RAZR Reloaded
by Volker Weber
Yesterday I violated the "if it ain't broken don't fix it" rule badly. What was the reason? I like the Motorola RAZR very much, but it has a big shortcoming: When looking up a name in the address book you can only type the first character and it immediately jumps. Typing another character jumps to another entry who starts with that character. So you can't type more than one character to filter the address book. This translates to a lot of scrolling if you have a large address book.
It turns out that newer firmware versions have a switch that lets you select between Jump and Find. There are also new features for which I could not care less, for instance an application that lets you record videos. With some hunting around on the Internet I had everything I need. A flash tool, new firmware releases, or so I thought. I flashed the new image, and lo and behold, my RAZR was fried. It would boot up, and then I could not enter the code to unlock the SIM. Swapped the SIM with another one that isn't locked, and the RAZR would start, connect to the network, and reboot. Lather, rinse, repeat. There was no way to recover. Every time I tried to flash a different version, it would reboot. It was completely hosed. I called myself an idiot for fixing something that worked before, and went to bed.
Time passes. :-)
Some problems need a good night's sleep. Today I learned that you press three buttons (*, #, ON) and the RAZR goes into flash mode. That looked much better. I also learned that I had an old boot loader (07.something) which would not play with the new firmware. So I flashed a new boot loader (08.23) and everything was back to normal. Pfeew. In order so save you the same trouble, here is a short list of things that did work for me:
- Multiflashflex and a patch for that (don't ask)
- Boot Loader 08.23 (look here)
- R374_G_0E.41.C3R_A (look here)
- R374_G_0E.41.C0R_MXLP0007 English and German language pack (look here)
All is nice and dandy now.
Comments
I once had a similar problem with my Creative MuVo V200 Flash MP3 Player. It worked, but I chose to "upgrade" its firmware and due to a bad USB connection it wouldn't boot up later. It didn't even show up as a USB storage device when connected.
After all I found a nice little recovery tool from Creative that revived it again. Thanks, Creative!
Good place for getting technical information around mobile phones is http://www.howardforums.com/. Helped me lot of times get full functionality on crippeled sorry branded phones or if someone decide to deliver the first series of a new phone with some kind of beta firmware.
... it happens to the best of us. :-)
Nice, that you found a workaround and thanks for the extensive link list.
If we never fixed what wasn't broken we would still be using smoke signals to communicate and not them fancy gizmos you describe on your blog :)
You say you can look up phone numbers in the address book by typing the first letter of the name? How? I've been trying to find a way to search within the V3 phonebook, and it's terrible. Any help is appreciated!
Thanks,
Rod
I took the best out of your blog post regarding the relashing of the Razr v3, mixed it with some stuff from motox.us, put it on a friends windows pc (I don't one one - lucky me) and got a all new cell phone. I realy like the new search option in the adress book and I love the advantage in speed - with the former snail attitude I hated this phone. After 10 months I found out, that one of the motorola-logos was still covers with a protection film. Seems everything is okay, hmm!? Unfortunately, not! Because, there's one big problem: The camera and the pictures folder doesn't work anymore :-(
Did anyone got a solution for this problem??
is it true this phone break easily
