Hacked My S60 Nokia Phone and Removed the Useless Search On The Main Screen… Sort Of

July 4th, 2008 • Mark Guim • Filed Under •

A topic I haven’t talked about here on the Nokia blog is about hacking S60. I never really understood it or saw the point, but I tried it today to remove that useless search tool on the main display of the Nokia N95 8GB. In essence, hacking your S60-powered phones like the Nokia Nseries and Eseries devices lets you install unsigned applications and apply patches. The bad thing about it is the changes applied by the patch needs to be reapplied every time the phone is restarted.

There’s no option to remove the Search on the active display. I don’t use it and don’t really want it on my main screen. I rather use the Google Search app.

So here are the pictures before and after the hack.

Before:

Nokia N95 8GB

After

Nokia N95 8GB

Hack Your S60

Want to hack your S60 Nokia phone? Go to Symbian-Freak’s Modding forums for instructions on hacking S60 and using the ROMPatcher. I have not found any other useful patches other than being able to remove the search from the active display screen. Maybe more useful patches will come out in the future. The changes are gone and need to be reapplied if you restart your phone. Is it worth it? Eh.

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There are 7 comments so far. »

  1. Jonathan Greene on 4 July 2008:

    I hate that search too … have to try this.

    Reply to this comment

  2. Devilywan on 4 July 2008:

    i will try this one too..i never use that search..

    Reply to this comment

  3. Mr-X on 5 July 2008:

    There’s an autostart version of ROMPatcher available meaning that you don’t need to apply patches on each restart. This particular patch still requires that you turn active standby on and off, though.

    If you haven’t seen them already, here are some other patches that some may find useful(when autostarted):

    1)Disable camera shutter sound, even if your firmware doesn’t allow it.
    2)Disable Java security warnings.
    3)Using voice command to open any application you want.
    4)Allowing any other application instead of the browser to be opened by holding down ‘0′.

    Reply to this comment

  4. Mark Guim on 5 July 2008:

    Mr. X I hope to see more come out of this. Now I see the potential of hacking S60.

    Reply to this comment

  5. James Powell on 6 July 2008:

    Would it be possible to add active standby plugins like those on the eseries to display unread text messages etc. for example?

    Could the files to do this be copied from an Nseries to Eseries device for example?

    Reply to this comment

  6. MichaelSF on 19 July 2008:

    Hi Mark, i’m Michael, Moderator over at Symbian Freak ..

    thought you’ll find those Links usefull:
    this is another Solution for Hacking the Phone, A LOT easier in my opinion, with Screens and everything.

    Index about some of the Patches, our Guys over at SF has developed, maybe some of your Guys find it usefull.

    Maybe you can remember, i was the former Member of the nokian-blog.com ..

    Cheers
    Michael

    Reply to this comment

  7. IA on 3 August 2008:

    Hi,

    Can you please tell me what are the *32 and the bubble icon with 0 for? What application bring them?

    IA

    Reply to this comment

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