Apart

I feel it when we're apart
That I'm incomplete like a piece of me is
Missing deep in my heart
Like an ocean I can't find my way across
The bleeding won't stop
Until you return
Until you're safe here in my arms
Do you feel this pain?
Do you feel this way when we're apart?

HTC HD2 Revival.

This is the story of an old phone and the lengths I took in order to bring it back to life.

I have an old HTC HD2. It’s technically not my own though, as it’s my cousin’s old phone, that he stopped using and threw it pretty much to his younger brother, and then after his younger brother got a new phone, landed in my hands.

The thing runs on old Windows Mobile 6.5, and it has been around since about 2009 or early 2010. Back then in the early days, it was flashed over to android from gingerbread, all the way to Jellybean until recently I decided to flash over Windows Phone 7.8 onto it.

I felt that it was the best OS for this dated phone, but with one caveat; somehow each time I tried to access the marketplace, I needed an activation ID. Bear in mind this flash is also an XDA flash over, meaning that it’s not an official release of Windows Phone 7 for this phone. So anyway, I read on the XDA forums that what you had to do was to message Microsoft saying you wanna activate a HD7, and they'll give you the codes, so I did just that.

I messaged Microsoft, and I told them that I bought a HD7 second hand, and that I'm having trouble accessing the market place. I guess that they sort of wisened up a bit since a few people have been doing this, so what happened was that they asked me for a proof of purchase, together with a photo of the front and back on the phone.

So I thought to myself... hmmm... Okay, I know how to do this. First I told them that since the phone is second hand from the seller, I don't have a receipt, and for the images of the phone, instead of going through Google images or eBay, I went into Taobao, which is this Chinese eBay sort of website, and using Google translate, I looked for second hand HD7 images

I sent them these.

Legit photos of a HTC HD7.

Then they said... well, that's fine and dandy, now we want a photo of you hand writing your name, your email, and your phone number, on a piece of paper, next to the phone, which shows the activation screen.

I was like... damn.... but... Challenge accepted.

The first quest was to look for a photo of the HD7 which was clean enough, and was easy to duplicate the scene. Once again, Taobao.

The phone was on lock screen though, and there's no screen protector with scratches on it like on the first images I sent them.

No matter.

Now I needed the activation screen. I took my DSLR out and I took a real photo in a similar angle of my real HD2.

Done. I had the activation screen.

Now all I needed as my last component, was the background in which to play it all in. It had to be similar angle to the first image of the HD7 with the lockscreen, with enough lighting information to pass it off. Okay.

After a few tries, I decided it was best to use my Note 3 camera instead of a DSLR, and to try and imitate flash at that same position that the reflection was at.

After that, it was a matter of compounding the images together. Blending, colour grading, making sure the blending worked perfectly, passing it through a lot of exposure, levels, and colour balancing filters.

Sent this in to them, and it flew like a kite.

• Photoshopped on scratches
• Screen protector with lifting edges
• Blended in the new activation screen into the HD7 image
• Added a bit of noise filters and passes
• Made it look like it was from a shitty camera
• Adjusted the angle and orientation
• Painted on some shadows and noise

yep.

She breathes a new life now, and all that much happier for it.