The QTEK 8500 may not be the best Windows Mobile Smartphone on the market – others have stronger processors and more memory. However, the machine is available for cheap(100€) and is very small…if it had a little more memory and WM6, it would be a cutting-edge flip phone. Read on to update your QTEK 8500 to Windows Mobile 6(and get 23MB of free storage memory)!

First of all, here are a few photos proving my claims. The phone on the left runs WM6, the one on the right is still on Windows Mobile 5(click for bigger versions):
Home screen
DSC04088 Windows Mobile 6 for QTEK 8500
Launcher
DSC04089 Windows Mobile 6 for QTEK 8500
OS version, storage size
DSC04090 Windows Mobile 6 for QTEK 8500
RAM size
DSC04091 Windows Mobile 6 for QTEK 8500

The update process essentially runs in three steps. First of all, connect your phone to your PC and run SDAUnlocker, which will unlock your phone.

After that, a slightly weird process called CID unlocking awaits you. Download version itsutilsbin-20070705 of the tools, and do the following(more news here):

1. Get itsutils: http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme/projects/xda/tools.html
2. Run pdocread.exe with no args. Take a note of the “uniqueid” value.
3. Run “pdocread -n 1 0×000000 0×10000 -b 0×4000 original-bdk1.nb” – you’ll get a file.
4. Head over to http://www.spv-developers.com/strtrkCID/. Feed it the DOCID and the file you got from steps 2 and 3. It’ll give you back anoter file.
5. Run “pdocwrite -n 1 patchedfile.bin 0×000000 0×10000 -b 0×4000″ where patchedfile.bin is obviously to be replaced with the patched file you got from step 4.

Once this is done, you are ready to go. Get a firmware update of choice from this xda-developers thread(I used one from here), unpack it and run the flasher. Once the flashing process is done, you are ready to go!

A big thank-you goes out to Franz Lax for providing us with a second QTEK 8500 for experimentation!


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