Techy odds and ends

Nokia OVI Suite and marking SMS messages read

2011-08-01T20:00:00.005+01:00

Wow! Nearly 8 months have gone by since the last post I made on this blog. Those of you who know me offline will also know that life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for about 6 months, which kind of explains the lack of activity both here and on my other blog.

So here goes...

How many of you have become irritated at Nokia OVI Suite's stubborn refusal to mark as read text messages that you have, well... read? Am I the only one?

You can click wherever you like on a message marked as unread and nothing will change that status. I'd read posts elsewhere that sugessted sorting the list of messages by date rather than grouped by contact but even that didn't work.

The only thing left to do was to go into the message database and change the status of the messages manually. For this, go and grab yourself a copy of SQLite Expert available from sqliteexpert.com. The free, "personal" version will work fine for this, although I'm sure the author would appreciate you purchasing a full version...

Note that the instructions given here will only work as of versions of Nokia OVI Suite that were released around June or July 2011. I'm using V3.1.1.80 here.

Before going any further, make sure OVI Suite is not running (click on the green OVI icon in the notification tray and select "Exit", simply closing the OVI Suite main window isn't enough). You don't want both it and SQLite Expert attempting to access the database at the same time and potentially lousing things up.

Once you've installed SQLite Expert, fire it up and then go to "File" / "Open database". Browse to the following location:

C:\Users\your_username\AppData\Local\Nokia\Nokia Ovi Suite\Messages\Database and load the database called msg_db.sqlite.

With that database open, you'll see a kind of tree view on the left and several tabs to its right. One of the tabs is called 'SQL'. Click on it.

Just below the tabs you'll now have a couple of lines in which to issue SQL queries to the database. Type in the following query and then click on the "Execute SQL" button. This will give you something like this (click on the image to see it in full resolution):

SELECT * FROM messages ORDER BY msg_time

Note that bits of the output that are personal and that can identify my correspondents have been blurred in order to protect their privacy.

The column that we're interested in here is the one headed "msg_status". I've figured out that the value in this column is a bitmask of sorts. Even though I've not been able to work out the meaning of every bit in the bitmask, I can say with relative certainty that the least but one significant bit (second from the right in binary notation) is the one that indicates whether the message is read or not. If the bit is set then the message is unread, if it is not set then the message is read.

So, the idea is to reset that second bit in all of the messages and thus mark all the messages in the database as read because OVI Suite seems incapable of doing so itself. This can be achieved by performing a logical AND operation with a number in which all the bits except the second bit are set. Without going into the details of two's complement signed integers, I can tell you that the number -3 is the one to use. This SQL statement will do the dirty deed for you, so enter it in the area for SQL input anc click again on the "Execute SQL" button:

UPDATE messages SET msg_status = msg_status & -3

That's it!

(Optionally) go into "File" / "Close database". Then exit SQLite Expert.

You can now fire up OVI Suite again and all of those unread messages will now appear as read.

Javascript/ECMAscript objects and namespaces

2010-12-04T12:54:00.011Z

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what these beasts are and what they're for. Hopefully, this article will clear up some of that confusion, although I certainly do not profess to be a real expert on any of the subjects herein and have simplified things before writing them down here.

Reading up on the concepts dealt with here and implementing them was in fact prompted by a real-world problem that I came up against at work. Part of my work involves maintaining a control panel site, each page of which can contain multiple "components". Each component comprises three elements most of the time: a PHP template file that handles the display, a PHP class that manages the mechanics of the back-end (often invoked via an AJAX call) and, given that AJAX obviously involves JavaScript, an associated JavaScript file containing data and functions that tie the display and the back-end together. Different components are written/maintained by different members of the development team and any single page can therefore contain components written by several developers. This situation can lead to clashes such as more than one JavaScript file containing functions or variables with the same name if we're not all very careful.

Namespaces and objects provide a tidy way to clean up the global namespace. If each component on the page behaves as a self-contained entity then each developer can use the names he or she wants for the elements making up his/her JavaScript code without treading on anyone else's toes in the process. Each developer's work is tucked away in its own namespace or object and can't interfere with any other developer's work.

So, how do we go about this tidy stuff?

Firstly, let's look at the namespace approach.

Consider this declaration of a generic object with a single property in JavaScript and an alert() that will display that property:

var myObject = { aNumber: 10 };
alert(myObject.aNumber);

A namespace is merely an extension of this concept in that we're also adding functions to the object myObject. Without them, the whole namespace thing is pretty pointless.

Let's add a function to myObject that displays the value aNumber and add some indentation to make reading this stuff easier:

var myObject = {
    aNumber:    10,
    display:    function() { alert(this.aNumber); }
};

In order to get this working, you need to call the function called display within the myObject namespace:

myObject.display();

Note the use of the reserved word this used to refer to the property aNumber belonging to the object whose display method is being called.

This example is obviously somewhat lame in that it is making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill. Using a namespace just to display an alert box is overkill, so let's get a bit more adventurous and create a simple guessing game. This should do the trick.

First, the HTML for the page that is going to run the game:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
 <title>JavaScript guessing game</title>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" />
 <script type="text/javascript" src="guessinggame.js"></script>
</head>

<body>

<input type="text" id="guess" value="" size="3" />
<input type="button" value="guess" onclick="guessingGame.play()" />
<input type="button" id="startbutton" value="start game" onclick="guessingGame.start()" />
<input type="button" value="cheat!" onclick="guessingGame.cheat()" />

</body>

</html>

Note that the text input box has been given the id guess and the button to start the game has been given the id startbutton. The text input and button are going to be accessed by the JavaScript.

And now the JavaScript file, guessinggame.js:

var guessingGame = {

  initialised: false,

  found:       false,

  numToGuess:  0,

  start: function() {
           this.numToGuess = 1 + Math.floor( Math.random() * 10 );
           this.initialised = true;
           this.found = false;
           document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = true;
  },
  
  cheat: function() {
           if ( !this.initialised )
             alert("The game hasn't started so you can't cheat yet!");
           else if ( this.found )
             alert("You've already found the answer, so why cheat now?");
           else {
             alert("The number to guess was: " + this.numToGuess);
             this.found = true;
             document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = false;
           }
  },
  
  play:  function() {
           if ( !this.initialised )
             alert("The game hasn't yet started. Start one before guessing");
           else if ( this.found )
             alert("The game is over, you already got the right number!");
           else {
             guess = parseInt(document.getElementById("guess").value);
             if ( guess == this.numToGuess ) {
               this.found = true;
               document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = false;
               alert("Correct! The number was indeed " + guess);
             }
             else
               alert("Nope! Try again.");
           }
  }

};

Our namespace, guessingGame contains three properties: initialised, found and numToGuess. Note that all of these properties have to have something assigned to them when they are declared in the namespace. Unlike normal variables (or properties of an object declared as we'll see later on) they can't just be declared and have something assigned to them later on. Our namespace also contains three functions: start, cheat and play. How it all works should be pretty self-explanatory and is not the point of this article. What is the point is the fact that despite there being six "things" to play with here, there is only ONE thing in the global namespace: guessingGame. This means that someone else can come along and write a similar game in a namespace containing similarly-named properties and functions, but as long as that new game's namespace has a different name, there will be no clashes whatsoever. Both can cohabit on the same page without any risk of confusion.

