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This morning I took my Motorolla Q off the charger and tried to power it on. It would briefly display the Sprint boot logo then fade out and shutoff completly. Thinking it might be a temporary condition I removed and replaced the battery which only made things worse. Now I am no longer able to power on/off the phone but when I remove and replace the battery I’m greeted with a “Motorolla Flash Mode” screen that instructs me to connect the USB cable.

I’ve been searching forums all morning looking for a solution since the phone seems to be partially working. Came across a site that suggested I could use the Motorolla Software Updater to reflash it but this is unable to determine the version of my phone. I tried another method of using the Motorolla Software Updater to start the process on a co-workers “good” Moto Q and swapping mine in while the update is downloading but I can’t get that to work.

So I’ve moved on to trying to use RDSLite to reflash the phone. I’ve found SPT_Q2_C_01.13.00I_01.0D.00R_MONSTER_01.sbf which is apparently firmware for some version (not sure which) of a Moto Q provided by Sprint. Using RDSLite I get part of the way through the process but it fails. The error doesn’t give much detail (that helps me understand what is going on at least) but it “seems” like it’s failing while trying to erase the old flash but also indicates that it’s not able to verify the bootloader (like a checksum error). So I’m not sure if the phone is actually dead (ie: dead flash) or if the problem is with the the file I am trying to upload. For shiggles I’m going to try uploading a Verizon image that looks like it might be an older version than what I have… Sigh…

Update: Tried several different flash images with RDSLite and they all seem to fail the same way. Luckily I found http://www.motorola.com/iden/support and was able to verify that my Moto Q is still under warranty. Going to ship it off tomorrow and keep my fingers crossed. Wish I had known about this repair service the first time it died and Sprint charged me $55 for a replacement. I have a Samsung A900 I was able to temporarily active on my account so the 10-14 days estimated repair time is only a slight inconvenience (hope I don’t miss any meetings heh).

WMReboot 0.2 seemed to take too long to load for what it’s function was. I figured if someone needs to reboot their device they want to do it quickly. For that reason I rewrote WMReboot as a Visual C# console application to greatly decrease the load time. It would problably run faster if I used C++ but I’m more comfortable in the managed code arena so we’ll take things one step at a time Read more here.

Quick release of WMStopWatch to fix the issues caused in the 0.5 release. Read more here.

I’ve released a new version of WMStopWatch that adds a countdown mode. The countdown mode allows you to set a time and optionally a wav file. When the timer reaches the countdown time the default system beep or the configured wav file is played. Read more here.

ProcessManager is a simple task manager for Windows Mobile devices. I wrote it to test my CC.System.Diagnostics class library. Download the application here.

I needed a way to find a process by it’s name on my Motorola Q so I modified some example code provided by Microsoft and wrote this simple class library. You can read more about the details here.

I wasn’t happy that versions 0.3 and below only supported a resolution of ~1 second so I have released an updated version that supports millisecond resolution (more if I wanted and your device supports it). Also added options to control the background and foreground colors and tried to fix an issue on Pocket PCs where “closing” the application minimized it (waiting on feedback, don’t have a Pocket PC to test on). Read more here.

Moto Q Flashlight allows the user to control the state of the camera flash. It has three modes of operation: Normal, Strobe, and Morse Code. The application consists of a Win32 DLL written in Visual C++ that exposes the native API to control the camera flash and a GUI written in Visual C#. Click here for more info.

There is an application out there for the Moto Q that allows you to enable / disable the camera flash and use it like a flashlight. I think it’s a great idea and could be a very useful application. Being cheap and a programmer I set out to code my own solution rather than fork over the $4.95 or make a keygen (seriously, why wrap the flash control functions in a C++ DLL but expose your key verification function in an unobfuscated IL binary ;). Ok you caught me I wrote a keygen and then moved on heh )

Thanks to the awesome support team at MOTODEV for pointing me towards the DeviceIoControl API:

The camera flash light can be controlled as a COM-port using “CAM1:” as a device.

Use the CreateFile() call to get a handle the camera driver, with the filename “CAM1:”.

Then use this file handle to make a call to DeviceIoControl() using the IOCTL (see the code below) and set the ‘Value’ value with a DWORD variable. 0=flash off and any other value=flash on.

The code shown below will change the state of the flash on a Moto Q. I’ve started work on a Win32 DLL to expose the native functions to a VB.NET or C# project. I’d like to start using C# more so I’ll probably write a frontend to control the flash.

WMReboot is a simple Visual Basic .NET 2.0 application to reboot your Windows Mobile 5 device. The application calls SetCleanRebootFlag and KernelIoControl API from coredll.dll to perform the reboot operation. All testing was done on my Moto Q. Click here for more info.