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Help Using an off-contract Devour for wifi?

P

Praetor353

Lurker
hey all. new to the forums but not to phandroid...i have a question. i just snagged a used devour off my friend today for $30 in the hopes to use it as a sort of wifi-tablet. does anyone have expierence doing this? i just did a hard reset on it to wipe off all of said friends data, and i used the ##bluroff command at the language screen to access the homescreen.

so does anyone have expierence doing this with unlocked/off contract android phones? if no one says "it cant possibly be done at all ever" im going to root it, try that, and flash on cyanogen or whatevers out there in the effort to accomplish my goal. i just got it tonight and havnt put much research into it yet

thanks!
 
I don't think Cyanogen has a port for the Devour (unfortunately). You can try to add some hype on their forums for it but for the most part it's the forgotten child.

That being said, I'll bet you can use the wifi on a deactivated phone. Like you already did, use ##bluroff then try to root it. Since it's a used phone you got from your friend and it's deactivated, you really have nothing to lose since you can always do a full restore. There are easy steps all over the internet (I believe there's a thread outlining the process in this forum). Once you use ##bluroff I think you can get into the Android Market simply by logging in with your Google account, and once you're rooted you can take steps to remove/bypass MotoBlur (a custom home screen app, etc). If you do manage to keep the phone from asking you to reactivate every time and have a home screen that will remember your apps, then you're probably good to go. Unless I'm horribly wrong and/or Verizon blocks using wifi with a deactivated phone, if you do things right and remove the correct APKs and stuff you should have a nice little Android tablet.
 
That's for the ##blurroff tip.

A friend just gave me her Devour for $20. VZW gave her a replacement phone since her Devour was that bad to her they must have relented. Either way I've got it reset-ed and I will be rooting.

I've heard there's a couple ROMs out there that are compatible with this phone, so I'm hoping I can get it running as swiftly as I can. The reason why I got it is to have a WiFi only gadget laying around the house in case guests or myself feel like browsing the web or playing games while lounging or watching tv.
 
My Dad gave me his old Devour, in case mine breaks down. He hated the smart phone, and got his number switched to a flip phone. I have it laying on a shelf. I just took it down, connected to twitter via my WiFi here at the house. No rooting or fiddling around required. I just had to tell it to connect to my network.
 
I recently got a Devour and use it only as a wifi mini-tablet. Just finished rooting it, permanent reactivated the wifi, and did the permanent Motoblur bypass (all instructions found on these and other Android forums) last week.

That said, it works great as a palm sized tablet...only downside is the screen is a bit small for websurfing.

From all the forum trolling I've done pre/post rooting, adding a custom ROM may pretty much be a no-go. This isn't a popular device, so not many people have gone into developing Devour specific stuff. Oh well, the basic Android platform works well enough for doing what most people will do with a tablet anyway...check emails, surf web, watch YouTube, etc.

If you want a "custom" look there's different home screen launchers available for free on the market; I'm using ADW for Android 1.5/1.6 with the Antique Cyanogen theme. The Galaxy S one for ADW is also nice, but I kept getting force closure notices so I just unistalled it and kept the Antique Cyanogen.

Despite all the hate on this phone, my personal experience so far is that it's a good device overall. As a basic "eSocial" device, it works great. Just don't expect it to be a Droid Razr and your set ;)
 
Hah, glad my guides are benefitting somebody. Now that I've done all that bullcrap I'll probably update my "safe to remove apps" list.

After that, I dunno. Maybe I'll try to get past the bootloader? I've done everything else already...
 
p_025 said:
Hah, glad my guides are benefitting somebody. Now that I've done all that bullcrap I'll probably update my "safe to remove apps" list.

After that, I dunno. Maybe I'll try to get past the bootloader? I've done everything else already...
Click to expand...

+1 for you man! +1 more for being kind to a newbie in responses. Guides have been very helpful in getting my Devour rooted. It really is a great little device on the whole.
 
Isn't that what Android is all about? I try to make my guides work step-by-step as easily as possible with very little technical knowhow. The Devour is a crippled phone and I want to make my uncrippling guides as easy as possible to follow. Its hardware isn't that terrible, but the MotoBlur and bloat software on it was crippling. So I like to think I help fight the good fight.
 
p_025 said:
Isn't that what Android is all about? I try to make my guides work step-by-step as easily as possible with very little technical knowhow. The Devour is a crippled phone and I want to make my uncrippling guides as easy as possible to follow. Its hardware isn't that terrible, but the MotoBlur and bloat software on it was crippling. So I like to think I help fight the good fight.
Click to expand...

Thanks again...it has been helpful. Question...are you running a custom recovery and if so which one? I'm trying to figure out if I can wipe the personal data in case I decide to pass the phone along to someone else (i.e. de-link my gmail account). Tried re-installing the Setup-release files that were deleted in the permanent bypass steps and that didn't work. Itried to push the files in ADB but that didn't work (maybe I was doing the command lines wrong, but when I had SU access it said "push" as a command wasn't found), so I sideloaded the files but still no dice. I then bought Root Explorer and tried it that way, but still no dice either. So, maybe if I had a custom recovery that could do a factory reset without losing root, like Xionia supposedly can, that would be great.
 
No custom recoveries are even available for the phone. But the stock recovery can do a "factory reset" wiping everything except the phone number if you reset it to get wifi working. You won't technically lose root but Superuser requests won't work properly. Fixing it is rather easy, though, if you're curious we can talk about it in a PM.
 
p_025 said:
No custom recoveries are even available for the phone. But the stock recovery can do a "factory reset" wiping everything except the phone number if you reset it to get wifi working. You won't technically lose root but Superuser requests won't work properly. Fixing it is rather easy, though, if you're curious we can talk about it in a PM.
Click to expand...

Cool...will send you a PM. Thanks!
 
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