Yay, trouble with the phone is over... I guess.
For those who aren't here, I bought another phone off of eBay to use for work. This time a Treo 650. Amazing actually, for dirt cheap it came with the gps unit, all the car accessories, bt headset and a VERY good shape phone. Only snag was that it was previously setup on Telus. I figured since it was also a CDMA phone, that it should be no problem to hook up onto TBayTel. I figured wrong. Telus swore up and down that it would NOT work seeing as they have the lock on the ESN of the phone. Took several phone calls for me to finally realize that it was a dead end. They weren't giving up the leash on that phone.
So I explored options of porting my number to Telus... but I'm always hesitant... Telus isn't that big here. But it seemed good as it used both Rogers' roaming capability and TBayTel's towers... so it seemed the best of both worlds, however the price was alot more (and Telus said if I had a PDA I would HAVE to have a digital plan or the phone wouldn't work).
So I almost switched... then I thought I'd give trying to crack the phone one more chance (earlier google searches led to nothing), and I was reluctant to as the last phone I did something like that to I ended up bricking the thing. So I cautiously did some more research and thought I'd try something, and within seconds I had the MSL for the phone. SWEET. I couldn't believe it was that easy. [i'll talk about what i did below]
Next phase was to see if TBayTel would accept it on the line. So I went to the store, said "hook this up on the plan" and they looked at me curiously, but when I said here's the MSL code, they went straight to the back. Ran into an old friend there who works for the company and said "they should have no problem doing this... it'll even better when they switch to GSM" (tuck that little bit of info away for later). Anyhow, they came back in a few saying the code wasn't working (which it was.. I tried it earlier) and to which I had to point out that they use a #*# coding instead of ##. 2 minutes more and it was working!! Score one for me. I have a sweet Palm Phone now... now just if it'll tide me over until either the Pro or Pre come to Rogers.
So here's what I did. I went to the palm site and found the FIRMWARE update for Sprint for the 650.
I ran the program up until it says "Sync phone" at which point I pause and check out the "Install" folder of the phone and found the file:
CDMA Updater.prc
I copied that file somewhere else handy, and delete the rest. Then go back and cancel the installation.
Put the Updater file on the SD card and load it onto the palm. Run the updater, but from the Debug menu I click everything off except "Backup NV" (or something like that). Then run the update. Essentially it's just making a backup of the ROM.
Once that's over with search around in the ROM (use RESCO EXPLORER... GREAT program) and find the file CDMA BACKUP and use a hex editor to view it.
Search around for any 6 digit number and one of them should be the MSL. I found a bunch and tried them all.
To test, go to the phone and punch in #*#MSL_NUMBER#
If it's the right number you then get a new screen showing the phone number and the ESN. Sweet.
Good luck to anybody else if you want to try.
