majority of the time I simply get this output in bitpim:

It worked the first time I tried last night, and the first time I tried the night before, but not since. I've rebooted my phone and PC a couple times and still can't figure it out.

I'm using Bluetooth, and I have the Bluetooth PC Connection set, and I've paired my computer with my phone, but for some reason I can't get it to connect every time.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Hello again everyone. I'm trying to pull pictures off of my phone but to no avail. I'm able to put the phone into offline mode, but once I access the shared/mp folder and right-click on the photo I want to transfer, I see no option for "Online Album." The only options I have are "Save...," "Hexdump," "Delete," and "Overwrite..." Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong? Thanks guys.

The Online Album option is found on the phone. It is under the Options menu when viewing any photo in your gallery.

I would just like to say that this forum/thread on the Samsung U420 is amazing. That being said I am also a fairly satisfied user of the U420 from Alltel. I have read almost all the treads on this topic but notice one thing in common, everyone seems to be windows users. As a mac user i can download a mac version of BitPim but i can't get a version of the dongle program to do the bluetooth transfer as shown on the Wiki page. Does anyone know the way around this?? In BitPim under preferences, it shows the ports available on my phone and says that a bluetooth port is available as a serial port but i can't pull up the phones directory tree. Any comments on this problem would be great and one last thing, does anyone know if the usb cable on ebay will work on a mac?? Are the drivers for windows only?

BTW i know someone with a mint chocolate and they were jealous of our u420's!!! they are sleek and could have been amazing if they included full fledge bluetooth support.

Thanks again as I await patiently for replies!!

lol.

FYI, you don't need to scroll down to Bluetooth (#8), as it has nothing to do with bluetooth. Just go to settings, hit '0' and enter the other zeros, then press the # key and enter the above password. Doesn't matter what option you're on, just as most of these further menues don't.
[UPDATE] Upon further testing, this works from anywher on the "System Info" menu OR from "Settings Info">"Bluetooth". Strange.

On a different note. Once you get to the first hidden menu from settings ("System Info") you used to be able to, on other samsung phones, press '0' to get to the GPS settings. I cannot, however, find the GPS settings anywhere on the u420. Has anybody else found it?
Thanks.

I actually have that usb cable, but didn't get it to work on windows (although I didn't try my hardest). I actually had great luck with doing it on my Linux (Ubuntu) box. Come to think of it, i don't think i had to configure a single thing. Just followed the updated instructions at howardforums, i think.
If you don't have linux, you can download an Ubuntu LiveCD that you can boot from and install bit-pim, without affecting your windows or mac (or other) operating system.
Good luck.

That just sounds like a bad idea...