Nokia 6300 4G (nokia-leo)

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View device specification table
Nokia 6300 4G (nokia-leo)Nokia 8000 4G (nokia-sparkler)
Released13 November 2020
ModelTA-1286 (APAC), TA-1287 (CN), TA-1291, TA-1294, TA-1307, TA-1324 (US)TA-1300, TA-1303, TA-1305, TA-1311
ColorsLight Charcoal, White, Cyan GreenOnyx/Black, Opal/White, Topaz/Blue, Cintrine/Gold
MSRP€49/£59.99/$69.99/1,290,000₫€79/£79.99/1,790,000₫
Specifications
SoCQualcomm MSM8909 Snapdragon 210 (4 × 1.1GHz Cortex-A7)
RAM512MB LPDDR2/3
GPUAdreno 304
Storage4GB eMMC 4.5 (+ up to 32GB microSDHC card)
Network2G GSM, 3G UMTS, 4G LTE Cat4 150/50Mbps
+ EU (except East Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia), APAC: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20
+ MENA, CN, Nigeria, Tanzania: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 38, 39, 40, 41
+ US: band 2, 4, 5, 12, 17, 66, 71
+ LATAM: band 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 28
+ ROW: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 38, 40

VoLTE & VoWiFi support
Single or Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual-standby)
2G GSM, 3G UMTS, 4G LTE Cat4 150/50Mbps
+ EU (except East Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia), APAC: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20
+ HK, Macau, MENA, CN, Nigeria, Tanzania: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 38, 39, 40, 41
+ ROW: band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 38, 40

VoLTE & VoWiFi support
Single or Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual-standby)
Screen320 × 240 @ 167 PPI
2.4 inches QVGA TFT LCD, 16M colors (24-bit)
320 × 240 @ 143 PPI
2.8 inches QVGA TFT LCD, 16M colors (24-bit)
Bluetooth4.0, A2DP, LE
Wi-Fi802.11b/g/n, 2.4GHz, Hotspot (up to 8 devices)
PeripheralsGPS & GLONASS
CamerasRear: VGA with fixed focus, LED flashRear: 2MP with fixed focus, LED flash
Dimensions
(HWD)
131.4 × 53 × 13.7 (mm)
5.17 × 2.09 × 0.54 (in)
132.2 × 56.5 × 12.3 (mm)
5.20 × 2.22 × 0.48 (in)
WeightWith battery: 104.1g (3.67oz)With battery: 107.9g (3.81oz)
Ports- microUSB 2.0 charging & data transferring port
- 3.5mm headphone jack
BatteryRemovable Li-Ion 1500mAh (BL-4XL), 5W wired charging (up to 25 days of 4G standby advertised)
KaiOS info
VersionKaiOS 2.5.4 (CN: KaiOS 2.5.4.1)
WA VoIPSupported (12.00.17.01 onwards)
Build no.10.00.17.01, 12.00.17.01, 13.01.17.05 (CN), 20.00.17.01, 30.00.17.01

Source code provided by HMD for B2G, Linux 4.9 kernel and certain LGPL-2.1 licensed libraries used on the 6300 4G can be found in leo-v20 branch of this repository. Do note that it doesn’t contain proprietary code from third parties and thus cannot be used to compile a functional KaiOS build.

Nokia 6300 4G in three colours stacking on top of each other

Table of Contents

Don’t buy a counterfeit

Here’s the funny thing: it’s easier to get a genuine version of the original Nokia 6300 than its rebranded version. On eBay, Shopee and other online shopping sites across North America, Europe and Southeast Asia, you may see hundreds of listings of used 6300 4G in various conditions. While the listings seem to look identical, many of those are NOT genuine but are knock-offs with terrible build quality and user experience. Do note that:

Photos provided by thurmendes on r/KaiOS Discord server in June 2023 and various Reddit posts (second, third, fourth).

Photo collage of fake 6300 4G

About Kosher phones

Kosher is a category of devices whose software (sometimes hardware) is heavily modified to limit access, or even get rid of content and features deemed distracting or against religious values, while keeping other features and user interface almost identical to the original. Companies specializing in customizing Kosher phones exist, and you can easily come across Kosher phone listings on eBay advertising as productivity and focus improvement tools.

As the build and UI remain identical, it’s difficult to tell Kosher phones and genuine ones apart. As of now, my key takeaways to differentiate them are:

Kosher is indeed a great way to make your phone truly basic, but HMD already offers more basic phones with 4G in their feature phone lineup, so the choice is yours. Double-check the description and pictures of the listings before you buy.

Photo provided by nuxx on r/KaiOS Discord server in October 2021.

