..out of the dark

..It works like this: on the rom- drive on the phone (which is hidden, unless you have a file- manager like Swiss Manager) there are a bunch of different directories. These contain, among other things, the standard icons and fonts used for the gui. And, for some reason, if you mirror those folders and files on the memory- stick, the original files are overridden at boot- time.

Soo.. let's just ignore the possibilities for a hack on the network- options, for instance, and focus on the visuals for now.

Basically, what you would do is put various mbm files on the memory stick, in the same directory structure as the files are in on the rom- drive. Such as //resource/ZSBLIB/.. and so on. Then restart the phone, and the new icons would be updated from the mbm- file on the mem- stick.

But, if you want to find a particular icon and replace it - first, download this tool. (It's an mbm (multiple bitmap)- viewer and compiler, based on the command- line tool from the UIQ sdk. Very well done, and loads of respect to whoever wrote it.) Then install Swiss Manager or X-plore, if you haven't already.

Open Swiss- Manager, click the setting for "show rom- drives", and open the z: drive. Browse for the folder you want - any of the folders with an mbm file would be possible to override in this way. Then copy the files here over to the memory- stick (..at this point, if the resource- directory exists already on the mem- stick, you can't write to it, since it's locked by the OS - so copy the directories you want, or the directory structure maybe, to a temporary dir on the mem- stick). Then link up the mem- stick, and copy the files over to the hard- drive.

If you're using the USB- cable now, the memory stick is not mounted on the phone's file- system, and you should be able to write to any of the usually protected directories.

Anyway. Edit the MBM- files. (I'm not entirely sure about the restrictions here, but it seems to work fairly well to resize the icon sizes a little. Here's an attempt at a long- drink battery- meter, for example: http://files.myopera.com/fleinn/uiq/longdrink.rar I think I need a slice of orange, and more orange juice.. ). Then import and replace the edited files inside the mbm- file, with the same names and so on.

All icons should be set to 16bpp colour, and the black and white masks should be set to 8bpp monochrome. Fix that in the mbmtool.

Finally, copy the edited file over to the memory- stick, into the directory structure the mbm- file was in on the rom- drive, with the same names and so on. Disconnect, and restart the phone.

(If things don't work, just delete or fix the new files via the usb- connection. Or, just removing the memory- stick and restarting, or possibly at the worst removing and inserting the battery as well, should fix things again. And then remove the new files on the mem- stick, and things should be back to normal.)

A note of caution - since there are some differences between the firmwares on UIQ phones, and between the versions on the same unit: as a rule, it's not really a very good idea to just import files others have compiled from the mbm files on their phones. The same goes for different cdas and fonts. So instead, import the bitmaps yourself to a file you just downloaded from your phone's rom- drive - i.e., confirm it's the same type of files with the same names. Most likely you'd just lose some new icons in your firmware, or something of that sort. But it's possible you would end up overriding the wrong icons, and possibly upsetting a parser- routine of some sort at boot- time.

There are no files or info replaced on the rom- drive by doing any of this, though. So this is a safe, and guaranteed reversible hack.