Thoughts for: Friday 23rd March 2007

Nokia Series 60 3rd Ed. phones on Orange UK :: [10:45:01]
Just chucking this out to be picked up by Google et al.
If like me you own a Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition smartphone (or 2) on the Orange UK mobile network, and you've been having some problems with said device crashing a lot, taking forever to send text messages, and generally not being particularly "smart", but you either a) can't send it back to Nokia, or b) don't want to have to wait for them to pull their thumbs out of a certain orifice and do something, then here's a much faster fix:

Just go to Nokia's Software Update site, download their handy Windows application, hook your phone up via USB, and let it do it's thing.
You'll probably need to have your phone fully charged and have a very fast network connection (clue I did this on a gigabit uplink, so your mileage will most certainly vary on DSL and lower). As I said it is a Windows application, so if you're like me and on a Mac or *nix box, you'll either have to run it in a VM or borrow another box (used my work PC here, as I run Windows Server 2003 in Parallels on OS X, and the Nokia software will only run on 2000 or XP).

Robert's your mothers brother and both my N73 and N80 are working again, without any preloaded Orange bumph.

A little bit more background on this: I was told my an Orange instore assistant that there are faults with various Series 60 phones released last year which occur when "our configurations are loaded onto the phone", which is a sly way of saying our Series 60 software, mainly our crappy little useless menu which does the exact same thing the inbuilt Nokia standby screen does but with a few more slidey transitions on options, is written so badly that it leaks memory out it's rear-end, locks up the sending of messages as it tries to update it's message count, this gets so bad that it causes the phone to crash, which can also lock answer phone flags into the system which need phoning up to be erased, lock message alerts onto the menu itself, and on my N73 cause the Orange menu to repeatedly crash with an out of memory warning over and over again unless you keep numbers on the screen at all times to keep the standard standby screen up. As for text messages, imagine waiting 5 (on my N73) to a whole 10 minutes (on my N80) while the phone is completely and utterly locked up (including the back light staying on the whole time) before it finally even attempts to send the message.
As I said, for these faults, re-flashing using Nokia's own update software worked a charm and also putting the latest firmware versions on fixed some of the Series 60 3rd Ed bugs to boot.