A M65 of my in-laws seemed broken so I took it home to play around with my DCA-510-cable.

It showed firmware rev. 15 … the current one was rev. 58. I read somewhere that older firmware WILL produce problems so I was glad that it might be a software problem instead of a hardware one.

Upgrading firmware

So I got the latest firmware from allsiemens.com and tried to flash the phone. Damn! The M65 was from Vodafone and thus the ID was M6V instead of M65. Since I hate brandings, I needed a way to change that value.

After some experiments I found instructions at gsm-multifund.de (which seems to be offline now).

I needed x65flasher and since I updated the phone to M6V v50 before, I needed the supplied Java-Midlet px75v1 to calculate the Hash and ESN for my phone. This needed around 3-5 minutes. After that, I was able to download a backup of the phone’s firmware and then chose Advanced → Change phone model to change it to M65. After writing it back to the phone, I did a FFSinit (see allsiemens.com) and was finally able to flash the rev. 58 using WinSwup.

Also a nice page with many tips and instructions: gsm-free.com.

Patching the firmware

You can use Smelter to generate a list with possible patches for the supplied firmware file which you can then apply using V_KLay. There are patches to e.g. disable some debugging (which makes the phone a bit faster) or enable the network monitor (aka. Develop. setup) in the “My Menu”.

Internal Filesystem

If you want to get rid of the “Load games”, “Load Ringtones”, etc. menus, just use the VSOFS-Plugin for Total Commander to delete the file \\M65\Config\Default\MagicLinks\MagicLinks.xml and the directory on the phone.