While this is a neat way to prevent namespace collisions, we can do much better. Just like with any other form of object literal, anyone from inside or outside the object can access any of the data held within the namespace. If we opt for another approach, we can create objects that only expose to the outside world properties and methods that they want to make visible.

Let's rewrite the guessing game, but alter it so that we only have 5 guesses before the game is considered to be over and the player to have failed. We will therefore have to add a "guessesLeft" property, set it to 5 when the game starts and decrement it each time the player makes a guess. Once it reaches zero, the game is over. If we go for the traditional namespace as above, it would be trivial for the player to obtain unlimited guesses by setting the "guessesLeft" property to a positive number before calling the play function because that property is exposed to the outside world. This is how to avoid that situation using private properties.

Consider this declaration of a very simple object:

var simpleObject = function() {
  var aNumber = 10;
};

var myObject = new simpleObject();

The first three lines define the class of our to-be object and give a name to that structure: simpleObject. The function defined in this way also acts as the constructor of that class. The last line actually instantiates that class. The object myObject is now an instance of the simpleObject class.

If you now try to display the property aNumber using something like this:

alert(myObject.aNumber);

All you'll get back is the response "undefined".

Why?

Because aNumber is a private property of the object. It can only be seen from within that instance of the object (or within a so-called "privileged" method that we'll be dealing with later). If you want to be able to use a property of an object, it must be a public property:

var simpleObject = function() {
  this.aNumber = 10;
};

var myObject = new simpleObject();
alert(myObject.aNumber);

This time you get the expected result.

Rather than access the public property directly, let's now create a method of the simpleObject called "disp" that we can call and that will display the value of that property:

var simpleObject = function() {

  this.aNumber = 10;

  function disp() {
    alert(this.aNumber);
  }

}

var myObject = new simpleObject();

myObject.disp();

Uh oh... That didn't work! Why? Because "disp" is a private method and as such is not visible from the outside world! We need to create "disp" as a public method if we want to be able to invoke it from the global namespace. There are two ways of doing this. The first way is simply to add the method to myObject, our instance of the simpleObject class:

var simpleObject = function() {
  this.aNumber = 10;
};

var myObject = new simpleObject();
myObject.disp = function() { alert(this.aNumber); };

myObject.disp();

The other way is to add the method to the definition of the class itself by adding it to the "prototype" property of that class:

var simpleObject = function() {
  this.aNumber = 10;
};

var myObject = new simpleObject();
simpleObject.prototype.disp = function() { alert(this.aNumber); };

myObject.disp();

The first way is the "quick and dirty" way of doing it and is just as effective as the second way unless you have created multiple instances of the class and/or you have created other classes that build upon your base class simpleObject. If this is the case then, with the first method, you have to add the method to each instance, which can be laborious, not to mention inefficient with the method being stored as many times as there are instances. With the second solution, by adding the method to the class prototype, it immediately becomes available to all instances of the class and of classes derived from it. To boot, it is only stored once, which is more in line with the whole philosophy of object-oriented programming, re-use of code and all that.

Let's change our class slightly to add a private property and try and access it using a public method:

var simpleObject = function() {
  var privatenum = 20;
}

var myObject = new simpleObject();
myObject.disp = function() { alert(this.privateNum); };

Uh oh... That didn't work either! Why? Because public methods can only access public properties, not private properties.

Enter the privileged method:

var simpleObject = function() {

  var privatePr = 'private property';
  this.publicPr = 'public property';

  this.disp = function() {
    alert(privatePr + " / " + this.publicPr);
  }

}

var myObject = new simpleObject();
myObject.disp();

That's better! This shows that a privileged method can access not only public properties of an object but also that object's private properties.

So far we've seen private and public properties and we've accessed them using public and privilieged methods. One thing we've not yet been able to use is a private method.

Just like private properties, private methods can be used by privileged methods (and by other private methods). This is useful if, for example, there are multiple privileged methods that perform similar operations. Whatever is common to all of the privileged methods can be stored in a private method that is invoked by each of them.

It is now time to rewrite the guessing game, but this time using an object and building in the limited number of guesses. You will not need to change the HTML of the previous guessing game, only the JavaScript:

var gameObject = function() {

  var guessesLeft;
  var found;
  var numToGuess;
  var yourGuess;
  var initialised = false;
  
  this.start = function() {
    guessesLeft = 5;
    found = false;
    numToGuess = 1 + Math.floor( Math.random() * 10 );
    document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = true;
    initialised = true;
  }

  this.cheat = function() {
    if ( !initialised )
      alert("You can't cheat before even starting the game!");
    else if ( found )
      alert("You already found the number, why cheat now?");
    else {
      alert("The number to guess was: " + numToGuess);
      gameOver();
    }
  }

  this.play = function() {
    if ( !initialised )
      alert("Start a game before guessing!");
    else if ( found )
      alert("You already guessed the number, the game is over!");
    else if ( guessesLeft > 0 ) {
      yourGuess = parseInt(document.getElementById("guess").value);
      if ( yourGuess == numToGuess ) {
        alert("Congratulations! You guessed that the secret number was "
              + numToGuess + " with " + --guessesLeft + " guess(es) left.");
        gameOver();
      }
      else {
        if ( --guessesLeft > 0 )
          alert("Nope. Try again. You have " + guessesLeft + " guess(es) left.");
        else {
          alert("Nope. You're out of guesses!");
          gameOver();
        }
        document.getElementById("guess").value = '';
      }
    }
    else alert("Sorry, you've already run out of guesses!");
  }

  function gameOver() {
    found = true;
    document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = false;
    document.getElementById("guess").value = '';
    alert("Game over!");
  }

}

var guessingGame = new gameObject();

The interesting thing here is that the only things we're exposing to the outside world in this object are the three privileged methods: start, play and cheat. As in the previous incarnation of this game, the cheat() method gives the answer but ends the game there and then. You don't get the satisfaction of being congratulated for entering the right number if you had to ask for it! Using the earlier solution for this game, it would have been possible to access any guessesLeft property and fiddle with it before submitting a guess, thus having an infinite amount of guesses. With this approach, the number of guesses remaining is available only to the instance of the class because it is all held in private properties.

So, to recap:

Private properties:

Declaration:

var myClass = function() {
  var privateProperty;
};

Can be accessed by: private methods and privileged methods.
Are not visible outside the object's scope.

Public properties:

Declaration:

var myClass = function() {
  this.publicProperty = 'whatever';
};

Can be accessed by: public methods, private methods(*), privileged methods.
Are visible outside the object's scope.

Private methods:

Declaration:

var myClass = function() {
  function privateMethod() {
    /* stuff goes here */
  }
};

Can access: public methods(*), other private methods, privileged methods(*), private properties, public properties(*).
Can be accessed by: other private methods, privileged methods.
Are not visible outside the object's scope.

