[Touch Cruise ROM Development] AviUA:
Experiences with HTC Advantage 7510

Howdy all,

Compliments to all on the vast efforts to develop Hebrew - the solution you have made is far superior, in my case, to all the commercial solutions available. You all are fantastic!

In hopes I can help others not to go through the tortures I suffered, I will try to make this as complete a report as possible, first info about the device and my attempts to make commercial Hebrew solutions work, then how I've implemented what is offered here.

Background:

The device is an HTC Advantage 7510 from HongKong with original ROM. It has an English UI, additional Chinese characters on the keyboard, and had some Chinese apps installed. The version of Opera that came with it had Chinese menus and help, I replaced them with English ones out of my son's Diamond, and subsequently installed Opera Mobile 9.51b2723, which is much better as long as you remember to exit it using the menu rather than the "X" so you don't get the stupid widgets stuck running.

ROM: 3.27.405.3 28/5/08

radio: 1.58.00.00

protocol:32.91.7020.20H

extROM:3.28.709.102

Windoze vs: 5.2.19209.1.0.2

My intended use is as a PDA/pocketable palmtop, and since I mostly run my business out of my PDA, it needs to support a few 3rd-party apps, mostly HanDBase, VNC, and SplashMoney, in both English and Hebrew. I do not have a SIM installed, instead I use it on my LAN for connectivity.

I tried every version of Eyron that they suggested, but it gave several problems:in every text-input window the text looked "weird" and fuzzy, like an over-compressed JPG, the cursor was never where I was actually typing, in Opera the URL window was displaced and text didn't fit properly, and it slowed the device down a lot. In 3rd party data-base apps every character entered would cause it to re-write the entire screen at glacial speed. Eyron support tried to help, but basically admitted they were not emphasizing developing/debugging for this device, because it's not that popular. Take it or leave it. I left it.

I

bought(!)

PDAC (installed by them in their offices) and then my troubles REALLY started! Random, frequent freezing requiring resets from the hole in the back; in HanDBase it actually caused screen corruption which led to data corruption!; in the mail client short clicks and tap-and-hold had to be timed accurately (not too long or too short) or they wouldn't register or it would think a short tap was tap-and-hold; Opera was really slow; and every action performed on the device was so slow I had time to drink a cup of coffee after each "enter" -- essentially it made the device impossible to use. It really was worse than a first beta.To their credit PDAC support tried to help, even sent me an app to disable Hebrew support in HanDBase (which alone was a deal-breaker for me), and claimed they had other 7510 owners using Hebrew with no complaints. But they couldn't fix the timing issues, and their only possible solution was that I come in with the device and let them try to "fix" it while I wait. Again, my impression is that they didn't think it was justified to purchase a 7510 to do debugging, but were willing to try it on mine.

I should point out that I left the UI in English with both packages.

XDA Hebrew:

Here's the procedure I used:

1. Hard reset

2. install the first version:

arabizer + soft reset

hebrew_regional + soft reset

heb_fonts_all + soft reset

Now Hebrew appears fine everywhere including Ynet in Opera, email messages, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents (with formatting issues), but in HanDBase the Greeks beat the Maccabees...

so:

3. In Start/Settings/System/Regional settings set the region to Hebrew - now the Maccabees beat the Greeks in HanDBase!

At this point, I had some Arabic numerals in a few places, and all yods "י" in place of the days of the week in the calendar app.

4. Installed the "fixed" Tahoma and TahomaBD fonts from fonts_without_the_arabic_numbers.rar posted elsewhere in this thread to the Windows directory. Windows didn't want to let me overwrite the original versions there, and since I don't as yet have any 3rd party tools for doing this, I renamed the new fonts elsewhere, copied them to the Windows directory on the 7510, renamed the original ones that were already there, and then renamed the fixed versions to their correct names.

This fixed the Arabic numerals, but I still have the problem with י in place of day names. Has anyone been able to fix this?

Now I needed a keyboard.

5. Installed AEKMap (from http://ae.inc.ru/aekmap.php) and the Hebrew mapping file according to the instructions at PocketPCfreaks http://www.pocketpcfreak.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=Himalaya;action=display;num=1206981977;start=0 and set the key combination to swap between English and Hebrew to FN+SPACE. I was not successful in overwriting any of the built-in keymaps for apps to become the swap key (for example FN+InternetExplorer will swap the language AND load Internet Explorer) and it's a little tricky getting it to take key combos in the configuration Window. It seems (without exhaustively testing this) that if you want FN+key, you have to tap and release FN and then tap key, but if you want CTRL+key, you have to hold down CTRL while you are tapping key.

That's where I'm holding right now. If anyone knows how to fix the day of the week characters back to aleph bet etc א ב וכו I'd appreciate knowing how.

-avi