Hacking the Motorola A780
posted Oct 18th 2005 8:00PM
The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has picked up one of these phones and started poking around in the system. The first thing of note is that the phone doesn't use the typical lightweight tools found in most embedded systems. Instead of busybox or uClibc it uses their heavier counterparts. The phone also has a 2.4 kernel and switching to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has successfully built a compatible toolchain and has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to construct a firewall between the GPRS and the USB connection. Other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux Bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging everyday like JTAG pads for both processors and debugging callbacks built into the factory code. Harald Welte will be presenting these and future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in December.
About time someone tryed to fix the dismal interfaces cell-makers call a UI and add forward thinking features (shame on you CE's makers for not doing it yourself!)With the advancements cellphone processing power has made over the last few years, comes greater flexibility and usability. Seems new features and apps came at the price of stability and fuctionality. Nokia, Samsung, Sony, and all other cellphone producers are skimping on designing quality software for these phone most likely due to the short lifespan of the modern cellphone. None the less we the consumer, still gets boned. Kudos to you sir for giving back what the consumer deserves.
[ First post sucka's :p ]
The Motorola E680i runs on Linux and already supports A2DP out of the box.
The Moto Fan Club forums have plenty of details on hacking on the E680/E680i/A780
http://www.rcsc.sisrs.com/mfc/