[Bada Software and Hacking General] PJK2011:
You are so right mylove90! This experience is starting to bring back memories. I've been using my G1, so this phone has been put aside since I got it, but now I'm remembering how hard it was to find the original ROM. KrazyKong is right. It is 120 euros to download from that site. But with your help and suggestion, I started additional searching.

First I found this service tech offering to share it for a fee because he bought it too. I remember finding him last time I looked for the FW:

http://tinyurl.com/83w3q8k

He's actually on the second page of that thread, and I saw him around other forums last time I searched that firmware too. Other than the pay services, he's the only private party that comes up on that firmware search.

Still, I decided to search the FW name again to see if it crops up anywhere else for download. Actually, after a lot of practice with these searches, I'm starting to learn that Google isn't too useful, and that searching file servers like Megaupload directly are more useful, and those all panned out negative, as I expected since that firmware was non-existent last year too.

But searching that ROM number did find a fresh post from someone with the exact same phone as me and the exact same problem. It's really timely because he just posted the problem 5 days ago and found the answer 3 days ago.

http://tinyurl.com/7x25ags

In a nutshell, he recommends the Brazilian firmware because it has the same bands as our Bell Canada S8500M phones. I gave a try first just to flash the amss.bin file over my Thai firmware, but no luck. I am thinking it is because the Thai firmware I installed is Bada 1.2 and the Brazilian is 1.0.

So next I tried to flash the Open Brazil he recommended (but didn't work on his phone) because I didn't want to try the branded one first. That was unsuccessful because it's not a full firmware and I got error messages in downloading. I'm guessing again it's because I'm trying to load Bada 1.0 over 1.2.

Still, before going to the branded (Vivo Brazil) firmware, I took another look at samobile.com/firmware and found 2 similar Brazil ROMs misfiled under North America. But more hopefully, I found another "U" series ROM: S8500L UHJL1 (Bada 1.0)

I was hopeful for this because my Bell Canada phone is similar: S8500M UGJF5

Because of the common "U" prefix, or the close UH/UG combination, I had hopes that this might be a correct firmware belonging to my Canadian hardware, but for the other Canadian Wave provider/carrier, Rogers.

While I was flashing, I noticed the file name protocols for firmware files and saw that the Brazil file had "Open Brazil" embedded in the file name, so I checked the corresponding file name in this ROM and found CI Entel PCS, which is a provider in Claro, Chile. This corresponds well with the other firmware for S8500L, VCKH1, for Claro, Argentina.

So anyway, after finishing the flash, my phone is working again thanks to your tips and suggestions to point the way.

Thinking about the theory behind this, I have to ask why the regular telephony GSM bands didn't work regardless of firmware, or why flashing different amss.bin files didn't correct the problem.

The only thing I can conclude is that these S8500M phones have a different modem to accomodate Bell Mobility Canada and need firmware to support the oddball hardware. Fortunately this same hardware is available in other countries as well. This procedure also changed my phone to an S8500B.