A Kosher-customized Nokia 8000 4G with no Browser, KaiStore or third-party apps shown in 3-by-3 grid of apps. Center D-Pad key is engraved with a Hebrew symbol indicating Kosher phone

Differences between US/CN and international models

US (TA-1324) and Mainland China (CN, TA-1287) 6300 4Gs has some key differences from other models:

US models work on CDMA networks, which are used by most US carriers and have little to no compatibility with worldwide GSM networks. Its 4G LTE bands barely cover international bands (e.g. band 7); as such, you might have trouble making/receiving calls and texts outside the country without roaming.

On the US 6300 4G, you are only able to select English (US), español (US), Français (CA) and Português (BR) as display languages; on the CN variant, you cannot set Google as a search engine (Baidu is set as default) and Google apps are not available.

TA-1324 currently cannot be rooted due to different hash signature used for EDL handshake (see Sideloading and debugging third-party applications below).

Tips and tricks

Known issues

KaiOS-specific

Secret codes

Tip: You can save these codes as contacts to dial later or as Speed Dial entries. When the phone suggests a saved code, you can press Call to activate the code’s function.

Codes that don’t work

Most of these codes requires userdebug or eng versions to work.

Special boot modes

What the heck is EDL mode?

Qualcomm Emergency Download mode, commonly known as EDL mode, is a special engineering interface implemented on devices with Qualcomm chipsets. It lets you do special operations on the phone that only the device manufacturer can do, such as unlocking the bootloader, read and write firmwares on the phone’s filesystem or recover from being a dead paperweight. Unlike bootloader or Fastboot mode, system files needed by the EDL mode resides on a separate ‘primary bootloader’ that aren’t affected by software modifications.1

Booting into this mode, the phone’s screen will briefly show the ‘enabled by KaiOS’ logo, then turn almost black as if it’s off, but in fact it’s still listening to commands over Qualcomm’s proprietary protocol called Sahara (or Firehose on newer devices). With a suitable digitally-signed programmer in MBN/ELF file format and some instruction-bundled tools, the most popular one being QFIL (Qualcomm Flash Image Loader), one can send commands from a computer to the phone over USB.


You can also force reboot the phone by holding the top Power button and the # key at any time.

EDL programmer for the international version of this phone (not TA-1324) can be found on BananaHackers’ EDL archive site with hardware ID 0x009600e100420029 (a copy is available in the content of this repository). TA-1324 version of this phone has been signed with a different PK_HASH and needs a different firehose loader which we currently don’t have in archive.

UART debugging testpoint

As discovered by atipls on Discord and @Llixuma, on the mainboard of the 6300 4G, there are 3 UART testing points in the order of TX, RX and GND just above the SIM2 slot. Shorting TX at 1.8V and GND takes you to Fastboot and Linux terminal interface.

Mainboard of a TA-1307 Nokia 6300 4G, with the red arrow pointing to three gold contacts in the middle of the board, those being the UART testpoints in the order of TX, RX and ground

Note that by default, KaiOS kernel disables the UART testpoints; kernel logs from UART testpoints will stop once the Linux kernel kicks in. To read the full output from UART, compile the Linux kernel from OSS release provided by HMD—also available under leo-v20 branch of this repository—with LEO_defconfig flag (not LEO_defconfig-perf).

Sideloading and debugging third-party applications

Don’t want to download apps from KaiStore? Both the 6300 4G and 8000 4G have been classified as debug-enabled by the BananaHackers team. As with other KaiOS 2.5.4 devices, you can install and debug apps from outside sources on these phones, so long as they don’t use ‘forbidden’ permissions, such as engmode-extension, embed-apps and embed-widgets, and you cannot debug pre-installed apps on the phone using WebIDE’s Developer Tools (you’re free to use adb logcat to view system logs instead).

Detailed instructions can be found at Sideloading and debugging third-party applications/ADB and WebIDE. Feel free to check out apps made by the community on BananaHackers Store, old B-Hackers Store or my personally curated list of KaiOS apps.

Do note that OmniSD, one of the methods used for on-device sideloading, and many Gerda-related apps requires the navigator.mozApps.mgmt.import API that has been removed from KaiOS 2.5.2.2, and therefore no longer work on this phone. However, after permanently rooting the phone, the Privileged factory reset feature to gain privileged userspace session that could be used on KaiOS 2.5.2 and older can now be used again (see Next steps).

To remove unwanted apps from the phone, you can use this fork of Luxferre’s AppBuster which lets you disable any apps you don’t need and enable them again if you want.

Looking for guide to root the 6300 4G? This section has now been moved to ROOT: Patching the boot partition (non-US only).

GitHub Pages theme: MIT-licensed riggraz/no-style-please. Logo by Vitaly Gorbachev from Flaticons

  1. Aleph Security has a deep-dive blog post into exploiting the nature of EDL mode on Qualcomm devices. If you’re into the overall boot process, check out the breakdown of Qualcomm’s Chain of Trust on LineageOS Engineering Blog.