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Dell Venue Pro EM App - Version 1.12

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windows-phone dell venue-pro hardware engineering

With the new update, Dell also updated their EM application. Which is still pretty horrible, surprisingly. It didn’t change much – some functionality is gone while other parts were unnecessarily hidden. I am not even going to talk about the code structure. You can start the application with ##634#.

By default only Phone Information, System Information and MMS Settings are available. To unlock the rest, the application requires the user to slide the hardware keyboard down and type in QWERTYUIOP.

From here you have a couple of options – for example, do an out-of-the-box reset. To do it, click on OOB and type in qwertyui.

WARNING: There will be no warnings and after the character sequence is typed, the phone will instantly reboot.

Clicking on RD Test and entering *#6336# will open the test screen, where it is possible to check various hardware capabilities, like the touch pad, sensors, WiFi, slider, etc. Then, there is the About page, or how it is referenced internally – SorryPage. There is nothing there but a text box, that can accept the following commands:

  • *#301# – open the hidden panel that contains switches between the Zune and Composite modes, enabling or disabling the Teleport Mode and more.
  • *#684# – opens the NV (non-volatile) writer.
  • 6814 – opens EM in EM. Some additional commands can be executed here, but the lack of explicit documentation requires digging through the source.
  • *#734# – opens the registry reader. There was a SET button in the previous version, that was promptly removed in this build. It didn’t work before, and it is gone completely now.
  • FB or 983 – open the binary file viewer. It doesn’t carry any file associations and the only useful thing that can be obtained from it is a plain text view of any file.

Reading files is an interesting addition and it is executed through EM:GETFILE – again, relying on commands instead of dedicated methods hooking to native APIs. EM:OPENFILE is used to read the binary content of a selected file.

The rest of the capabilities in the application are pretty much the same as in the previous release.

That being said, my current tasks include:

  • Find a way to access the registry (telnet, provisioning text).
  • Build a better file explorer (with file associations).
  • Create a better AT command console.
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