Public methods:

Declaration:

yourObject.publicMethod = function() {
  /* stuff goes here */
};

- or -

yourClass.prototype.publicMethod = function() {
  /* stuff goes here */
};

Can access: other public methods, privileged methods, public properties.
Can be accessed by: other public methods, private methods(*), privileged methods.
Are visible outside the object's scope.

Privileged methods:

Declaration:

var myClass = function() {
  this.privilegedMethod = function() {
    /* stuff goes here */
  };
};

Can access: private methods, public methods, other privileged methods, private properties, public properties.
Can be accessed by: public methods, private methods(*), other privileged methods.
Are visible outside the object's scope.

The more astute readers will have noticed that an asterisk appears sometimes when it comes to private methods' access to public properties and methods and privileged methods. This is down to an error in the implementation of ECMA-262 where this incorrectly references the window object in private methods called by another method of an object when it should reference the object in which the method is running. Consider this scenario:

var myClass = function() {

  this.publProp = 'I am a public property of myClass';

  this.privilegedMeth = function() { privMeth(); };
  
  function privMeth() { alert(this.publProp); }

}

var myObj = new myClass();
myObj.privilegedMeth();

This should work. Upon invoking myObj.privilegedMeth(), the private method privMeth() is invoked. This, in turn should be able to access the public property publProp and display it in an alert box. Well, it doesn't, because once execution enters the private method, this no longer references your instance of the myClass class, myObj. Instead, it references window. Given that global variables and functions are actually properties and methods of window, you can see this in action by creating a global variable called publProp and giving it a content different from the public property of your object:

var publProp = 'variable in the global namespace';

var myClass = function() {

  this.publProp = 'I am a public property of myClass';

  this.privilegedMeth = function() { privMeth(); };
  
  function privMeth() { alert(this.publProp); }

}

var myObj = new myClass();
myObj.privilegedMeth();

An alert box saying "variable in the global namespace" will be displayed, which is definitely not the expected behaviour!

We can get around this problem with a bit of a kludge. We create a private property (usually called that, but "that" is a matter of personal taste...) and assign the value of this to it when the object is instantiated. Thereafter, we prefix the public and privileged data we want to access from within the private method with "that." instead of "this." and everything works again because that hasn't changed since the object was instantiated (whereas this now references window). The code snippet above becomes:

var myClass = function() {

  var that = this;
  this.publProp = 'I am a public property of myClass';

  this.privilegedMeth = function() { privMeth(); };

  function privMeth() { alert(that.publProp); }

}

var myObj = new myClass();
myObj.privilegedMeth();

You now get the expected result.

So, the point of this article was to explain how to tidy up the potential mess that can arise when multiple scripts are included in a web page. It explored two ways to achieve that and outlined the main differences between them. In doing so it highlighted a pitfall that's the result of a flaw in most browsers' implementation of ECMA-262 and provided a way to bypass that flaw.

Obviously, much more complex stuff can be done than was explored here. For starters, none of the functions and methods given as examples actually take any parameters, while nothing's to stop them doing so. The constructor can also take parameters. For example, in the guessing game object, we can set the maximum allowable number of guesses by saying how many we want to allow the player in the constructor:

var gameObject = function(maxG) {

  var guessesLeft;
  var found;
  var numToGuess;
  var yourGuess;
  var initialised = false;
  var maxGuesses = maxG;

  this.start = function() {
    guessesLeft = maxGuesses;
    found = false;
    numToGuess = 1 + Math.floor( Math.random() * 10 );
    document.getElementById("startbutton").disabled = true;
    initialised = true;
  }
...
...
}

var guessingGame = new gameObject(3);

This time, when the class is instantiated, the parameter passed to the constructor, the value 3, is assigned to the private property maxGuesses. When the privileged method start() is called, we no longer blindly assign the value 5 to the private property guessesLeft, we assign maxGuesses to it. We have, in effect, created a variant of the game in which only 3 (the value passed to the constructor) guesses are permitted.

References to methods can also be passed to functions and used as callbacks. This is used frequently in the AJAX subsystems of Prototype and jQuery, where you pass a reference of a function to be called when the AJAX call has completed. You can pass a reference to a private, public or privileged method, although you might have to use the old "that" trick if you want to pass a reference to a public or privileged method when setting up the AJAX call from within a private method. You can also use Prototype's bind method to ensure that your methods run in the desired scope/context.

Nokia E72 firmware version V51

2010-09-18T17:00:00.006+01:00

Nokia released a major update for the E72 handset in September 2010. The previous version was V31, so V40 and V50 weren't even released to the public. According to many online resources there are something like 450 bugfixes in V51. There are also some new features that some people would consider to be bugs, and curiously enough, some pieces of software appear to have been downgraded between versions V31 and V51.

V51 is currently available via Nokia Software Updater and as Firmware-over-the-air.

There are various sources of information on the internet listing things that are supposed to have changed. What I'd like to do here is give you an idea of what the new firmware feels like, which is something you can't put on paper.

Visually, very little has changed. To be honest, the only difference I've noticed is a smaller clock at the bottom of the screen.

People who tend to use the keypad to select elements in the phone's menus will be pleased to hear that the '7' and '8' keys can now be used again. That ability was removed in V31 for some reason or other.

The menus do seem a little more responsive generally, although the digits still take ages to display while you're dialling a number.

The voice control application, vlingo, does get in the way when you start the phone up for the first time. Although it starts in the background and you can kill the application by long-pressing the menu key, scrolling to the vlingo icon and pressing the delete key, it starts again next time you start the phone, and will carry on doing so until you tell it not to.

The way to do this is not self-evident at all. Nor is why you should have to do this in the first place because the E72 already has built-in recognition of voice commands without the need for third-party software. Carry on answering questions asked by the application as if you were planning on using it until you get to the page where you're invited to hold down the "voice activation" key, speak a phrase into the microphone and then release the voice activation key. The thing is, you're invited to press the "back" key instead of the voice activation key (on the side of the phone between the volume/zoom keys), so you end up in an endless loop and cannot complete the settings and get rid of vlingo.

Instead of holding the voice activation key, start typing some text instead. You will be informed that you can indeed input text directly and asked if you want to skip the voice configuration. You can then proceed to the next pages in the configuration process and at some point you will be asked if you want vlingo to start when the phone starts. This is where you can say "no" and no longer be bothered with the software.

Even though we are all told that the browser, media player and messaging application have been updated, there is no perceptible change.

Adobe Reader LE is a useful piece of software for reading PDF files. The trouble is, many recent PDF files require Adobe LE 2.5, which came with firmware V31. Firmware V51 downgrades Adobe LE to version 1.5. I have no idea why this is.

Up until now, the keypad autolock would only kick in if you were on the standby screen. Go into the menu or into any application and the keypad would no longer lock. With V51, the keypad will lock automatically regardless of the screen you're on. Some people are calling this a "bug" (probably because it's a change from what they were used to), I think that it makes things more consistent and I welcome the change.

