Root I just noticed our Volt is basically aG2 Mini

milk909 · Feb 6, 2015

Hey guys,

I just noticed that our phone has basically all the same specs as the G2 mini. I don't have access to a g2 mini, but maybe we can port some stock apps from them for use with our phones. Just a thought maybe there ROMS may also work? If this has been mentioned already sorry. I'm at work and barely had enough time to type this up.

bobdole888 · Feb 9, 2015

milk909 said:
Hey guys,

I just noticed that our phone has basically all the same specs as the G2 mini. I don't have access to a g2 mini, but maybe we can port some stock apps from them for use with our phones. Just a thought maybe there ROMS may also work? If this has been mentioned already sorry. I'm at work and barely had enough time to type this up.

This is interesting... I just check the specs, they do look identical except for the G2 being a GSM phone.
But since our volt does have a GSM sim card, I wonder if maybe the hardware radio is the same and they just disable the un-needed radio bands from each phone? If that's true, maybe we can even turn a Volt into a world phone that can take sim cards???
Anyway, this is probably too much of a stretch.

You mentioned apps...do you know of any nifty apps on the G2 that we don't have on Volt?

bg4m3r · Feb 9, 2015

That's not a GSM sim card. It's a CDMA phone. The card is for LTE data. GSM and CDMA are different hardware technologies and not interchangeable.

bobdole888 · Feb 9, 2015

bg4m3r said:
That's not a GSM sim card. It's a CDMA phone. The card is for LTE data. GSM and CDMA are different hardware technologies and not interchangeable.

I totally get that CDMA and GSM is different technology, but it doesn't mean that the same phone can't support both. Some iphone models can support both CDMA and GSM so can the Nexus6.

Sim car reader is the same for LTE or GSM. It's got nothing to do with the radio. Sim car is just for identification of your device on the network.

The fact that Volt has a sim car reader give it the possibility to run GSM if the radio hardware and firmware allows it. (This is a BIG IF)

bg4m3r · Feb 9, 2015

And I'm telling you it doesn't.

Bad_MOFO_33 · Feb 9, 2015

yeah the g2 mini(g2m), L90, LG Volt are all pretty similar. Major difference being the TouchScreen drivers used. Pull the defconfigs from the stock kernel source and compare using Meld, you'll see whats different. Also you can easily port a few roms by just replacing the boot.img of their rom with our bumped boot.img and modifying the UpdaterScript to read x5 instead of w7 or g2m. But you then need to do some more tweaking to get other things to run(like keylayout, ext-sdcard, etc). You may also run the risk of bricking your device!

bobdole888 · Feb 10, 2015

bg4m3r said:
And I'm telling you it doesn't.

I don't think you understood my point.
Both LG Volt and G2 Mini use the same Qualcomm MSM8926 chip.
This chip supports both GSM and CDMA as well as LTE...all from the same chip.

http://system-on-a-chip.findthebest.com/l/432/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-400-MSM8926

Since the Volt is only cleared on FCC to run on CDMA, LG will not list any of the GSM capabilities.
This doesn't mean that the hardware is not capable of running GSM. Assuming there no additional hardware needed to run on GSM, with some cleaver firmware modification, LG Volt can potentially run GSM.

Motorola Bionic was one such phone. It was sold as a Verizon CDMA phone, but had all the hardware capable of running gsm. Because it had a LTE sim card reader, people figured out how to modify the firmware and got it to run GSM using GSM SIM in the LTE sim card reader.

whoshotjr2006 · Feb 10, 2015

The difference is though that we aren't using a Sim card. Its a uicc chip. That doesn't mean Sims will not work, but it reduces the likelyhood greatly. Verizon had a removable uicc for the gnex, and sprint had an embedded one, and I'm pretty sure they never got Sims working.

bobdole888 · Feb 10, 2015

whoshotjr2006 said:
The difference is though that we aren't using a Sim card. Its a uicc chip. That doesn't mean Sims will not work, but it reduces the likelyhood greatly. Verizon had a removable uicc for the gnex, and sprint had an embedded one, and I'm pretty sure they never got Sims working.

No that's not true. Volt uses micro sim card, not uicc. Just open the battery cover and you'll see the sim card under the micro SD slot.

whoshotjr2006 · Feb 10, 2015

bobdole888 said:
No that's not true. Volt uses micro sim card, not uicc. Just open the battery cover and you'll see the sim card under the micro SD slot.

Dude that's not a micro Sim, its a uicc. That's how we get 4g on sprint service. Sprint has never but may in the future used Sim cards on their phones. The technologies are mostly the same, but someone was just talking the other day about flashing to pageplus and not being able to get a pageglus uicc working since the slot is software locked. If you pop out the card in the back of the phone and put it into a gsm phone, it probably won't recognize the card.

