S60 ROM Patcher
There’s an interesting development reported at Symbian Freak…
"In short, ROMPatcher makes the S60 platform truly and finally open to anything, this is the amazing piece of code, application allowing patching the ROM"
There are already two patches available to enable showing of hidden menus and allowing the install of unsigned applications.
The only limitation I can see is that different S60 phones (and even firmware versions on the same phone) might have code in different locations. This means patches are unlikely to work on all phones and there may need to be variants for different phones and firmware versions.
ROMPatcher raises lots of questions for Symbian and Nokia…
- Is this legal? Is something being reverse engineered? Will patches rely on authors having (possibly illegal) access to Nokia and/or Symbian source code so they know how things work and how to patch them?
- Is it possible to brick your phone this way?
- If someone bricks their phone this way and takes it back to their network operator, who pays?
- Would an ‘open’ OS, such that Android eventually hopes to be (isn’t now), prevent this kind of thing?.. or encourage it?