I think some optimisation has taken place in order to reduce power consumption and thus get more life out of the battery. Under normal circumstances, the battery indicator will show "full" for most of the battery's charge cycle. Once it drops a bar, the battery is usually flat within 24 hours. The gauge had dropped a bar yesterday morning, and this evening, about 34 hours later, it is still on 3 bars, and that is with the WLAN switched on almost permanently (I use the E72 as a VoIP/SIP phone). So, instead of being flat as a pancake in 24 hours, it has only dropped by 3 bars in half as long again. That's a definite improvement.

The e-mail client still doesn't use the "destinations" feature. You can only set it to use a given access point to connect to a mailbox. Thankfully, SmartConnect is included in the firmware, so you can get around the problem by using that. It didn't work with V31. BirdStep had to provide a patch to get it working. I don't know if the new version works or not on its own since the patch from BirdStep is still installed on my E72 after the update to V31.

Reading the Nokia Support Discussions forum, you will hear about various problems that people say that they have had. Among the problems I've seen, there are:

I don't see the names of people calling me, only the number.

It's unlikely that that happened since the update. Read here.

The phone has become unstable and never stops crashing.

This is the same as any update on any phone. The usual things to try are to clear the phone's settings (*#7780#) or to attempt a re-install of the firmware.

I can't zoom into pictures using the gallery, only using the file manager.

Can't say I've noticed this. I just tried to do just that and the zoom works fine in the gallery.

Received calls are no longer logged!

Can't say I've noticed this either. They are logged on my handset.

This and many other problems reported can most likely be solved in the same way as the general instability problem.

In short, the update is positive, I think, but I fail to understand why a whole major version has been skipped. The changes made do not justify such a version jump in my opinion.

WOMWorld/Nokia "Experiences"

2010-02-12T13:43:00.006Z

WOMWorld/Nokia have recently unveiled their "Experiences" page. It offers a view of the devices they currently have out on loan and the cities where said devices are currently being evaluated.

Privacy concerns mean that the devices are mapped only to the city where they've been sent, not to the actual address of the person trying the device out. For example, as of writing this, there's the indication of an N900 (the one sitting next to me on the arm of my sofa) in Bolton when in actual fact I am in Horwich, which is a few miles West of Bolton.

WOMWorld/Nokia Experiences

I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is but hey, it's fun, right? It certainly seems to fit in with the current craze for location-based services such as OVI location sharing, geotagging on twitter, Google Buzz etc.

Speaking of the N900 I have here, I still have just over a week to evaluate it. I'll digest my findings and report back shortly thereafter.

Vodafone Access Gateway femtocell

2010-02-05T20:51:00.008Z

Or, How To Spend Lots Of Money And Then Pay For Your Mobile Calls Twice

There's no denying that this product can be of use if you're in the unfortunate position of needing 3G coverage from Vodafone UK and from no other operator. If this is the case and you have a decent enough broadband connection then this product will certainly fit the bill. There is, however, a more sinister side to it in that the business model used to place it on the market do leave a little to be desired. Let me elaborate...

What is a femtocell and how does it work?

You know those mobile phone towers that everybody wants near enough to have great mobile phone coverage but not in their own back yard? This is one of those that's been very much scaled down both in size and in terms of power output. A big, outdoors mast has its radio tranceivers on the top and equipment in the cabinet at the foot of the mast to connect the signals directly to the operator's backhaul network. This one here has tiny tranceivers in the housing that emit a fraction of the radiation, just enough to give you a good 3G signal for your phone within your home, and it uses your home broadband internet connection to tunnel into Vodafone's own network. In effect, you have a base station in your home.

This base station allows you to place and receive calls and to connect your phone to the internet using the 3G signal.

In theory...

Also, this device is 3G only, no GSM signal is broadcast. If your mobile phone is not a 3G phone, it will not work with this device.

A few figures

The Access Gateway femtocell requires that phones be registered to it in order for them to be able to use it. It provides a web-based interface allowing you to register up to 30 Vodafone numbers with it. Only 4 phones can be connected to it and use it simultaneously.

Vodafone are selling this piece of kit at prices ranging from £50 to £160 up front or at £5/month, depending on what level of service you want and already have.

So, what's the problem?

On the face of it, it looks like a useful piece of kit providing 3G coverage where there was none before. However...

There have been numerous complaints (head over to Vodafone's user forums if you want to see for yourself) about the kit not actually working. Apparently a phone will show a full 3G signal and the VAG tell you that all is well when in fact you are not connected to Vodafone's network at all. You will miss calls and you won't even know about it until you try (and fail) to place a call yourself.

Whenever your phone connects to a base station (and this device is a base station even though it's a lot smaller), your operator's network is updated with the ID of the base station you're connected to. When someone tries to call you, the network knows which base station to use in order to reach your phone. This sometimes (frequently?) doesn't work how it should, meaning that Vodafone doesn't know that you're connected via your femtocell and therefore can't reach you.

The "solution" proffered by Vodafone is to power-cycle the femtocell. Having to switch a device off and on again in order to make it work reliably is obviously not a perfect situation...

Other than technical issues there are commercial and financial implications. By selling you one of these femtocells, the operator is, in essence, admitting that the service you're already paying for in your mobile phone bills is not up to scratch. It is then making you pay (again) for the hardware to solve that problem.

But that's not all, it gets better!

This femtocell uses your broadband connection. So, not only are you paying for the hardware, but you're also paying for the network connectivity. Those of you with capped data contracts will have to remember that the data used by the femtocell will be counted in your monthly allowance.

Wait... There's even more...

Not only are you using your own internet connection and hardware that you've had to pay for to extend Vodafone's network at your expense, but you're not even getting a discount on your mobile calls.

Here's the best bit...

If you happen to use Vodafone's home broadband service, when you use the femtocell to place calls on your Vodafone mobile, the data sent over the internet connection is still counted against your monthly allowance. So not only are you paying the full price, but you're also using your broadband allowance that you're paying for elsewhere. You are, in effect, paying for the call twice.

So, this solution is viable, albeit costly, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to use Vodafone's mobile telephony, and Vodafone alone is an option, and if you're in an area to which Vodafone's normal network does not extend.

There are alternatives

If you stop and think about it, why do you absolutely have to make cellular calls with your mobile phone? A large proportion of phones produced over the past few years are also able to connect to standard WiFi wireless networks (WLAN), so why not turn to VoIP? Software exists for nearly all WLAN-enabled phones allowing you to place and receive VoIP calls on your phone.

This can be achieved in either of two ways. The first and simplest solution is to use a system that's designed specifically for use on internet-enabled mobile phones. Such services include Fring, Nimbuzz and Truphone. These systems usually allow free calls between users of the same system and low-cost calls to normal phone lines almost anywhere in the world. Some of them also allow the user to log into various instant messaging services such as MSN messenger, AIM, Yahoo! messenger and google chat. They also allow limited access to certain social networks like twitter and facebook.

Internet telephony solutions normally associated with desktop computers are also available to mobile phones nowadays. I'm thinking in particular of Skype, which is available as a native application on many mobile platforms. If it is not available on yours, then you can always try using Fring because that service can also interface with Skype, allowing you to place and receive Skype calls via Fring.

The second alternative solution is to use traditional VoIP providers, whose systems use a widely implemented protocol called SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol. There are numerous manufacturers of hardware SIP phones, such as Cisco, Snom and Grandstream, for example. These products all "talk" SIP, which is a pretty universal protocol.

