The Complete Cheapskate's Guide to Your Virgin Mobile Kyocera Cyclops K325

According to ConsumerSearch, Virgin Mobile has the best prepaid wireless plans around, but anyone trying to do more than just talk on their phone will start racking up some hefty fees for texting, emailing, downloading ringtones, and so on. However, some of Virgin Mobile's phones offer a workaround, allowing total control over the data on your phone, and rather affordable, albeit limited, data plans starting at just $5.

One such phone is the Kyocera Cyclops, still available from Virgin Mobile for just $30 (With $20 free air-time, so it's really only $10.). In addition to decent call quality, a speaker phone, an acceptable camera 1.3 megapixel, you can also get access to your GMail, the web, RSS feeds, games, self-made ringtones, and more without paying Virgin Mobile a penny. This post walks through how to do this with nothing but a $10 data cable and some patience.

Note: The most recent version of the Cyclops (red) will not allow the open access described in this post. You must have a phone with firmware before QA1.1 for any of this to have a shot at working.

Getting Ready

In order to transfer data to and from your phone and computer, you need three items: a data cable, drivers, and software to manage the files on your phone. You can knock out all three at once on Amazon.com for just $20, but this guide assumes you are taking the ultimate cheapskate route, as follows.

1. Cable: A search for a "Kyocera K325 cable" on eBay should get you the correct results. At this very moment in time, there are two available for under $10.
   
2. Drivers: If you are using Windows, you will also need drivers downloaded from Kyocera's website, but Linux users should be fine without them.
   
3. Software: The best software for managing your phone's files is BitPim, a well done, open source application you can download here.
   

Connecting to Your Phone in 10 Steps

Hooking up the Cyclops to your computer is quite easy, if you know what you are doing.

1. First, plug in the data cable and the phone to a USB port.
2. Launch BitPim.
3. Select "Settings" from the Edit menu.
4. In the dialog box, pick "Other CDMA Phone" from the drop-down options for Phone Type
5. Click on the Browse button to select a COM Port.
6. There should be two options for Kyocera--one refers to the data cable and the other the phone. Pick the second one, though if this does not work, come back later and try the first.
7. Click "Okay" and then "Okay" again to get back to the main BitPim window.
8. In the leftmost column, select "Filesystem." Note that none of the other options in this column work on this phone. You will be working solely by directly manipulating the filesystem.
9. A folder should appear in the middle column, and you can navigate it by toggling it and its subfolders open and closed.
10. From here on out, all the commands I use are accessible by right-clicking on the appropriate folder in the middle column or a file in the right column. When you are done, you can right-click on any folder and select "Reboot Phone." When you want to use your phone again, you unfortunately have to go through all of these steps again to get BitPim to recognize it, but, once you get the hang of it, it takes less than 30 seconds.
    

Apps & Games

Now that your computer can see your phone, the fun really begins.

1. To get games and apps on your phone, you must first download both jar and jad files for them. I found lots of options at ShareJar, but other sources might work better for you.
2. Once you have the jar and jad files for your game, use BitPim to navigate to /brew/ams. Here, you will see all the games and other apps installed on your phone, though you will not recognize them because they have numeric names ("01.jar", for example).
3. Outside of BitPim, you must rename your game jar and jad with a number not already used.
4. Back in BitPim, upload the renamed jar and jad files to your phone by selecting "New File" when you right-click on the ams folder.

Although those four steps are all you need for the basics, here are a few more tips to enhance your experience.

• Icons: If you want your phone to show an icon, you can extract the png icon file from the jar outside of BitPim, change its name to the corresponding number ("01.png", for example), and then upload it to your phone using BitPim.
• App Placement: Your phone considers everything in the /brew/ams folder a game unless told otherwise. If you want your non-game apps to appear in "My other stuff" on your phone, you must edit those apps' jad files with a text editor by adding a new line that says "Content-Folder: Other" at the end. In addition, "My other stuff" arranges apps in descending order by their numerical file name, so 06.jar comes before 05.jar. If you want GMail to be first, for example, make sure it has the highest numerical file name.
  
• GMail: You won't find GMail Mobile at ShareJar. Instead, download the jar here and the jad here. You will need internet access on your phone, which costs only $5 per month for 5 MB of data transfer.
  
• Opera Mini: I also highly recommend Opera Mini 4 (jar, jad), an excellent mobile browser that includes bookmarks, a feed readers, and a sync tool so you can access your bookmarks from any browser.
  
• Google Maps: As much as I'd like this to work on my phone, I haven't gotten it to. If anyone else has, let me know.
• Missing jad files: If you happen to come across a jar file without an accompanying jad, try JADMaker for Windows or this script for Linux.
  

Multimedia

If you have gotten apps onto your phone, then getting pictures, wallpaper, and ringtones on there will be a cinch. All you have to do is know where to look.

• Pictures: Your camera pics are located in /brew/shared/campics/pics and named according to the date when they were taken. You can download all of them to your computer by right-clicking on the pics folder and selecting "Backup directory..." This will put all of the photos into a zip file on your computer. To remove the photos from the phone, you can just delete the pics folder and then recreate it, rather than deleting photos one at a time.
• Wallpapers: These are located in /brew/media/img/wallpaper/default.
• Ringtones: You'll find these in /brew/media/snd/ringer. I have not played with ringtones at all, so I cannot provide any suggestions on this front.

This guide was derived largely from two threads on Howard Forums (ropegun's on transferring files and th3Lorax's on adding games) and numerous other hints I picked up from around the internet. Many thanks to all the contributors who shared their knowledge publicly online!