SCH-A310 Technical Information:
Welcome to the Samsung SCH-A310 Technical information page. On this page I hope to give out as much technical information about the inards of the A310 as possible as well as information about programming the phone through a PC connection.
As I learn more about the A310, I will try to update this page so that everyone in the A310 community can know what I've learned... If any body else would like to submit articles for this page, I would be more than glad to review and post them also.
Hideo
A310 Inards:
Getting an understanding of how the A310 works begins with understanding the chipset that the A310 is built upon. We begin our investigation by looking around the web at various resources...
By looking at the pictures of the inside of the A310 test model from the original FCC approval submission (here), we see that the main chip inside the A310 is a Qualcomm chip labeled "5100".
Then if we take a look at the press material for this chip from Qualcomm (here, here, and here), we see that the chip is what gives the A310 it's GPS location, it's MIDI ringers, and animations. The chip is even Bluetooth enabled and has built-in MP3 decoding software (although it seems unfortunately as if Samsung ignored these capabilities in the A310).
However, reading these documents does give us some hope that uploading of new MIDI ringers and JPEG animations to the phone may be possible...
A310 PC Communication Command Set:
If we do some more looking around the web, we'll find the SCHPU utility (here) and it's associated web pages (here). This utility uses an "AT" command set to talk to a Samsung 8500 series phone. So, it isn't a large stretch to think that we may be able to communicate with our A310 in the same way using a PC data cable...
Looking at the commandset for the 8500 used in the SCHPU utility (here), we see that the majority of the interesting commands seem to be of the format at#PXXXX= where the XXXX is a leter set from AAAA to ZZZZ. These commands include commands for accessing the phone book and ringers on the 8500 which gives us hope that the A310 may have the same capabilities...
A little further investigation shows us that the command set used for the 8500 in SCHPU is a modified commandset from the V2.50 standard outlined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) (here and here). The documentaion for the basic command structure and command set is found in these documents.
So, by using this information, I was able to communicate to my A310 through the USB port using a cable I obtained from FutureDial (here). I wrote myself a code scanning program to basically "wardial" through the various AT codes and see which ones didn't return an "ERROR" code. The results from my code scanning on the A310 can be found here, My Wireless Hacker (WHACKER) utility can be found on the downloads page along with another utility I wrote to back-up the phonebook on the A310.
A310 MIME set through Verizon tunnel and WAPTunnel free service:
With some help from James on the Wireless Advisor forums, we mapped the MIME set allowed by Verizon on their WAP tunnel and by the WAPTunnel free WAP service. The results are posted below.
WAP Tunnel:
SEC-scha310 UP.Browser/4.1.26c3
application/vnd.wap.wmlc;Type=1108
application/vnd.wap.wmlc
application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
text/vnd.wap.wml
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
application/x-thinflow-collection
image/gif
image/png
Verizon:
SEC-scha310 UP.Browser/4.1.26c3 UP.Link/5.0.2.6c
application/vnd.wap.wmlc;Type=1108
application/vnd.wap.wmlc
application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc
application/vnd.uplanet.signal
application/vnd.uplanet.cacheop-wbxml
application/vnd.uplanet.alert-wbxml
application/vnd.uplanet.channel-wbxml
application/vnd.uplanet.list-wbxml
application/vnd.uplanet.listcmd-wbxml
application/vnd.uplanet.bearer-choice-wbxml
application/vnd.wap.multipart.related
application/vnd.wap.multipart.mixed
application/x-up-device
application/vnd.phonecom.mmc-wbxml
application/octet-stream
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
image/bmp
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
application/vnd.uplanet.alert
application/x-up-alert
application/vnd.uplanet.bearer-choice
application/vnd.uplanet.cacheop
application/x-up-cacheop
application/vnd.uplanet.channel
application/vnd.uplanet.list
application/vnd.uplanet.listcmd
application/vnd.phonecom.mmc-xml
text/x-wap.wml
text/vnd.wap.wml
text/x-hdml
text/html
text/vndwap.wmlscript
*/*
After looking at these two lists, we can come to the conclusion that the MIME types that are allowed for your phone are controlled by your tunnel provider. So, in theory, you should be able to set up your own WAP tunnel and allow anything you want on your phone.
James found out that his provider allowed the "download/ss-a460-midi" type on it's server for his SPH-A460 phone, so it's possible that there is an equivalent "download/ss-a310-midi" type for the A310... We're still working along these lines to see what we can find out...
