CAT S60 Telekom Single to Dual SIM unlock (#P17)

Short but rambly one for today, as I’m a tad busy at the moment…
As shown previously, I got a blank CAT S60 phone from work, which got a SIM card added just this week, so this is now my official mobile phone. I wouldn’t normally get a company phone despite all of my colleagues being kept on short leash for quite some time. That’s because my stuff is handy and can be replaced entirely when something goes wrong on graveyard shifts or the weekend, whereas the main production machines are one-offs and need to be fixed asap. That’s why the colleagues get a nice phone (and the occasional stand-by duty), and I got a 600×90 work bench that’s more often than not flooded with broken equipment. I wonder when I get the first call from around the world at 4am because that number is now in my mail signature…

Now, the S60 wasn’t in use for over a year and would have been discarded for whatever reason, despite being highly useful for electric and electronic troubleshooting. It would have donated its fresh battery and the speaker grill to another in-use S60, and that’s why I was asked to have a look at it.

The reason for all that financial nonsense is that the second S60 is a device from the free market, while mine was a Telekom/T-Mobile contract device with crippled firmware. Despite being dual-SIM in hardware, the T-Mobile firmware only has one IMEI present, and they even got a custom sticker in the SIM/SD hatch that only denotes one IMEI. All of our Android users however want/require a dual SIM device (and the Apple folks get what they deserve). So it was deemed useless and T-Mobile wasn’t taking it back.

Someone, well, several people clearly weren’t thinking – useless devices must be given to the tinkerers!

I’m by far not as active in the mobile phone world as I used to be, but that’s because there haven’t been as much radical new things in that sector as there used to be. I started with a decent Nokia 3410 with the classic Nokia OS (Java-enabled and some 100KB of free space, never had a killer app available) and boy was the Nokia N-Gage on Symbian S60 (foreshadowing!) an upgrade. I had a 5MB data plan from day one and I just cancelled my current plan as there’s some free volume on my business SIM – guess what, I spent 2 bucks on 100MB a month. My data needs were huge in the beginning and didn’t scale all that much, other folks were bewildered when I checked my mails in school and now they struggle with 50GB plans. I know, I’m strange.

Symbian was a big deal back then and I tinkered a lot. It was also the time when carrier branding went from a physical logo on the device plus some boot screen to a severe crippling of functionality and some money traps, e.g. the dreaded WAP browser shortcut on press of the “0” button. Visiting dodgy pages and flashing dubious images was all the rage. There also might have been cases of users fixing a design flaw of Nokia, that is, in order to play a different game on a game-focused smart phone, one would have to swap the MMC card, similar to a console game. Which required to open the case and remove the battery first. Go figure why that concept died pretty quickly.

What’s it got to do with the CAT? Well, it’s the same shit all over again.

When I got it, it let it patch up to the current software, which obviously didn’t help. T-Mobile designed their crippling firmware to stay, and CAT/Bullitt Group do not offer significant updates, but only deliver patches for things that would make the device more open to third-party updates. If it wasn’t for the IR camera, I’d ditch that phone in an instant.

XDA developers forum is still going strong, and this is where I got the software to get rid of T-Mobile. It also helped rooting, which is a nice touch. My current Galaxy S5 isn’t really easy to root, as it (for some reason) is the AT&T model that isn’t affected by towelroot.

Well, here’s the main link – XDA T3698046 – all the usual stuff, do things on your own risk, call your mommy when you bricked your device successfully. Here’s the firmware versions, as freeing the second SIM slot requires downgrading to version 32 and slowly patching up to 38 / Android 6.01 again: XDA P79046443 I’m now at (#02#) CEI software version LTE_D0201121.0_S60_0.038.00 (D as in Dual SIM), kernel 3.10.84-perf-g863a158f973rdadmin@vBuild1BT52#1, ACDB version ACDB_BT52_EU_20160823_1400 and fully unlocked status. This post XDA P77978181 might also help in getting root with TWRP. I did follow the guides and used the 31->32->38 shortcut firmware from the second link, never got a boot loop, but in hindsight I would transfer my data first before getting the company accounts set up. It’s easy to sync phones when both are rooted (Helium or Titanium backup), but as I said, my S5 isn’t – and to do that, it’s likely reset to factory defaults first.

Do all that software magic and a second IMEI appears… (*#06#)

…FUCKERS. It’s not that we paid any less for the phone because of the contract, it’s not the early 2000s anymore. Even back then the carriers accepted money for some unlock code, but T-Mobile will not unlock this phone for any amount. One NEEDS to hack this in order to get access to the second SIM slot. Which only is 2G anyway, so it’s not that one could use a 4G T-Mobile card AND a cheaper 3G/4G card for data use…

The physical nav buttons are still a nuisance, but I’m starting to move everything to the CAT, as using two phones are even more of a hassle. Takes some time, but I already switched the power button in my tiny lizard brain from right (S5) to top-left (S60). So that’s a good thing.

Now, what do I do with that sweet IR cam? Probably watching stuff die under severe overload conditions (“Polly wants more amps”). Or watch my Weißwurst warming up. That’s not some Bavarian slang for newfangled IR dick pics, that’s literally what I did:

Users new to the FLIR system might want to consider that there’s also a second image embedded into that JPEG, which is from a regular optical camera. There’s a huge offset that I cannot fix, so it’s like the FLIR software is using the standard camera, but the resolution is REALLY shitty. So for IR dick pics, please note that unless removed, there’s also an early 2000s style, super-low res optical picture of your Wiener included.

If anyone knows how to extract those images under Linux (not with WINE’d FLIR tools), please drop me a note.


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[…] As ranted previously, I did change my phone not too long ago, so in addition to having the backup from back then, I was also able to make a full backup of the faulty system. And to reset it, and to do other backup and restore tasks in my six day journey of making the damn thing work again without data loss. […]