In playing with my Samsung u550 phone, I found some postings about various “hidden” menus. On my old Motorola V265, these hidden menus allowed you to change such things as the HTTP proxy that the phone would use for web browsing. By using your own proxy rather than the default Verizon proxy, you could avoid data charges for web browsing, but the time would still accumulate minutes (apparently Verizon tracked data usage at the proxy). The V265 had a pretty small screen, and as such was not very useful for web surfing, but I did use it a few times. From what I read now, Verizon has closed that hack, so using a private proxy will not get you free data usage anymore.
So in looking at what minor hacks are known about my newish u550, I only came across two things. The first is a Debug Menu. To get to this menu, do the following:
- Navigate to the Settings & Tools menu.
- Press #, which will bring up a prompt for the User Lock code.
- Enter 000000 (six zeros).
The Debug Menu has several options, that can be used for debugging, such as setting the phone in CDMA only mode, EVDO only mode, and others. None of these options are that useful to the user. From the Debug Menu, one can access another hidden menu:
- From the main Debug Menu, press # which will bring up a prompt for the Developer Lock code.
- Enter 8886573982
The Developer Menu provides some options for testing bluetooth, sound, and sleep settings.
Although the hidden menus on this phone are interesting, they do not provide anything useful to the user as the older phones did. This phone is also a pretty generic flip phone, and since data plans have become much more common, there is probably very few people who care about tweaking this phone. I’m sure I’ll get a smart phone eventually, but I’m undecided as to which platform I would prefer.