The implementation of SIP is just a question of software. If appropriate software is available for your phone, you can get it to "talk" SIP, too, and use the services of any mainstream SIP provider. Your mobile phone will, in effect, be a SIP phone just like any of the phones from the manufacturers mentioned above. This, too, usually gets you free calls to other users of the same service and cheap calls to normal phone lines. My main providers of IP telephony are VoipTalk and VoipFone.

Even if there is no software to turn your mobile phone into a SIP phone, all is not lost. Fring, at least, can log into your VoIP provider on your behalf and relay SIP calls to/from you through your Fring account at no extra charge. Given how ubiquitous SIP is, I assume other systems similar to Fring can do likewise. The only disadvantages to this particular kind of setup (and to using Skype like this through a third party) are the comparatively poor audio quality that is a result of multiple transcodings in order to reduce bandwidth and the sometimes borderline unacceptable lag between one person speaking and the other hearing what was said on the other end of the line.

To sum this up, you have three possible solutions other than a femtocell for your telecommunications needs. In order from lowest to highest desireability, they are:

3rd position: use a third party system such as Fring, Nimbuzz or Truphone, which can interface with well-known network-based solutions such as Skype or straightforward SIP. The cost involved is nil except for the communications themselves, which can be free anyway under some circumstances.

2nd position: use standard SIP service from a run-of-the-mill SIP provider and access it with a dedicated hardware SIP phone. This is the best solution from the point of view of call quality and ease of use. It does, however, mean buying a dedicated SIP phone, although that SIP phone will probably be cheaper than the femtocell...

1st position: use your WLAN-enabled mobile phone as a SIP phone. You get call quality that's maybe just a bit lower than you would with a dedicated, hardware SIP phone, and it might also be marginally less flexible to use depending on how well the SIP software integrates with your phone. There is little to no expense, though, because the software is more often than not either absolutely free or extremely low cost.

The femtocell does, however, have one major advantage over all of these three solutions: convergence. Whether your mobile is connected to a conventional base station or to your femtocell, if someone dials your mobile number then your phone will ring. This is not the case with any of the VoIP solutions outlined above.

Does it matter?

It depends on the reason why you want the femtocell in the first place.

Do you want the femtocell so that you can still be reached on your mobile when you're otherwise out of reach of your mobile network? If so then none of these VoIP solutions are really any good for you. In this case, you could always consider diverting all inbound calls from your mobile to your land line. You'd most likely have to pay for any calls diverted this way on top of your contract, and you'd have to weigh this cost against the cost of the femtocell.

Do you want the femtocell so that you can place calls using the free minutes in your contract rather than letting them go to waste while paying for communications on your landline? If so then you might want to consider a VoIP solution, which will be cheaper than the femtocell and cheaper than normal landline calls.

Food for thought...

N900 review coming soon...

2010-02-05T01:03:00.004Z

Not content with having lent me an E72, which I reviewed last week and in fact decided to adopt, the fine folk at WomWorld/Nokia should be sending me one of Nokia's flagship Maemo devices, an N900 internet tablet.

Being a long-term Linux user, this device holds particular interest for me.

Stay tuned...

Nokia E72: review

2010-01-31T00:39:00.013Z

On Friday (22/01/10) I took delivery of a Nokia E72 handset on loan from Nokia so that I could test-drive it and write this review. The whole thing could in fact be summed up in three words: "I want one". That is not, however, particularly helpful for other people so I'll go ahead and give you the longer version as well...

To get an idea of the perspective from which I'm writing this mini-review, bear in mind that I'm a long-ish term Nseries user having worked my way through an N73, N95 and N96, and my current phone is a 5800 XpressMusic (which really is an Nseries phone in all but name). I don't have much use for several of the business-related features of the E72 (such as VPN and printing, for example) and won't cover them here. There are also some of the features I used to use on the N95 that disappeared from the N96 and 5800XM but have reappeared on the E72. These features mean enough to me for me to be willing to compromise on the multimedia side of things that is usually less well developed on Eseries devices.

First impressions are very important. The build of this device is impressive. It certainly doesn't feel plasticky and flimsy like many competing phones, it has a metallic coolness and weight (128g) about it. Given that the E72 sports a full, 4-row QWERTY keypad, each of the keys is comparatively small at roughly 5mm (W) by 7mm (H) in size. At first I thought I'd have great difficulty using it because of this but I was pleasantly surprised at the speed with which I got used to it. The keys are domed, which helps you feel your way around the keypad, and the action is gentle yet well defined. The ergonomics make the keypad far easier to use than you'd initially think looking at its somewhat reduced size.

At 6cm wide, 11cm tall and only 1cm thick, this phone is quite a slab. Slim, but a slab all the same. With a significant amount of metal in the bodywork and no moving parts (this is a candybar phone, not a slider or a clamshell), it feels rock solid. The battery cover is also made of stainless steel and does not creak like the back of the 5800XM or the N96, another detail that makes the phone feel solid.

The E72 comes with 512 MB of NAND flash, resulting in a comfortable 220 or so megabytes of free space on its C: drive for installing extra software. This is complemented by a microSD card slot that also accepts microSDHC cards. At the time of writing, these cards are available in capacities of up to 16GB. A 4GB card comes with the phone and is already installed in the slot. It includes, among other things, 2.5GB of maps and the PC Suite software used for synchronising data between the phone and your PC. Personally, I'm using a ByteStor 16GB card in mine. The E72 also has 128MB of SDRAM, which is just about enough for a phone of this calibre. The CPU in this handset is clocked at 600MHz and it shows in the responsiveness of the user interface, especially if you turn theme effects off.

Having the screen in landscape mode all the time is certainly "different". Even though the only thing that changes from a more conventional phone is the orientation, you nevertheless have the impression that the screen is larger. It is only an impression, though. Maybe the landscape orientation allows for more information on-screen, or maybe we're just more comfortable looking at something more like a TV screen. Its QVGA (320×240) resolution, however, is lower than what I've been used to for the past 9 months. The 5800XM does have a 360×640 widescreen format display, so switching to this handset will be a bit of a step backwards in that respect.

Knowing that this phone has native VoIP support, one of the first things I did was to set up a SIP profile on the E72 and then pay a visit to forum.nokia.com in order to grab and install the SIP VoIP Settings application for this model. The setup was painless and literally within seconds I had connected the phone via my wireless network to my PBX at home running Asterisk and was using it as my "landline" phone. Now, that is a feature that I missed from the N95 and which disappeared when I "upgraded" to the N96.

Call quality, for both cellular and VoIP calls, is very good indeed. The sound is not tinny at all, it is rather rich without being fuzzy. The quality of audio transmitted appears to be good as well. I just spoke with my father in France a few minutes ago and he told me that I sounded very clear his end of the line (it was a VoIP call). The good audio quality is valid for the music player, too. And for Spotify mobile. One minor niggle I'd point out is the minor click you hear when one track ends and the next one begins. It's only a quiet click but it shouldn't really be there. Nokia has managed to suppress it in other music-enabled devices such as the N96 and the 5800, it should also be possible to do so in a close-to-top-of-the-range Eseries device. One feature that Nokia haven't sorted out in any of their devices yet to the best of my knowledge is gapless audio playback. Not having it, and having to suffer a pause in the playback between tracks, when listening to live albums, for example, is a bit of a pain.

