So there I was (at least that is how all the best stories start), face to face with a gold cased lollipop screen thinking, “Where is the menu button?” I digress, this story needs some background.
I am married to the most wonderful, kind, caring, beautiful woman on the planet. It’s true. She doesn’t read my posts, so I am not just trying to keep out of the dog house. She really is that amazing. I call her my “Crock-Pot Queen” because she can make ANYTHING in a crock-pot. Even cake. I know, your thinking, “Cake, in a crock-pot?” I was skeptical myself until I had some, it’s great!
The point being, for a woman so wonderful, and so great, you would think I could spring a few extra bucks to get her a decent cell phone. Well, I’m cheap. Actually, at my work, they use my name to describe a level of cheapness that is below the word cheap. Last time I checked, the scale was thrifty, frugal, cheap, and then Weston. Because I am so cheap, I bought my wife a “new phone” a couple months ago when I saw a customer returned a Blu Life One on Amazon Marketplace which gets posted for sale from their warehouse.
Now for any haters out there, it literally said there was only one small cosmetic scratch. That however, is not the point of interest, and we will leave that behind for now… or forever.
She really does like the new phone. I know, it’s kind of cheap, but it was an improvement over the tiny little screen she used to have, and the camera on this model was 13 mega pixel, which was almost twice the pixels of her old phone. The interesting and long evening transpired when I showed her a new Bible reader app. It had these great features that you could access from the menu, and as I showed her how great it was, I pushed the square button at the bottom of the screen to bring it up. Only it didn’t. Actually, it closed the application and brought up the “recent” tabs.
Dumbfounded, and feeling sheepish for having pushed the wrong button, I opened the app again and pushed the circle button. Except that closed the app and brought up the home screen.
Dumbfounded, and feeling sheepish as well as a little flustered, I opened the app again and looked at every available button. There was no menu button. None. So I asked my beautiful wife were the menu button was. She didn’t know either. So I spent the next 30 or so minutes looking through every menu in the settings app and still couldn’t find the menu button. It didn’t exist.
Suppressing the urge to give flying lessons to the phone, I decided to do some searching online. Sure enough, the Android version on this phone was compiled without an option to enable the menu button. Absurd, absolutely ridiculous, and downright stupid are several thoughts that came to my mind. Never the less, I found an alternative. On my SlimRoms phone, I use the pie to give myself extra options, and I know on Google’s PlayStore that there are several “pie” programs. So I downloaded Pie Controls.
Once setting it up and changing one of the slices to be the elusive menu button, I smiled like a clown and proudly announced to my kind wife that the problem had been solved. With much pomp and ceremony, I pushed the ill fated menu button, and a toast popped up to inform me that I needed root permission to use that function.
Wishing now to add “Black and” to the Blu Life One, or perhaps to make it into a Blu Life “two”, I restrained myself while the phone snickered at me. That evil little phone. I swear it was mocking me, maniacally.
Not to be outdone, I again turned to the internet at large, and finally found this wonderful article: https://www.paulstechtalk.com/2015/08/how-to-root-your-blu-life-one-x010q/#comment-2718
and this version of KingRoot: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/one-click-root-tool-android-2-x-5-0-t3107461
With which I attempted to download. For some “unknown” reason the cell service became flaky as I attempted to download the mighty hammer to smash my illustrious foe, but I know the truth, the Blu Life One saw the writing on the wall. It was shaking in it’s case. It tried to deter me with a popup warning, “Oh, you don’t know where that’s been, you really shouldn’t install that thing, it is not from a trusted source….” But I just ignored it and installed it anyway, as it trailed off, “Dave, what are you doing Dave….”
Once I opened the app it was as easy as advertised. It did a check and said root was unavailable, and I then clicked the only button on the screen, which said something to the affect of “root my phone”, and a slow moving counter counted up to 100%. With a few jumps here and there, it eventually made it to the top, and the phone was successfully rooted.
After granting root permission to the Pie Control app, my wife’s phone now had a working menu button.
All the while I thought, “Seriously?! 3 hours for a stinking menu button?!”
Linux – keep it simple.
And you never wondered if this was why the first guy returned it? 😉