Root [Q] HTC Desire from China can't figure how to root and install new rom.

[bbrackrog]

Good Day,
I am a US Teacher teaching abroad in Rome and a noob to the android scene. I bought the HTC Desire on eBay from a seller in China who advertised a rooted and unbranded HTC Desire. When I received the phone it came with an Italian operating system and Windows Mobile 6.
The problem is i do not speak Italian yet and would like to root and install another rom. Being new to this i have looked up countless forum articles on this but i can't even get the phone to boot in hboot turning on phone and holding down back button does nothing nor does holding down the - volume button and power when starting phone and i can't find the usb debegging option either. I have included as much about the phone as i could find and would greatly appreciate any help with this. Trust me i have spent 2 weeks trying to find a fix on my own.

HTC DESIRE INFO:

Model No. V1.0.1-B7
Platform: Pocket PC
IMEI 850850690163042
ROM C03.021.13 ITA
ROM DATE 2010-11-19
Radio Version 4-16-2010 20:16:30
Protocol Version BASE_W09.20_P4
CPU SnapDragon QSD8250

thank you so much for your time.

 

[Hadron]

I'm sorry to say that I don't think it's a Desire - if it were, it wouldn't be running Windows Mobile. I can find the details you give here in this thread about Chinese clones of HTC Windows Mobile phones (Diamond 2).

There are a lot of fake phones made in China, I'm afraid.

 

[reech]

Nope - this definitely isn't a Desire, sorry to say. Fortunately, when my mate bought one, Paypal reversed the transaction, and he got the money back. Register on Paypal\Ebay STRAIGHT AWAY, marking the item 'Significantly not as described'. Point out that they've used the terminology\description of an HTC Desire to sell an item that is NOT a Desire, and is a cheap Chinese knock off.

Make sure if you're posting the item back, to send it registered, as that way you'll have proof of posting.

 

[bbrackrog]

Thank you.
How do you know it is a clone? could the rom be running wm?

 

[Remordere]

You shoul've research the Desire's specs before you buy, I don't think the ROM can run another OS.

China is full of clones. My country is full of them and I am knowledgeble about them. Your phone might not even be running true windows.

Most china knockoffs have a MTK chip, which is a cheap hardware and cannot run even Android/Windows. So what they do is they create their own OS, which has the UI of their desired OS(Android/Windows/iOS), it only looks like the OS when its actually a cheaper version.

Your description is that it is probably so, you can't root it since the hardware cannot handle it. Some options are also missing(like your USB debugging).You were rip-off, there are a lot of people that are selling cheap knock-offs as the real thing.

Did you get it at a very cheap price? Do you have a picture of it?

 

[Hadron]

Thank you.
How do you know it is a clone? could the rom be running wm?

There's a big difference between building a different Android ROM and putting a different OS on the phone. Sure, you get the occasional effort, e.g. to put Android on an iPhone, or a desktop linux on the Desire, but someone putting WM on a Desire (serious effort, if possible) and then flogging it on ebay without mentioning this seems highly unlikely.

Also a different ROM doesn't change the hboot, so if this were a Desire it would be more profoundly hacked than a ROM. And while those details don't match a Desire, they do match a Chinese knock-off of an HTC WM phone, and you bought it on ebay from China. So applying Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation would be that that is what you have.

As Remordere has said, a picture might help, as there are usually some visible differences, though to be fair they can look rather similar: this one seems to differ, at a glance, only in the colour of the bezel, though the rear shot shows that the headphone socket is different. Another site here has some comparison pictures with a different fake, showing some differences in the sockets and buttons. There may be some that are better.