The battery in this phone is a mighty 1500 mAh BP-4L, the same battery as in the N97. The official specs claim that this gives the E72 16-22 days of standby time or up to 13 hours talk time in GSM or VoIP mode (or 6 hours in 3G mode) but, as always with battery life annouced by manufacturers, need to be taken with a skip full of salt given that the conditions in which the measurements are made are not reproducible in real life. While playing with the phone pretty intensively, I've been able to get 3 solid days of life out of the battery, that's with the WLAN connected permanently since I've been using the phone as a VoIP phone connected to my PBX.

The E72 ships with a few nice accessories, and some not so nice. First of all, the stereo earphones. I'm afraid they're a waste of space. They reproduce virtually no bass or treble and they're the kind that you're supposed to wedge in your ear, and they invariably fall out all the time despite coming with three different sizes of rubber grommet. Not only that but the inline remote control only has volume up/down keys and a call key, and looks (and feels) cheap and nasty. This phone is fully compatible with the more complete remote control of the 5800 XpressMusic, which also includes track skip, fast-forward, rewind, pause/play and stop controls, and a lock. It also has a standard 3.5 mm stereo socket on it into which you can plug a standard set of earphones, such as noise-isolating in-ear buds. Forget the supplied earphones, get yourself an AD-54 audio adapter and some decent earbuds. Your ears will thank you.

You can use a microUSB cable to connect the phone to your computer. The supplied CA-101D "cable" (in quotes because it's a bit of a joke, "stub" would be a more accurate description) is only about 10 cm long and therefore probably OK for laptop users. It's no good whatsoever for users of desktop systems because it's just far too short. The photo above shows it next to an SD card, which gives you an idea of its size, or rather lack thereof. You'll definitely want to invest in a normal CA-101 cable. Note that the E72 can be charged through the USB port. The rate at which it charges is, however, much slower than if you use the supplied AC-8 charger, which takes approximately 2 hours to charge the battery fully. For the phone's USB port to be fully functional, it needs to be connected to a USB 2.0 port on your computer. My (rather old) laptop only has USB 1.1 and the phone will not charge when connected to it, nor will "mass storage" mode work. USB charging is comparatively rare on Nokia handsets.

Another rarity on Nokia phones is HSUPA. All of Nokia's recent 3G phones are in fact 3.5G-compatible, boasting data download speeds of up to 7.2 megabits per second (provided the mobile network supports such speeds) but only the old 3G uplink speed of 384 kbit/sec. Several newer Eseries devices, including the E72, support HSDPA at 10.2 megabits/sec and, very importantly for those who send large volumes of data, HSUPA at up to 2 megabits per second.

The cleaning cloth is a nice touch. It's needed because the phone itself is a bit of a grease magnet. There's also a protective carrying case and a wrist strap. The case offers good scratch protection but it's a bit of a scramble to get the phone out of it quickly enough if someone calls you. The wrist strap is a great addition. It offers much appreciated reassurance when, for example, using the camera. You know you're not going to drop £350 worth of phone into the pond while photographing the ducks...

Speaking of the camera, I was rather impressed with it. It shoots 5 megapixel still images and video up to VGA resolution (640x480) at 15 frames per second. The video frame rate is half that of the 5800 XpressMusic and high-end Nseries devices but I'm not really that bothered. I use the still camera far more, so that's what I was more interested in. I've not yet really put it through its paces, but preliminary tests suggest that it's every bit as good as the N95's camera despite the absence of Carl Zeiss optics. Nokia hasn't brought out a camera of this quality since the N82 (and arguably the N86 8MP). Once I've conducted some reasonable tests I'll add a link to the results here, so check back occasionally, but don't expect much until the weather improves around here (northern England). There's little point in me taking a load of pictures of rainy streets and grey skies. One indication of the piqué of images taken with the camera is the size of the resulting JPEG files. Generally, they range between 1MB and 3MB on the E72. Believe me, 3MB is big for a 5 megapixel image from a cameraphone, meaning that there's plenty of detail in there...

One feature of this phone that I appreciate greatly is the mode switcher. It allows you to switch easily from "business" mode to "personal" mode and back. You get a different set of shortcuts and notifications on your home screen and a different theme for each mode. It would have been nice for the mode switch to change profiles as well so you can filter out business-related calls when in "personal" mode, for example, but I suppose we can't have everything.

Just below the soft keys and above the call make and break keys, there are four function keys. Menu and calendar on the left, contacts and messaging on the right. With the exception of the menu key, all of these keys are in fact programmable. The action in response to short press and a long press can be programmed independently. For example, I have programmed the "calendar" key to bring up the calendar application if I simply press it, or to bring up the clock application if I press and hold it. Or, a short press on the "messaging" key brings up the messaging application's main screen, while a long press on it starts composing a new text message. In the middle is the usual 5-direction D-pad, the middle of which is also an optical Navi-wheel. Swiping your finger over it allows you to scroll in the direction of the swipe. At first I thought it got in the way, but I came round to it after a couple of days once I'd got the hang of it.

While on the subject of messaging, the e-mail client built into the E72 is far more feature-rich than that of Nseries devices. I suppose this is normal for a phone being presented as a business device. It is compatible with normal POP3 and IMAP4 services, but also Lotus Notes, Google mail, Hotmail and Microsoft Exchange. Not fogetting Nokia's own OVI Mail service. There are, however, a few things I'd like to see Nokia put right in future releases of the software. First of all, there is no automatic "send to self" feature, nor is there an automatic Bcc: feature to fall back on because of the lack of "send to self". If the E72 moved sent mails over to the "sent items" IMAP folder of the account it's connected to, it wouldn't be a problem, but instead of that it stores sent mail locally and there is no possibility to move mail between folders manually (or, if there is, it doesn't work). If you want a globally accessible copy of any mail sent, you have to Bcc: yourself manually each time you send something.

Secondly, the way the e-mail application handles network connectivity needs to be rethought. S60v3 with Feature Pack 2 (the user interface on the E72) has a network feature called "destinations" whereby network access points can be organised in a priority list. For example, in the "Internet" destination, I have my home wireless network in first position, followed by my mobile network operator's packet data service. Any application needing a connection to the internet can therefore use the "Internet" destination rather than any particular network access point programmed into the phone. If it does, the phone will first try and connect using the first access point in the "Internet" list, ie. my home wireless network. If that is unavailable, because I'm out of the house, for example, then it will fall back on the next item in the list, my operator's packet data service. Despite the presence of this feature in the E72, the e-mail application only uses specific access points, not destinations. I can set things so that my wireless network is used for e-mail connectivity, and all works fine as long as I'm at home. If I go out, I need to change the access point used, for the inbound mail connection and then for the outbound mail connection, for each of the mailboxes defined. It would make things far simpler if I could tell the application to use the "Internet" destination. The most convenient connection would be used regardless of whether or not I'm in range of my wireless network. The feature is built into the phone, so why does an application a priori developed specifically for the series of phones not use it?

