While I’ve had a few gripes come up with my newly purchased (very used) T-Mobile SDA, one of the bigger ones has been re-mapping buttons. The SDA (actually the SDA II) has a nice little set of 8 buttons on the front. 4 of them are perfect (2-Menu buttons, 1 back button and 1 home button) – but 4 of them are useless to me (1-T-Zones button, 1-Fwd, 1-Play, 1-Rev).

So ever on my quest to get rid of dumb provider implemented stuff, a hunting I went for a way within the OS to change this. And I found squat. So – Google to the rescue. I came across THIS fountain of knowledge over at Howard Forums. See you after the jump…

Alright – the process is very simple even for a simpleton like me. There’s supposed to be two ways to do this, but I couldn’t get the other way to work so I’m going to show what worked for me… you want to try the other way, be my guest.

First grab cenotepad. It’s free and an excellent utility that we should all have.

Second – Connect your phone to ActiveSync. This can be done any number of ways, but direct connect is the safest.

Third – start up cenotepad… and click on the open folder icon. Can you see how hard this is going to be? It’s just going to keep on getting harder!!!

Fourth – and here’s where things get tricky – navigate to windows. Careful – I know this is super scary stuff. In the Windows directory you’ll find a file named Short_AP1.lnk – Click that and hit ok. Ok, enough number counting.

When you open up Short_AP1.lnk you’ll find a nice string of text that looks like this:

19#\Windows\iexplore.exe http://my.t-mobile.com

Simple enough to figure out what this does as it’s just like any other standard shortcut you would create in Windows. We don’t need to know how the OS knows to read this file, we need to know what this file does and how to get it to do something else. That some thing else is our goal.

In the case of Short_AP1.lnk (The T-Zones button) it opens the Internet Explorer application in the Windows directory and passes it the value http://my.t-mobile.com … how nice. Bummer for me that I’m a Cingular customer and this just made my trip to gmail a lot slower. So how can I get to GMail a lot faster? Easy. Replace that line of code with this one and click the save button (no need to reboot).

19#\Windows\iexplore.exe http://www.gmail.com  **or whatever other website (like JustAnotherMobileMonday) you happen to prefer

Now that’s all fine an dandy. We’ve got a much more useful shortcut to the Internet. Now, let’s do something even better – like start an application on our storage card.

Open up Short_AP2.lnk – That little line of code there should look pretty familiar. Changing it is very similar to changing the first link, but we have to do one thing a little different. Stick with me.

The application I want to launch is FlexWallet. Flexwallet is on my storage card… here:

\Storage Card\Program Files\FlexWallet 2006\FlexWallet.exe so it stands to reason I would type in this replacement string for Short_AP2.lnk:

19#\Storage Card\Program Files\FlexWallet 2006\FlexWallet.exe – WRONG!

Here’s why – When you try to use that shortcut it see’s the filepath as Storage and thinks everything after that is the values you’re trying to pass … obviously that fails. So the valuable lesson here is that if you want to have a space anywhere in the file path you need to wrap the whole filepath in quotes like this:

19#"\Storage Card\Program Files\FlexWallet 2006\FlexWallet.exe" – RIGHT

Ok, so that’s all I’ve got for this round. Here’s the link files that you can change:

Short_AP1 – T-Zones button
Short_AP2 – Rev button
Short_AP3 – Play Button
Short_AP4 – Fwd Button
Short_Camera – Camera Key
Short_POC – Connections key on the left

Another hint from the link above (and what I mapped to key 4) – to launch the task manager use the string:
19#\Windows\IA_Task_Manager.exe?:TaskManagerApp

NOTE: — MAKE A BACKUP FIRST. It’s not my fault if something goes wrong here!

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