Sunday, January 9, 2011

My New Capacitive Touchscreen phone

Last week/year, I started looking out for a new capacitive touch screen, 3G mobile phone after my jailbroken(rooted), unlocked iPhone started loosing battery. Came across this device, a factory unlocked phone with most of the features I was looking for below INR Rs 10,000/- called Spice MI 300.



This device turned out to be a good phone with 3.2 inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, GPS/AGPS, Gsensor ,a decent CPU qualcomm MSM 7227 ARMv6 running at 600MHZ, with a 2GB MicroSD (upgradable to 32GB) 156MB user phone memory, 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM, hardware capable of FM radio( SOC USI WM-BG-BM-02  need to verify), with a 1230mAH battery and a 5 Megapixel camera, Optical trackball, E-compass, Proximity Sensor, bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP + EDR, Wifi 802.11 b/g, GPRS | EDGE | 7.2Mbps HSDPA.

This phone is powered by modified version of linux 2.6 kernel. This mobile operating system is called Android which has an application platform running on a java stack,. The stock MI 300 runs (donut)Android 1.6 with an upgradable option of the firmware to (Eclair)Android 2.1.
I had earlier played with montavista linux runnning 2.4 kernel on a motorola A780 which had a resistive touch screen and also a keypad.

The first thing I do when I get any device is, try to dissassemble and see what goes inside the device. Warranty doesnot mean much these days. Before starting I searched around the net for any tips. It turned out that this device is a widely popular phone and has a 14 variants/clones with the same hardware under the hud manufactured by commtiva. Some of these clones are factory unlocked and some are tied to carriers which can be easily unlocked.

1 Spice MI 300(India)
2 Optimus Boston (Portuguese)
3 Orange Boston(Europe)
4 Gigabyte Gsmart G1305
5 Motorola Quench Xt3/XT502(India)
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_quench_xt3_xt502-3354.php
6 Apanda A60(China)
7 Vibo A688(Taiwan)
8 Chinavision Excalibur
9 Muchtel A1(Taiwan)
10 Wellcom A88(Thailand)
11 Cincinnati Bell Blaze
12 Nexian Journey Lounge
13 Commtiva z71(USA, Taiwan)
14 Videocon v7500 zeus(India)

The PCB of a MI 300 Clone, Apanda A60.
Here is a pdf file of dissassembly with pictures of chinese version of motorola quench xt2.

Update: FM Receiver
The combo Bluetooth/WIFI/SIP mobule USI WM-BG-AQ-02  spec pdf file and USI WM-BG-AQ-02 description. Looks like the hardware doesnot support FM Receiver :(

2 comments:

  1. Hi Vijay,
    Cool blog! Good work.
    Any idea whether Micromax A60 is a factory unlocked phone ? or any other cheap smartphones you suggest me so that I too can start debugging just for fun.

    BTW can you give me your mail id.

    Denny

    ReplyDelete
  2. Micromax A60 is factory unlocked.
    Spice MI310, MI410, are a few unlocked android phones.
    Have fun and happy debugging :-)

    ReplyDelete