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
Launcher
OS version, storage size
RAM size
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!