Tweak for more battery life on the Advent Vega

The Advent Vega has pretty impressive battery life, but if you want to squeeze even more life out of the beast, you may want to try this hack.


If you look at your battery stats, you'll see that the Device Standby process is sucking down a lot of the battery use... strange, that's the process for your cellular radio... and the Vega doesn't have a phone!

So, let's connect the Vega to the computer, and run the following ADB commands (these are from the android development kit).

adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mmcblk0p5 /system
adb shell mv /system/app/Phone.apk /system/app/Phone.OLD
adb shell mv /system/app/TelephonyProvider.apk /system/app/TelephonyProvider.OLD
adb reboot

The Advent will reboot and when it comes up it'll be no longer running the useless process.

You'll also get a notification telling you that there is no signal... annoying, but at least you know it's worked!

To undo the changes, just run this script.

adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mmcblk0p5 /system
adb shell mv /system/app/Phone.OLD /system/app/Phone.apk
adb shell mv /system/app/TelephonyProvider.OLD /system/app/TelephonyProvider.apk
adb reboot

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Advent Vega Restore Procedure

It took me ages to find the instructions on how to restore my Advent Vega to its original configuration using the restore image off the myadventvega website, so hopefully this'll save you a bit of time:



To restore your Advent Vega to our latest base image, please follow the steps below:
DOING THIS WILL REMOVE ALL YOUR APPLICATIONS – YOUR SD CARD STORAGE WILL NOT BE AFFECTED

• Download the Advent Vega USB Flash driver from www.myadventvega.co.uk
• Download the latest Advent Vega restore image from www.myadventvega.co.uk
• Extract the USB flash drivers to a folder on your PC (eg C:\Advent\)
• Connect the Advent Vega to your Windows PC with the supplied USB cable, you must also have the Vega PLUGGED INTO THE POWER SOCKET
• Place the Advent Vega into recovery mode by: 

     Turn the Vega off by holding down the POWER button for 6 seconds

     Once off, hold the BACK button down for 2 seconds
     Then, whilst keeping the BACK button held, press and hold the POWER button for 2 seconds
     Then release just the POWER button but keep holding the BACK button for a further 2 seconds
     Release the BACK button

• If this is the first time you have completed this you will need to install the Advent Vega recovery driver
• Windows should automatically prompt you for a driver – if so point it to the folder you extracted the driver to above – THIS DRIVER IS CURRENTLY NOT SIGNED – YOU WILL NEED TO ALLOW THE DRIVER TO BE INSTALLED WHEN PROMPTED – DO NOT BE ALARMED BY THIS MESSAGE

• Once installed, double-click on the Advent Vega Restore Image file downloaded above.
• A DOS window will appear – DO NOT REMOVE OR POWER OFF YOUR DEVICE DURING THIS PROCESS.
• Once the image is installed, you will be prompted to press ENTER to exit. Your Advent Vega should now be restored/updated.
• Remove the USB cable.
• Power on your Advent Vega – Your system will now be updated.

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Installing a recovery image (Clockworkmod) onto your Advent Vega / POV Mobii

Hopefully you now have a nicely root POV Mobii / Advent Vega (if not, please see here).
Now it's time to get a recover image onto your system.
A recovery image is a very basic operating system that allows you to do fundamental operations on the system... for those of you old enough, think of it as a boot floppy disk!


It's a bit complicated to get it set up the first time, but here we go...


First you need to install the Android Development Kit.


Then turn on debugging on your tablet : Settings > Applications > Development > USB Debugging

Plug in your tablet, and you should see a little bug in the task bar.


Once you have installed the Android Dev Kit (I recommend you install it to the c:\android directory) open up a command prompt and navigate to C:\android\tools


Type: adb devices


You should then see your device listed:

If you don't see it you'll need to go to device manager, find the unknown device, and install the ADB driver from C:\android\usb_driver


Now you are ready to start installing the Recovery Image.


Download the recovery image from:



and extract the two files and place them in c:\android\tools


Then run the following commands:


adb push recovery.img /data/local/
adb push flash_image /data/local/
adb shell chmod 4755 /data/local/flash_image
adb shell /data/local/flash_image recovery /data/local/recovery.img


Now all you need is a simple way to reboot your Vega into Recovery Mode: just install Vega Recovery Boot from the market. 

Many thanks must must go to Paul at Modaco for these instructions (and the file). I'm a subscriber to Modaco, and am very happy with the support for the Advent Vega there.


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Rooting your Advent Vega / POV Mobii

A lot of posts will tell you that the Advent Vega is supplied pre rooted, however my experience with the latest ROM (the one without Flash installed) is quite the opposite.


So, before you start your plans you customise your Vega, the first this you probably want to do is root your tablet.


To do so, all  you need to do is install Z4 root. You won;t be able to finid it in the Android Market as Google have removed it, however you should be able to pick it up from here


Copy it onto your SD card and then click on it using a file manager (like eStrongs File Manager

or Astro File Manager

This will then allow you to install the APK to your system.


When you have installed it, fire it up and select "Permanent Root" and your system will then make the changes, reboot, and once it's back up you'll be sorted! To check it works, install Titanium Backup which requires boot permissions to run.

Once you have rooted your device, your next step will probably be to backup your system (using Nandroid) so you can always recover from your hacking attempts... click here for the insructions.


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Fixing slow ringtones on Android phones

I've been playing around recently witht he new Android phones, and have been generally very impressed with them. They still have a few rough edges though, and my HTC Magic has been exhibiting some strange behaviour...

The first thing I do on any new phone, is copy over my ringtone. Honestly, if it doesn't use that ringtone I'll tune it out and never answer it. So I copied over my MP3 file and set it up as the default ringtone.

Imagine my surprise when I called myself, and the phone vibrated, the screen flashed, but the ringtone didn't fire up for a good 10 seconds, then after another 5 seconds it went to voicemail.

Initially I thought this was the fault of the MP3 being too big and was taking up too much memory, so I chopped it down to 236kb, and tried it again... with the same results.

I then fired up a file manager on the Android phone and saw that all the built in ringtones were in OGG format.

On a hunch, I fired up Mediacoder and converted my MP3 to OGG Vorbis using the settings below:

Set the Encoder to Vorbis

Set the Container to OGG

Once I had generated the OGG file, I copied it onto m sdcard, and set it as the default ringtone, and now my phone flashes, vibrates and rings all at the same time :)

I hope this helps you out if you are having the same problem. If so, please show your thanks by clicking on one of the adverts on this page... you don't have to buy anything ;-)