I got this RCA Reno it’s sluggish but in excellent condition, so I’m wondering if I could do any hacking to it to make it more smoothly operable.

  • @grueEnglish
    31•22 days ago

    …the fuck? An RCA-branded smartphone?!

    Considering that RCA is nothing but a zombie trademark these days, whored out to label what would otherwise be no-name generic junk, I think that the odds that whoever actually made this thing would spend the effort to lock it down (or otherwise customizing the software in any meaningful way) are low. That’s the good news.

    The bad news is that the sort of people who would buy an RCA-branded thing made after the 1980s are the opposite of informed enthusiasts, so the odds of anybody caring enough to go to the trouble of making rooting instructions or building a custom ROM for this device are also low. Not zero, apparently, at least for the rooting part, but low.

    Frankly, IMO it only makes sense to bother with this device if you’re doing it out of principle to stop it from becoming e-waste or something like that. If your goal is to have a useful device with root and a custom OS, the quicker/easier way to achieve that would be to get a more mainstream device officially supported by the firmware you want to run.

    • @AndrewZabarOPEnglish
      11•22 days ago

      lol hey I share your flabbergastiness - [I’m gonna go with _Flabbergastitude_™ ;-)] - about this. I got it in a lot of used devices and I just want the challenge of hacking it.

      Most likely it’s made by HTC or maybe one of the Chinese brands…? I dunno. I know that some carrier-branded phones I used to have were just HTC models slightly modified.

      So yeah, it’s just the challenge I want.

      On another note, I’m also trying to do a LineageOS install onto a Galaxy J7 Sky Pro. All the literature I can find online is somewhat confusing insofar as getting the files onto the thing. I put everything onto a microSD and it’s in there, but I can’t figure out how to flash it. There is an article about first doing a file system mod etc. I followed directions but I am not seeing what they indicate I would see. It’s that way so often :-( anyway I’m going to next try something to free it because it has the message of an unauthorized factory wipe, so I am going to use droidkit to remedy that. After that I think it’s necessary to go into debug mode. I tried using the built-in Odin mode but it only says it can do update from sd card but that’s not what the file is.

      Anyway sorry to ramble… I haven’t done any kind of rooting since I worked on my Zenpad to turn it into an e-reader. It’s so slow that it’s absolutely unconscionable that they would sell such a thing. These days it seems perfectly ok to sell a device that literally all it can manage is to load the Android OS. Once it succeeds then they presumably are able to release to market and not get their pants sued off. But beyond actual bootup everything is terminally slow, I have even seen to the point of a device just freezing up and shutting down lol. So they sell this thing that can just bootup and then it’s a brick draining a battery. Despicable.

      But I am rambling again lol.

      Anyway, back to the adventures.