I am a great fan of sonyericsson phones. Do you own a sony ericsson phone? Check out the tutorial, I wrote some time back, about changing your default menu icons.

Unlike the first wave of eight-megapixel hot shots, including the LG Renoir, Samsung Pixon and Samsung i8510, the C905 sliderphone doesn’t have touchscreen control or smartphone functionality, but it does work its Cyber-shot credentials hard.

Read the rest of the review here.

Today crankup.net is celebrating one year. I thank all my visitors, readers and subscribers for supporting me. Special thanks to following bloggers who helped me a lot.

1. TheAnand
2. Kenney Jacob
3. I am a techie
4. SajithMr

Thanks to bloggers like thewindowsfix , householdhacker who have linked to my articles.

Here are some of my popular posts in case you have missed any

1. Change Sonyericsson default menu icons
2. Add background music to your orkut scrapbook
3. Access blocked gmail in office/school
4. Funny Windows Vista Errors
5. 5 email addresses that convert documents
6. Download high defenition wallpapers

Once again thank you for all the support

I am planning to give away 2 free .com domains for 2 of our readers. If you ask why? the simple answer is “Just to thank my readers “.

On September 15th I will be giving away the domain names(you can choose the domain name). Interested in participating? Just leave a comment on this post and you will get a chance to win. Digg/stumble or bookmark any of my popular posts shown below and you will get an extra chance ;-). Don’t forget to add the link to your account, with the url, as a comment.

1. Change Sonyericsson default menu icons
2. Add background music to your orkut scrapbook
3. Multiple yahoo messenger login…
4. Top 10 mobile apps[java] for your phone
5. 25 useful portable applications
6. Add more themes to ubuntu
7. Firefox : Make it better/faster
8. Ubuntu transformation pack

And finally dont forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds to keep you updated.

Today accidentally I came upon this page in Indiatimes shopping and was shocked to see the contents. (Clcick to enlarge)

The laptop shown in the page is Compaq presario v3225au model. I bought this laptop about 5 months back. And running Ubuntu and XP successfully. I was shocked to see the price. The page says

MRP : Rs 53,900

You Save : Rs 17,000

Price Now : Rs 36,290

I bought this laptop for 35,000. This amount includes 2500 additional cost for 512 MB RAM. The above is nothing but CHEATING.

This laptop is no longer available from HP. They are selling it for Rs.3790 more than the normal price and claim we save 17,000.

I checked some other products in their site and same is the case with most of the items. They are selling a HTC phone for 16,000 (They called it reduced price) where as it costs only 14,000+ in the market. There are many other websites like these. www.wowdeals.co.in is another website which claims to sell products at discounted rate.  Lets have a look at those.

Sonyericsson K750i : Price : 9000+ and You save : 12,000+

Sonyericsson W810i : Price : 12,000+ and you save 16,000+

They call these GREAT BRANDS GREAT DEALS. I think these websites should be shutdown. What do you say?

Many users end up in my blog searching “Sony ericsson themes, Sony ericsson secrets codes ..” etc in search engines but they don’t find exactly what they want. So I thought I will write something which any SE phone user will love.

Firstly let me warn you that playing with your phone settings is not a  joke You should take extreme care not to mess up things. you may end up damaging your phone beyond recovery.The tutorial is very simple and the picture below is what I have done to my W580i phone menu.

Did you like it?

OK …before you can start with you work make sure you have/satisfy the following

1. XS++ : This is the tool which will help you to transfer your new menu icons to your phone. If you dont have it download it from here .

2. Menu Icons : You can do a quick google search  for SE Menu icons  and you will get lot of sites with good menu icons.  If you dont find any, download any of the below menu icons pack from my site. These were not designed by me (Oh! yes you can design your own menu icons using another tool which I will mention later). I dont know who the designer is but I must say I love the designs.

1. menu-1.zip (This is the pack which I have used)
2. tecnology-menu-icons.zip
3. mixed-menu-icons.zip
4. fire-menu-icons.zip

3. 80 - 100 % battery charge : Make sure you battery is fully charged. (This is very important)

4. USB drivers for your phone.

6. Data cable (You cant do anything without this.. bluetooth does not help you in this )

Now here is the step by step procedure.

1. Switch off your phone ( Yes you cannot see a live preview of your new menu… Like DIGG says “Patience My friend is a virtue”)

2. Open “XS++” and you should have something like this

3. Press “Connect” button. Leave the default settings as it is and you will see that XS++ will ask you to connect you phone.

4. Press and hold “c” in your phone and connect your phone to your PC with the USB cable (You have 30 seconds for this).

5. Xs++  will show your phone status (see below screenshot).

 6. Now slect the radio button for “FSX” (See below screenshot)

7. Press “Start FSX“. XS++ will start building your phone’s system folders. This may take some time depending on your phone’s model and the amount of data you have in your memory card. Dont worry if XS++ hangs for some time. Wait until all the folders are mapped.

8. Expand “tpa” (Click the + symbol) -> preset -> system -> menu

9. Now you will see a list of files. The PNG files you see are the icons. You will also see a file named menu.ml. This file has all the details about menu icons and their links.

10. Drag and drop the icon files which you have downloaded (Make sure you unzip the contents before uploading). By deafult XS++ replaces all the files but you can delete the existing icons manually.

11. uploading will take some time depending upon the size of your images.

12. Once the upload is complete. Click shutdown and press “Yes”  in the confirmation box.

Now disconnect your phone and switch it on.

Does it switch on? NO? OMG what have you done? Did you miss any step?

Yes! dont worry the phone will not switch until you perform the next step.

13. Remove and reinsert the battery. Switch on your phone and have fun with your new menu icons.

Hope you enjoyed this post. If you like more posts like this, why not subscribe to my RSS feeds to keep yourself updated? You can also subscribe via email. Just enter your email ID above.

As I promised earlier here is the tool which can generate menu.ml  files for your own icons.

Read my post about Sony ericsson secret codes in mobspice. Check out my photo gallery. Let me know what you did with your SE menu.

1. Hey google, where is the Android code?
2. Introducing EyeMobile Engine
3. Location Based Services - A Double Edged Sword?
4. Sony ericsson Secret Codes

I moved to nex step by changing the menu icons for sony ericsson phone

Now its getting more interesting…. Anyone wants their phone to be modified???

Most of my friends know that I love sony ericsson phones… I bought this amazing SE w580i phone 3 months back…. Since W580i is new i was not able to download new themes, applications etc…

I thought of flashing my phone… Did a quick google search and i ended up with few good sites that can taught me how to flash my phone

1.  www.topsony.com
2. www.segoodies.com
3. http://forums.se-nse.net

Within 2 days I gathered enough information to flash my phone.. Oh!! yeah.. I forgot to mention.. Flashing a phone means customizing the firmware(Software) which is installed in the phone.

I managed to remove Airtel operator logo (Airtel text) from my phone’s desktop, move the date to left etc etc… You wont find these options in phone menu.

I installed W800i accoustics .. meaning… i was able to increase my walkman player’s loudness.. and add thump/more bass to it …

This is how the original w580i desktop looks (Lasyk Networks is the operator logo)

This is how my phone looks (excuse me for the dull pic.. I took it with my webcam :-))

(AIRTEL operator logo missing)

You can change many settings if you are ready to risk :-).. Tweaks include changing font, adding a new operator logo, changing standby clock etc etc.

Contact me if you need any help for flashing your phone.

Warning : flashing without knowledge can damage your phone beyond recover
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