Intro
If you only want to unlock your VP6500/VP5500 from the clutches of KPN, you can read about the softhack on page 3.
A while ago, I got a mail from Joost Rohde. He saw my article about the SMC phone I hacked to do SIP. He got his hands on a couple of Philips VP6500s. These devices are portable video-phones meant to work on the infrastructure of the 'classic' telecom provider in the Netherlands: KPN.
The history of the phone, he relayed to me, was somewhat of a sad story. A few years ago, KPN was convinced that video telephony could be the next thing. The previous attempts at it could only have failed because the devices were meant to sit on a desktop and not portable. That could be fixed, so they commisioned Philips to create a videophone which would be portable and could be carried around the house.
Well, as you know, video-telephony took off great and nowadays everyone has a videophone in their house... Oh wait, different reality. The videophones didn't quite catch on, even when KPN sold them for just a bit above the manufacturing costs. After a while, the servers supporting them were shut down and the phones became almost worthless, going for not much more than ten Euros on Marktplaats, a local eBay-like site.
Back to the present. He had some of these phones and wanted to use them. He already found out that these phones were Linux-based and used standard SIP to communicate, but the settings were fixed to KPN-specific ones and there didn't seem to be a software-based way to change that. He offered me a phone so I could find out if the hardware had some secrets I could uncover...
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