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adventures in resurrecting an old motorola flip phone

published 2024-01-27

the phone in question is a motorola v66e, it's a very attractive little bean when closed (photo coming soon??) and it has a phone keypad, a few extra buttons (like arrow keys and call/hang up keys) on the inside and some others (volume, voice record) on the sides. it has a cute monochrome backlit display (with a choice of green, red or orange backlight colours!!). on the hinge side is a short non-telescopic antenna and a status light, on the top is a removable plate covering the sim card slot, and on the back is a removable battery.

this particular specimen has been lying unused for at least a decade now and so it has a few major issues. one which is obviously expected is that the battery life is abysmal (only lasts for a few minutes in constant use and maybe up to half an hour in standby if you're lucky), but there is a more problematic one relating to actually using it as a phone. the battery should be easy enough to replace or otherwise fix (especially since it's so easily removable) but the other issue is proving to be much more difficult.

trying to get service

so, the sim card still in the phone was for the network it was originally purchased from - orange uk - and turning on the phone with that card in allows it to boot to the main standby screen. it's able to connect to the cell network! but it can only make emergency calls, because orange uk has been defunct and nonexistent for years, and the plan would probably be deactivated by now anyway.

the obvious solution was to put another sim card in. i gave it a 3 card, which it didn't like at all, and just said "CHECK SIM" - i'm guessing that 3 has turned off support for whatever old connection types the phone uses, or something similar. so i gave it a 1pmobile sim card instead (1pmobile uses ee's network and not 3's), which gave a different response, this time asking "Enter Subsidy Password" which after some searching apparently means it's network-locked and needs an unlock code from the operator.

so the phone is locked to a network that doesn't exist anymore. but all was not lost at this point, because when orange went defunct they were bought by ee and all customers were moved to an ee plan instead. so i went to the ee website and asked them for an unlock code (which required entering the imei of the phone, which required reinstalling the orange sim card so i could access the dialer so i could enter the magic number to display the imei). but they essentially just said "lmao your phone too old we forgot the unlock code for it" (in more professional terms of course)

i think you can see the problem here: the phone is locked to a network on which it can't get service, and there is no way to unlock it because they got rid of the codes. so it seems like the phone won't be able to act as a phone anymore :(

less legitimate methods

after some research on mostly old forum threads, it seems like it's also possible to unofficially unlock this phone using some special software and a usb cable. there are two new problems now: how to get the mysterious proprietary usb cable, and how to get the sketchy 20-year-old software

as for the usb cable they're actually not too uncommon second-hand so hopefully we will get one of those arriving soonish!

but for the software, i'm still in the process of scouring old threads for any download links that aren't dead already (many many many copies are hosted on various long-gone file sharing services) or for any that happen to be in the wayback machine (unfortunately none of the software is in the internet archive proper). from my research it seems like i need:

the official motorola diagnostic/service tool, in order to put the phone into the right mode
"P2K Easy Tool" which is the dodgy program that actually does the unlocking
alternatively to the easy tool, some variety of "P2K Seem" editor, essentially a direct flash memory manipulator

so right now i have a copy of the motorola tool and multiple p2k seem editors, but i haven't yet tracked down the p2k easy tool anywhere. this is problematic because i don't actually know what memory edits are required to unlock the phone, so if i'm gonna actually do it i'll need to either find that out or find a copy of easy tool.

the hunt continues ! hopefully will update if/when i manage to unlock it or if any other complications turn up