Feb 142010
 
Fixing Emobile S21HT

I have a H11T from Emobile. Simple phone. Works well for connecting computers via Bluetooth or USB to the Internet. The phone itself is medicore. Web browsing is a pain as the phone constantly runs out of memory and reflowing web pages is a big challenge for the phone. Unfortunately there is no Android phone available from Emobile. Otherwise I would have bought one.

I got my fingers on an Emobile S21HT (AKA HTC Touch Diamond). Not the most modern phone, but not bad either. And it’s surprisingly small with a nice display. But it has one severe flaw: It runs Windows Mobile 6.1. For phones it is the most horrible OS possible in my opinion. Sluggish. Non-intuitive usage. It is Japanese only, which does not help here.

Luckily there is fix available for those shortcomings: Android On HTC which allows you to install Android (currently 2.01) on several HTC Windows phones. Like the HTC Touch Diamond.

Initially it failed for me. haret displayed an error message which did not make much sense. What fixed it was a full reset of the phone including formatting the internal flash.

For those who want to fix their S21HT too: here is the link for the download. Phone works. Internet works. WiFi works. And using it is far more intuitive now.

Small problem: the buttons at the bottom are swapped. The very bottom one and the top one are swapped. The neat thing is, that when you start to touch one, the other one starts to glow. Neat.

Not everything works though: This table shows what works and what does not. Mostly the cameras and GPS does not work. Luckily my real phone has both, so I don’t care.

So far I am happy. It is a bit slower than I expected (but snappier than on Windows Mobile), but it is great to do my first steps on Android and I can figure out whether this is something I want or not.

Update: 3G data transmission has to be set up. I found the settings here. In short: APN=emb.ne.jp,  Username=Password=em, MCC=440, MNC=00

I have to admit I have no clue what those things means, but once set up, browsing the web via 3G works like a charm.