Also under system updates in settings, there is a uicc unlock option, and when porting Roms there's a required lib called libuicc.so that's needed also.

Do you have an activated gsm Sim or a gsm phone? Best way to know is to try to put the uicc into that gsm phone, or put the gsm Sim into the volt and see what happens.

http://answers.virginmobileusa.com/...VB/questions.htm?page=13&sort=recenta&dir=asc

bg4m3r · Feb 10, 2015

bobdole888 said:
Assuming there no additional hardware needed to run on GSM, with some cleaver firmware modification, LG Volt can potentially run GSM.

It would need a GSM modem. It doesn't matter what the processor supports. It says right here no GSM support.

http://www.phonemore.com/phone/lg-volt-4g-lte/1541

bobdole888 · Feb 10, 2015

bg4m3r said:
It would need a GSM modem. It doesn't matter what the processor supports. It says right here no GSM support.

http://www.phonemore.com/phone/lg-volt-4g-lte/1541

You guys just don't get it.
Where did it say anywhere on Motorola, FCC, or phone info website that a Motorola Bionic can support GSM?
Yet, all the hardware is there and with some firmware change the Bionic was converted to run GSM.

What I'm saying is that frequently, the chips used for cell phones have greater capability than what the phone is marketed for or approved for. The fact the a stock firmware doesn't support GSM, doesn't mean that it can't be modified to support it.
Often a manufacturer will build the same hardware and generate slightly different model that are only differentiated by firmware and cosmetic difference. Iphones are very much made this way.

I am not at all saying that Volt will run GSM. I don't have enough info to make that conclusion. I am saying there is a possibility that it can.
This Modem that you said the Volt lacks, have you confirmed that the radio chip used on the Volt doesn't support GSM?
Unless you looked up the model of the chip used and read the specs to see that it doesn't support GSM, I don't think that conclusion can be made.

bobdole888 · Feb 10, 2015

whoshotjr2006 said:
Dude that's not a micro Sim, its a uicc. That's how we get 4g on sprint service. Sprint has never but may in the future used Sim cards on their phones. The technologies are mostly the same, but someone was just talking the other day about flashing to pageplus and not being able to get a pageglus uicc working since the slot is software locked. If you pop out the card in the back of the phone and put it into a gsm phone, it probably won't recognize the card.

Also under system updates in settings, there is a uicc unlock option, and when porting Roms there's a required lib called libuicc.so that's needed also.

Do you have an activated gsm Sim or a gsm phone? Best way to know is to try to put the uicc into that gsm phone, or put the gsm Sim into the volt and see what happens.

http://answers.virginmobileusa.com/...VB/questions.htm?page=13&sort=recenta&dir=asc

I thought you were talking about embedded UICC chip in your first post. Our volt does not use embedded UICC.
There really isn't any real difference between UICC card and sim card that users need to worry about. It's more less the same. GSM sim card is just one form of UICC and UICC is a more general term.
The bottom line is that the reader hardware is the same and you can stick in a UICC or sim card, they can both be read by the phone. That's all that we really care about.

I do have a activated gsm phone and I tried swapping the sprint UICC with gsm sim on both. This is what I observed.
On volt with GSM sim, I don't get error message, but see a icon in the status bar that might mean "invalid sim".
I can still make phone calls on sprint network even with a GSM sim card inserted, but it doesn't use gsm network.
No surprise here...lots of work would be needed to modify firmware to enable GSM on Volt if it's even possible.

On a dumb Nokia GSM phone, I put in the sprint UICC into it. I don't get any error message or bad icons at all. So I'm guessing the phone can read the UICC card just fine, but just that it can't find any network that it can talk to.
I tried making a call, of course it says "no network found". No surprise here either. This Nokia phone is a pure GSM phone so it's not going to be able to talk to LTE network. On top of that LTE transports data only, so no chance a voice call can ever go through.

kwknott · Feb 10, 2015

Pretty much all sim cards are UICC card. The software on them is what makes them unique to each type of network.

Even though the SOC in the volt supports all types of networks, I'm sure anything other than CDMA is disabled at a hardware level. It's cheaper to make a product support everything and disable what you don't need, instead of making separate products just for each type of network. I'm sure if someone had plenty of time, knowledge and the resources they might be able to enable gsm and make the phone work on a gsm network.

EarlyMon · Feb 10, 2015

CDMA doesn't use any form of sim. LTE is a GSM technology so that part alone uses the sim/uicc/whatever.

The teardown on a lot of phones show that they indeed use different radio transceiver chips in different models quite commonly, building unique models per carrier.

