Advice on what to do with my phone.

[Guest rbnfrance]

Hi All,

I just bought a phone for my dad in China, since thats where I live and they are cheap here. I ended up choosing a HTC Desire VC (t328d) which are little known outside China and India.

The point is that I can't do anything with it now. I'm taking it back for him in 2 months and using it in the meantime but it does not have any google stuff on it which makes it a bit like a shoe without a sole. I'm not new to this and have messed around with phones before. I have rooted it and unlocked the bootloader. I've tried putting Google Apps on it loads of different ways and nothing works. I've tried putting it on by flashing it with CWM; installing the apk files individually; and copying the files over to system/apps folder (and changing permissions). I've tried several different downloads and they all fail with a parsing error. Anyway the point is it has failed and I've almost given up. There are no custom roms for it outside China so I could put a Chinese one on and try it all again, but Chinese people don't use google much so google stuff is not included in the roms.

Please can anyone offer advice on what to do with an android phone without google on it? are there any apps that offer similar stuff? where can i get apps from without google play store etc? Sorry for all the questions, I'm just annoyed that the new phone is suddenly pretty useless!

Thanks