MTN Steppa smartphone for R499

Hi guys,
Wondered if anyone has tried to root the Y220 and the Steppa or know of any ROMs to try for it? Can't find much information on the net about it. Seems SA/India/China are the markets for the phone and so not much in english around.
 
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bradza said:
Hi guys,
Wondered if anyone has tried to root the Y220 and the Steppa or know of any ROMs to try for it? Can't find much information on the net about it. Seems SA/India/China are the markets for the phone and so not much in english around.
Click to expand...

Give it some time... hasn't been very long that it's been released
 
eehellfire said:
Give it some time... hasn't been very long that it's been released
Click to expand...

Yeah, just wondered if there were any daring souls out there trying it. I did some searching, the Y220's chip might be an issue as it appears some data hasn't been released for the Mediatek, on the xda forums many have dropped trying to create a ROM for it because of this, unless the recent flow of the Y220 to South Africa the past month will increase interest, not sure (though it has been rooted, apparently,still trying to find the how for this specific phone). Now with the Qualcomm/Steppa, looks like more light at the end of the tunnel for ROMS due to their being a Qualcomm chip (from what I've gathered). Rooting? Unknown yet as I can't find its cousin yet out there but when someone downloads the oneclick root, who knows, see what happens.

Also been finding some conflicting results on the Y220, some saying 2meg cam and some saying 300k (0.3 meg). The Steppa being 2meg everywhere.

Still deciding which one...

EDIT: Okay, so sourced this, nothing for Steppa yet but for Y220, as far as I can work out, the Y220 with the single SIM card is the Y220-T10 - this link here says it can root it.
http://www.srsroot.com/
Thought I'd post as it was a small mission in going through Mexican, Indian and Chinese sites to get somewhere... possibly getting one of the above tomorrow, will see how time goes. If anyone wants to take a shot with the root, let us know if it works, of course I'm not sure if it can unroot (I know others like my Xperia can). As they both seriously entry level it seems hard finding data so early. Great to see some cheaper models coming out though. I can see the phone co's making a mint off of peoples missing data though, which will be sad as they won't have a clue.
 
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Got the Steppa, found this thread on XDA for a rooting method. Strange name for a root and I am not sure whether to trust.
 
I see the Y220 only being advertised by MTN. Will the phone work with a Vodacom sim?
 
10i said:
MTN does (to my knowledge) not network lock phones any more.
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SA operators have not been allowed to lock devices for some years now. In this respect we are actually ahead of some other more advanced countries, most notably the US where phones are invariably network-locked.
 
To those considering the Y220. I have the Steppa and I am already starting to panic about disk space seeing that installing more apps tends to use up disc space. Not all the apps seem to allow you to 'move to SD Card'
Now if I am having these concerns on the Steppa how much of an issue is this on a phone with half the RAM ?
 
Yeah we have a couple of Vodafone 858's that are even less spec'ed and they are extremely limited to the type and size of apps that are out there. Not only that but it appears the Android version on there had an issue with memory reporting, when it got to 18megs left it stuck there, even if you deleted to make more space, so must be something with the software reporting. I think the Stappa and Y220 are one up though but yes, can imagine storage/RAM will limit a lot. Bare essentials :P
 
Well I often struggle updating apps from the play store with my SE Arc S which has 512MB RAM and ROM. I'd imagine that would then also cause problems with similar spec phones.
 
On the up side though, anyone that purchases these smaller phones due to not enough cash for a more advanced Android phone, should spend less on data charges due to the limited space. I know my Sony Xperia at one time was doing over a gig of updates becuase of so many apps a month and when converting that to cell data rates, it's insanely expensive (thank god for wifi). It is sad though that many will purchase these phones without knowing that app updates will kill their pocket, especially google services/play/facebook etc that aren't removable.

Can anyone tell me though if the USB's are powered? (can use external USB's etc) I doubt as its so cheap but if they are, it would serve well for some experiments. Thanks.
 
Don't know about the Huawei Y220 but the Steppa has an option to change the Preferred install location. I changed mine to removable SD card although some apps still force their way onto the phone. Games install directly on the SD card.
 
bradza said:
On the up side though, anyone that purchases these smaller phones due to not enough cash for a more advanced Android phone, should spend less on data charges due to the limited space. I know my Sony Xperia at one time was doing over a gig of updates becuase of so many apps a month and when converting that to cell data rates, it's insanely expensive (thank god for wifi). It is sad though that many will purchase these phones without knowing that app updates will kill their pocket, especially google services/play/facebook etc that aren't removable.

Can anyone tell me though if the USB's are powered? (can use external USB's etc) I doubt as its so cheap but if they are, it would serve well for some experiments. Thanks.
Click to expand...

If you mean USB on-the-Go, then no, it doesn't support it.
 
They now going for R449 at PEP with free SD Card :)

The JET I visited received 20 of them. Huwei Y220 they received 80, all sold out. Apparently there is no stock in the country
 
So I took the risk and my Steppa is now rooted, so far so good, i removed pro root afterwards and replaced it with something i am more familiar with SuperSU (chainfire).

The next thing i am doing is find a way to backup what I can.
the default recovery, the current image in pc terms to rescue me as i attempt various custom roms based on MSM7227A (so says CPU/RAM/DEVICE Identifier ). This should be possible based on branded phones that look like they used the same system and board.

who's got the beer :-)
 
I have hit a brickwall.

First I could not get adb to talk to the phone, I got over that. Now I am looking for the boot data and system (<-- is that necessary ?) partitions to be able to roll back should i brick the phone.

I am able to su in adb shell but when trying to dd I get input output error.
 
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