While I'm griping about missing features, how about scheduled backups? Backing up your data is crucial, especially on what is supposed to be a business device. S60v5 devices have the ability to schedule either a daily or a weekly backup. As long as the phone is switched on, you don't need to think about backing up your data, it happens on its own. Why not include that in Eseries device? It's so useful. Much more so than 3D ringtones, for example...

The killer application on the E72, in particular since Nokia announced free navigation on several devices including this one, is OVI Maps. It includes walk and drive navigation with verbal prompts in over 70 countries. Other than the fact that turn-by-turn navigation is no longer subject to the purchase of a licence, one of the key features of OVI Maps v3.03 is the ability to log into your Nokia account and synchronize the locations and routes stored in your phone with your online maps.ovi.com account. Another feature added in this version is "location sharing", whereby you can update your facebook status with your location and an optional photo. The resulting status update on your facebook profile will include a link to a map marking the coordinates of the location you shared in this manner.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in the firmware of the E52, E55 and E72, which inhibits signing on to your Nokia account. If you try and do so within OVI Maps, the application simply crashes. This very same bug is most likely behind the fact that the e-mail application cannot create an OVI Mail account correctly either. The bug has been acknowledged by Nokia and they are working on a fix. The Nokia employee who posted the message linked to above on the Nokia Support Discussion forums sent me a patch to test on my E72 and it worked fine, allowing OVI Maps v3.03 to access my Nokia account and also allowing the e-mail client to set up my OVI Mail account with no problems. The patch will definitely be included in future firmware releases of these three devices. It is unknown for now how it will be pushed to devices running current (and older) firmware. Before you ask, I have not been granted permission to distribute the patch I was sent. Do not ask me to send you a copy of it.

Update 06/02/2010: The fix I was given to test has now been officially released by Nokia. You can grab it from this support page.

It is now 4 days since I started writing this review and just over a week since I took delivery of my test E72. In that time I have grown extremely fond of the device, especially the landscape mode screen. In fact, if I look at the 5800 XpressMusic now it looks positively weird. I never thought I would ever be able to use a non touch-screen phone again after the 5800, but the E72 has proved me wrong. I have now managed to reach a relatively fast typing speed, pretty much as fast as I was on the touch screen if not faster, and the fact that the E72 is VoIP-capable is, I think, what really won me over. As I mentioned earlier, I used to have an N95 until the end of 2008, when I "upgraded" to an N96 (in quotes because in many respects, the absence of VoIP and the comparatively poor camera in particular, it was more of a downgrade) and then to the 5800 XpressMusic (also without VoIP) in April 2009. The absence of VoIP on the last two handsets was a major pain in the neck and meant that I had to go out and purchase a dedicated VoIP phone.

Despite the complaints I have formulated here, I was so impressed with the E72 that I went and ordered one for myself only a few days after I first got my hands on the loan device. I'm really pleased that I can now have a single phone for cellular and VoIP calls, and I'm equally pleased with the build quality of that single phone. It's a pleasure to use.

Incidentally, I signed up with Virgin Mobile on an 18-month contract at £25 per month, which gets me 500 minutes, up to 3000 texts and up to a gigabyte of mobile web data. The phone itself was free, and here's the best bit of it: it's a generic, UK phone and it isn't even SIM-locked! Most of the time when you get a "free" phone from an operator, its firmware has been messed about with by the operator so that you get its logo in your face all the time and so that some features of the phone that they don't want you using have been deactivated. This is not the case here. You'd walk out of a Nokia store with exactly the same phone had you bought it SIM-free. Indeed, this phone is a SIM-free phone. Until now I was on O2 with a SIM-only deal getting me 600 minutes, 1200 texts and 1 gigabyte of data for £20 per month. In essence, I'm paying an extra £5 per month for the next 18 months (so £90 all in all) and getting comparable service given that I never got anywhere near the 600 minutes or 1200 texts, and I just got a phone worth around £350 for free. Not a bad deal after all!

Free navigation with OVI Maps!

2010-01-21T21:33:00.003Z

On the morning of January 21st 2010, Nokia announced that turn-by-turn navigation would be free for all to use on their Nokia handsets.

Until now, the OVI Maps software (formerly known as Nokia Maps) was free to use for finding your current position and managing locations, but obtaining step-by-step directions from one location to another with vocal prompts was subject to the purchase of a navigation licence.

The roll-out of free navigation is not yet global. The ability to use it is subject to installing OVI Maps V3.03, which is not yet ported to all models. As of writing, the models supported are:

5230, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Navigation Edition
6710 Navigator, 6730 classic, X6
E52, E55, E72, N97 mini

Current speculation is that this new version of OVI Maps will be embedded in the V21 firmware update of the N97 that is due to be released later this month. It is also thought that OVI Maps V3.03 is the reason why the V21 update, originally announced for December 2009, was delayed.

Visit http://www.nokia.com/maps for more details.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic V40 firmware update

2010-01-14T11:03:00.007Z

What better way to kick off the New Year's blogs than with the announcement of a great firmware update from Nokia?

This article could be subtitled "Give Credit Where Credit Is Due" because V40.0.005 does seem to be the result of a productive effort from Nokia's software development team. They have evidently been listening to customers' concerns because the timer-related bugs that were introduced in V30 and V31 are gone and new features that many people were demanding have been introduced. In short, it took them long enough but they got this one right in my opinion.

Nokia considers changelogs to be confidential information, so you'll never find one except when it's leaked on unofficial sites, but bear in mind that they more than likely contain inaccuracies deliberately introduced by Nokia in order to identify the mole leaking them. The information here is therefore based solely on personal observation. There may be features I've overlooked because I never use them, and some things I did notice may be totaly subjective.

BUGFIXES

There were three (most likely related) bugs introduced in V30 and carried over to V31 that almost ruined the experience of using the 5800XM for me:

1) Scheduled backups would not happen
2) The alarm would go off late
3) Timed profiles would expire late

These bugs would appear to have been eradicated in V40. The scheduled backup did happen last night, my alarm went off at 07:45 precisely instead of some indeterminate time between 07:45 and 07:55, and the timed profile expired at 08:00 dead on. That is a major relief, it's been random since I installed V30 in October last year.

NEW THINGS I LIKE

More responsive

The phone definitely seems more responsive since the update, and this isn't the result of a reset because I didn't do that. There's no need to if the phone has UDP (User Data Preservation). The user interface is definitely snappier, menus open quasi-instantaneously, applications open quicker, on-screen controls react faster.

More RAM

Running x-plore immediately after the phone boots reveals that there's 51 MB (plus whatever x-plore itself is using) of RAM free on D: for applications to play with. That's more than with V31, where 48 MB were available. This will help if you have several applications running concurrently. You will be less likely to run out of RAM, which means less likelihood that the system will forcefully shut down an application that's being a bit of a memory hog.

More battery life

Preliminary investigations using Nokia's "Energy Profiler" suggest that the operating system has been optimized to use less battery power and thus increase battery life when in standby, which is the status in which the phone finds itself most of the time.