The only part the SoC plays in that is when it embeds a programmable world modem.

Modem != radio transceiver

EarlyMon · Feb 11, 2015

slipk487 said:
When I had my LG G2's sim unlocked i tried putting my buddys tmobile sim card in it and was able to use both my 3g services and was able to use the tmobile sim and was receiving the calls and texts from the tmobile sim but haddnt tested to see if it was utilizing the hspa for network.

And all of the Verizon phones as well as the high end HTCs carry both sets of radios.

You can see the board simplicity here by visiting the FCC website and looking at the internal photos taken at the time it was certified.

xman95 · Feb 12, 2015

slipk487 said:
When I had my LG G2's sim unlocked i tried putting my buddys tmobile sim card in it and was able to use both my 3g services and was able to use the tmobile sim and was receiving the calls and texts from the tmobile sim but haddnt tested to see if it was utilizing the hspa for network.

Which provider was your LG G2 from?

I saw some Verizon LG G2's on sale on EBAY (gave it a thought), but when I looked at the specs, they didn't match all the T-mobile's necessary for 4G LTE. You may get some HSPA+ service on the 1900mhz band in certain places. But the phone did not have the 1700mhz band or the LTE bands needed with full fledged T-mobile service.

bobdole888 · Feb 12, 2015

xman95 said:
Which provider was your LG G2 from?

I saw some Verizon LG G2's on sale on EBAY (gave it a thought), but when I looked at the specs, they didn't match all the T-mobile's necessary for 4G LTE. You may get some HSPA+ service on the 1900mhz band in certain places. But the phone did not have the 1700mhz band or the LTE bands needed with full fledged T-mobile service.

The US cell phone providers all run LTE on different frequency, some are even different LTE technology, so even on the same frequency, they are not compatible. There is no compatibility across different providers. We can only expect GSM, WCDMA to be compatible on a phone that supports those on the correct frequency.

benSTMax · Nov 24, 2015

bobdole888 said:
This is interesting... I just check the specs, they do look identical except for the G2 being a GSM phone.
But since our volt does have a GSM sim card, I wonder if maybe the hardware radio is the same and they just disable the un-needed radio bands from each phone? If that's true, maybe we can even turn a Volt into a world phone that can take sim cards???
Anyway, this is probably too much of a stretch.

It seems this isn't such a wild idea after all. Due to the small frequency bands differences among countries, the phone chipset manufacturers came up with some clever ideas in order to avoid designing particular (for some countries) phone chipsets.
In the end, the modern phone chipsets are pretty much software defined radios that can be tweaked to work for different countries just by using different settings/firmware.
Here is a link providing such a phone patch.

masterchief3k · Nov 28, 2015

Does that patch work? I don't have a way of testing it.

benSTMax · Nov 28, 2015

Well, it seems some things work but some more tweaks/work/patches are needed.
Using the patch as is, I could see a GSM SIM worked. I was able to read the entire phone book and the SIM toolkit(basically a sort of network-provider services) was working fine. Before the patch, when a GSM SIM was used, I got an error icon and the phone said there's an error with the card.
As for the network(before the patch), it could not see any signal at all (I am in EU right now and here there's no CDMA network available, thus besides the network signal I get a red X). However, after the patch, I could see the phone saw signals (from the GSM networks) but I couldn't make it connect to its SIM-card network. I don't know if the phone needs more tweaking or it needs additional modem firmware. Nonetheless, this patch proves somehow the phone chipsets are designed in such a way that by using a specific modem firmware & settings, the same chipset can be used all over the world, doesn't matter the network particularities.

factinmyosin · Dec 9, 2015

Got this screen shot at CM12, dailer, *#*#4636#*#*, phone information.
It seems this volt has the GSM capability, and can call for emergency phones with GSM without any SIM. So it means this volt is set to turn off GSM at somewhere.

benSTMax · Dec 10, 2015

Bad_MOFO_33 said:
yeah the g2 mini(g2m), L90, LG Volt are all pretty similar. Major difference being the TouchScreen drivers used. Pull the defconfigs from the stock kernel source and compare using Meld, you'll see whats different. Also you can easily port a few roms by just replacing the boot.img of their rom with our bumped boot.img and modifying the UpdaterScript to read x5 instead of w7 or g2m. But you then need to do some more tweaking to get other things to run(like keylayout, ext-sdcard, etc). You may also run the risk of bricking your device!

Some starting points for making the Volt run on GSM might be to analyze the G2m and L90 flash contents. If lucky, these phones might share the same modem and maybe the modem files needed for GSM (which Volt might not have) can be taken from the other phones and put them to good use.

Root I just noticed our Volt is basically aG2 Mini

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