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Argh! My E61!

So, I’ve been using my E61 quite a lot lately, because of the temperature here, I’m using it to read mail, chat and IM from my room, without having to have PCs on, as they make the room even more hot than it is by itself.

Unfortunately, I’ve also started experiencing connection problems with wifi in my room, probably due to the increase in client I have connected (two laptops, an Airport Express with the printer, the OpenWRT router that connects my main network segment – where the workstations are – to the Internet gateway, the E61 and the Nintendo DS). The bad thing is that lately it also started rebooting itself when the wifi connection was lost.

This wouldn’t be that bad, annoying yes, but not bad, I would just have to restart the applications and connect them back, and then it should be okay.. too bad that tonight things got worse: after the reboot, almost every application couldn’t start from the SD card anymore..

And it’s not even the first time this happens, it’s probably the third or fourth, and starts to get annoying. I bought a 1GB mini-SD card for that phone so to avoid using the internal memory, but if I have to re-install everything every other day, I start to wonder if I wasted my money on that phone.

It’s a nice device, and I got clients for IRC, MSN, ICQ (thanks Caster!), I just miss a jabber client, but the reboots and the memory corruption is not something I want to deal with.

I suppose tomorrow I’ll have to call Nokia support and ask them what the heck is going on with my phone.

Can somebody tell me why can’t I buy devices that “Just Work™” out of the box? Not stuff I have to fiddle with? Being obscure configuration, firmware flashing (the OpenWRT router I’m using is because the only device able to understand that the WAN is reached through WLAN that costs less than €300 that I could find was a Linksys with a flashed firmware) or worse, I can’t seem to find a device that “just work”.

Even the software of my LCD TV turned me off when I found that the picture slideshow is NOT able to cope with images that have a size proportion different from 16:9, as they are always stretched and you can’t get it to fill the screen with black bars (I would have liked to read downloaded comics on it, but as it is it’s not feasible).

The only thing that was truly working out of the box after configuring two parameters was the Airport Express, so as much as you people hate Apple, I have to say that they are at least able to provide devices that do work out of the box.

Now of course I could also see the positive side, as devices never work fine out of the box, technicians will always be needed, and I’m a technician most of the time, still, I’d gladly find a different job road if devices started working fine. Who did think that the situations in Star Trek where engineers always had to deal with broken transporters or messed up holodecks were too far fetched?

Comments 5
  1. It’s because you feel a perverse need to tinker with everything, change things that don’t need changing and run pointless legacy operating systems because you think it makes you cool. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except then you feel the need to complain about it, blame everyone except yourself and make out like you’re mankind’s last saviour against everyone else’s laziness.

  2. It’s nice how *your* need to blame everyone but your fanboys is able to turn a phone with a faulty flash memory management into a problem of mine.If there still was any need you just shown your need to grow up and mind your own business when you don’t have anything useful to add.

  3. 1. You’re welcome :)2. What brand is the SD card? Nokia (-> expensive) or third-party? I’m afraid their support will tell you third-party is not supported. But don’t worry, you and E61 is not alone :/ I’ve read on local symbian forums from people that have N73 corrupting their SD cards repeatedly too, one got even the card (Corsair) replaced and didn’t help. Wonder when I hit it too with my 2GB Kingston card… luckily it’s good so far (knock knock) even though I have filled it almost completely with tourists maps for GPS and mp3’s and went to mountains for week without computer backup :)3. s/why can I buy/why can’t I buy/ :)4. Should be possible to batch process the images to add the black bars before viewing on the TV. Yeah another tinkering with workaround 🙂

  4. The mini-SD is a Corsair; but I think I found what the problem was, at least yesterday, I can’t talk for the past experiences: when the phone was rebooted, the applications weren’t saved on the SD card yet, seems like Symbian don’t write them out on the card when you install them, but just when you shut it down, and probably keep them loaded in the local RAM while the phone is operating. Restarting it manually seemed to do the trick to write them down, for now.And yeah I could add the black bars where needed.. but, why should I waste so much time? 😉 I’m waiting for an AppleTV, I’ll just use that one.Fixed the typo, by the way 😛

  5. The reason why I could never get into using either Palm I owned much was that they would crash. These little devices need to be rock stable or its not worth it.So I’m glad my phone only makes calls pretty much. Its never crashed.

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