For the longest time, I’ve been trying to successfully install an application on my Motorola Razr V3xx that would allow me to process QR Codes from my camera. This evening, I finally had success. Let me run through the steps that I did in hopes that it will help others.

First, let me start off by explaining QR Codes. QR Codes are two dimensional bar codes that contain information that can be used on cellphones. Typically, it will include a URL, a phone number, text or an SMS message. As an example:

is the QR Code for the URL of this blog.

You can use Kaywa’s QR Code Generator to create different QR Codes. Kawya also has a QR Code Reader. Their reader doesn’t list the Motorola V3xx as a supported phone. However, it does support the Motorola V3x which I hoped would be close enough. However, I could never get that reader to work. It always complained about not being able to access the camera.

i-nigma also has a QR Code generator and QR Code reader. I downloaded their QR Code reader had and the same problem accessing the camera.

This afternoon, I spent a little time looking around and found comments about it perhaps being a Java problem. Various searches led me to the need to replace the j2me_domain_registry.sm with a less restrictive j2me_domain_registry.sm file. A thread on the Midpssh forum pointed me to a zip file of this file:

http://www.logichigh.com/files/j2me_domain_registry.sm.zip

I downloaded the file and searched around to find the right place to install it. To do this, I used PKCommander. The best site I’ve found about loading and running PKCommander is this: Motorola RAZR V3 - Install P2K Commander - Step-by-Step (Pictures).

With PKCommander installed and your Razr connected to you computer, you want to go to the P2k:/a/mobile/certs/root/x509/kjava/ directory. You should find a file that is around four thousand bytes. Copy this file onto your computer as a backup. Then, copy the j2me_domain_registry.sm I described above from your computer into the directory I described above.

I don’t know if it is necessary to restart the cellphone when you do something like this, but I always like to, just in case. The cellphone started up fine and I went to the i-ningma application. It worked like a champ. I check and this also fixed the Kaywa application as well. I don’t run much for other applications on my cellphone, but I thought I should check a few others as well. One that I run is a free Tetris application which ran fine. The next application I tried was Google Maps.

One of the things that always annoyed about the Google Maps application on the Razr V3xx is that it would always ask for permission to download data from the Internet. I could specify Yes, for this one time, or No. I did not have to option to permanently grant access. The new j2me_domain_registry.sm allowed me to specify Yes, always grant permission, and things work much more nicely for this application and for Gmail.

I haven’t found any applications that don’t work because of the upgrade, but there may be some.

So, now I’m running with a slightly more modified Razr which is working nicely and allowing me to access QR Codes. Perhaps I will try some other applications soon as well.