For those of you who have bought the Motorola E398 (Chaiya Chaiya phone), here’s how to give a new lease of life to your phone. And those who haven’t, this is still one of the best phones in the market. So go make an informed decision.
The original phone (MTv Version) comes with firmware (version: R372_G_0E.20.34R) which is quite good but flakey. Among it’s chief gripes are:
Slightly slow interface and SMS typing
Very flaky USB transfers through bundled cable. 8KB/sec at most. Even Bluetooth transfers happen at the same speed. Worse, transfers possible via USB using bundled BVRP mobilePhone Tools or Bluetooth drivers only which keep crashing or getting disconnected in the midst of a transfer.
No Drive Letter support for USB. Use MobilePhoneTools or OBEX transfers only.
No voice recording, video recording.
Inbuilt MP3 player lacks proper file management and makes playback of 80 (96Kbps, 44.1KHz, Joint Stereo, Lame 3.96.1, RazorLame) odd songs stored on a 256MB TransFlash very difficult.
SMS can be stored on SIM cards only. 32K sim stores around 25 SMS message. Even though phone has almost 5MB of internal memory.
Insufficient number of skins provided in original phone (just 3)
For a long time I have been studying the Motorola Firmware Update groups and finally took the plunge. Most of the forums recommended that later E398s had better firmware and so experience lesser number of problems (missing features were still missing). Hackers promptly cooked up new Firmware Updates based on knowledge they gleaned from studying the Factory firmware in the phone. While many firmware versions were experimental and clearly documented known issues, they warned of unknown issues crashing the phone too. After a while, the firmware versions matured and forums started recommending specific versions for specific features.
One good site to read up the final results is: https://e398essentials.wikispaces.com/
After months of deliberation, I finally decided to take the plunge and go in for a hacker firmware update. Since my phone is now out of warranty and Motorola will probably never get around to updating my firmware for free, I selected the R372MP:YAP398 firmware multi-pack. https://e398essentials.wikispaces.com/yap398
The tools you require are: (my versions)
FlashBackup (2.3)
P2kTools (0.8.6)
PST (6.7)
Patch for PST (6.7)
R372_G_0E[1].20.9CR_LP0024C3_YAP398_0.90_MP
Comprehensive user guides and links to download are available at the website mentioned above, and I don’t need to replicate them here.
After the firmware update, I immediately noticed:
Fast and responsive User Interface (great looking too!)
Quick SMS typing
Drive Letter support for TransFlash card in phone
Very fast USB transfers to phone (90-100KB/sec)
Good selection of skins and some silly ringtones.
New information display when phone has disabled the normal display and saving battery.
Reliable USB transfers (dumped 48MB files using USB, kept it connected for 30 minutes - no issues).
Stuff I haven’t tested:
Bluetooth transfers (speed & reliability)
SMS storage is supposed to have been switched to the phone (over 1000 messages) but I am yet to test this.
To enable Voice recording & video recording, I am supposed to now install a R373 firmware. Thats a different adventure altogether reserver for another day.
Other stuff I did using P2KTools:
Changed the Startup & Shutdown wallpaper as well as sound.
Saved the Java based Motorola MP3 player software, and planning to check it out on a Nokia phone.
Changed a slew of phone related settings.
Overall, tremendous changes were applied by the firmware itself, and with the tools at your disposal, you could change everything about the phone to make it a totally unique experience. No other phone in the market allows you to do this yet.
Its like the beauty of a IBM PC - May have bugs, but lets you install a very wide variety of operating Systems & millions of software tools. You can’t resist that, can you?