Swipe action

When this was first introduced on the N97 it confused the hell out of people. Despite the animated graphics, people were just trying to press on the green, animated, right-pointing arrow to take a call and, of course, not succeeding. They didn't realize that the animation was suggesting that they should swipe the screen to the right in order to take the call, or to the left in order to reject the call. Reading the manual might have helped here, but who does that? That's another matter altogether... Anyway, the "swipe to answer" gesture is now part of the 5800XM's firmware and I must say that I like it, although its implementation is a little confusing here. A swipe to the right does answer the call, whereas a swipe to the left unlocks the keypad and silences the ringtone but doesn't reject the call. You have to tap a button on the screen after you've unlocked the keypad in order to do that. The green and red keys still, however, function as normal (answer and reject).

The swipe action has also been carried over to the alarm clock. Swipe to the right to kill the alarm, or to the left to engage the "snooze" function. Ditto for calendar entries with a reminder (ToDo notes, Memos, Anniversaries and Meetings), albeit with a slightly different behaviour. With calendar entries, a left swipe will silence the alarm and then give you the opportunity to kill it or engage the "snooze" function.

Visual feedback

If you tap on a selected item in a list in order to open it, you now get visual feedback that you've done just that. It's a small detail but it helps in that you are given an acknowledgement of the command you just issued. This is particularly useful if you've deactivated haptic feedback (vibrations in response to actions on the touch screen) in order to conserve battery power.

NEW THINGS I HAVE MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT

Auto QWERTY keypad

Many people were asking for this, and I can see the logic in it. If you're holding the phone in portrait mode, you get a conventional alphanumeric keypad for text input. If you now rotate the phone to landscape mode, the alphanumeric keypad is replaced with a full-screen QWERTY keypad automatically. This is all very well, but the option to have an alphanumeric keypad while holding the phone in landscape mode has now disappeared. I used to use that frequently because, say what you will, text input on a small keypad such as that of a phone is far easier on an alphanumeric keypad because the keys themselves are much larger than they are on a full-screen QWERTY keypad, and with T9 predictive input you don't lose any speed to speak of. Combine that with the ease of holding the phone horizontally and you're on to a winner. Unfortunately, you no longer have this option. It would have been nice to have included something in the phone's settings to enable either this new behaviour or the traditional behaviour.

New "Contacts Bar" homescreen theme

This, along with kinetic scrolling (see further down), brings the 5800XM in line with other S60v5 devices (except the N97/mini) from Nokia. You get up to 20 contacts in the scrollable contacts bar, a tap on one of which will bring up a screen showing a log of your communications with that contact and buttons to call or send a message to that contact. You also get the usual 4 shortcuts to applications like you do on the "Shortcuts bar" home screen theme, plus a small panel allowing you to control the music player or the FM radio, if one of them is running.

This would be great if it weren't for two things missing from it. Firstly, the "Content search" is not on the homescreen. Secondly, the calendar is missing. While the absence of the search facility is not a deal breaker, the lack of a calendar display most certainly is. Also, the contacts bar is extremely clunky with only 3 contacts displayed at any given time and with no option to rearrange contacts other than deleting them and then adding them again in the order in which you want them to be displayed.

Nice try but it needs more work.

Kinetic scrolling

This is the ability to scroll through a list by swiping the screen upwards or downwards and thus "flicking" the list in that direction, making it scroll until you stop it or until it decelerates and comes to a halt. Several applications have used this feature for a long time, Gravity and Nokia's own touch screen Photo Browser come straight to mind. Kinetic scrolling was added to the N97's firmware in V20, which was released late October 2009, and I believe other S60v5 phones had it right from the beginning. The 5800 was therefore, until now, the only S60v5 phone not to have it.

The trouble is, its implementation is inconsistent. Kinetic scrolling does not function in the phone's menus, nor can you use it to scroll through the text of a message or an e-mail.

Personally, I never had any problem sliding the scroll bar to the right of the screen and I find myself still using that rather than kinetic scrolling. At least it's implemented consistently, you can use it everywhere.

THINGS THAT LEFT ME PERPLEXED

The "Switch" application is used when you get a new phone and want to transfer your data to it from the old one (provided both are Nokia phones). In theory, you'll only use it once, if at all, so I suppose it doesn't really matter where it is in the menu heirarchy, but moving it from Connectivity > Data transfer, where it seemed perfectly at home, to Settings leaves me thinking "What was that in aid of?".

THINGS I DEFINITELY DISLIKED

Subscription to "My Nokia"

Whether you like it or not, the phone sends off an SMS to the "My Nokia" service, subscribing you to receive tips on phone usage by SMS. You are not asked if you want this, you are told "I'm going to subscribe you to My Nokia" with the only possible response from you being "OK". You then have to go into the "My Nokia" application in your phone's menu and send another SMS to unsubscribe from the service.

The problem with this is that the tips from "My Nokia" are of no interest to anyone who's been using a mobile phone for more than about 30 seconds. They are aimed at people for whom even the most basic operations (such as switching the phone on and off) are completely bewildering. For my part, I find it rather condescending, even insulting, that Nokia should feel the need to remind me that I can use the power button to switch my phone on... If it's switched off then I can't receive that pearl of wisdom. Duh!

FM radio

The FM Radio no longer works. It'll start, but then it becomes totally unresponsive. You can't change preset stations, retune manually or do anything other than exit the radio application.

I never use the thing so it doesn't really bother me, but I do appreciate the frustration of people who do use it in much the way that not many people were bothered about the bugs present in V30/V31 while I definitely was!

IN CONCLUSION

This is a breath of fresh air after the string of somewhat disastrous firmwares for S60v5 phones we've seen coming form Espoo. It fixes the main problems encountered in earlier versions of the 5800's firmware and adds new features that people have been demanding so that this phone falls in line with other devices of the same family. It's what V30 and V31 should have been with a few extras.

A few things still need ironing out in the new "Contacts bar" homescreen and there is still no native SIP client to place VoIP calls, but regardless of these issues, V40.0.005 is a huge step in the right direction towards making the 5800 XpressMusic a phone that's fun to use in that the features it offers actually do what it says on the tin.

This is a major update so it won't be available over-the-air. If you want it (and I certainly recommend that you do install it), you'll need to update the phone on your computer using Nokia Software Updater.

Will my mobile operator bill me for using WiFi?

2009-12-30T21:17:00.003Z

While people will often be dismissive and give answers like "of course not, you idiot", there's more to it than at first sight.

Before an answer can be given for this question, you need to ask yourself who is providing the WiFi. There are three possibilities here:

1) You!

This is probably the only case that most people think of when they're giving a dismissive answer. In this setup, you're using a wireless router or a wireless access point to distribute your home broadband internet among several devices such as your desktop computer, laptop, possibly a wireless VoIP phone, and your WiFi-enabled mobile phone.

In this instance, your mobile phone is just another device connected to your wireless home network. Any data usage is already paid for in your broadband internet bill. While we all know that mobile network operators would love to bill you even just for thinking about using the phone, they have no way of knowing that you're using your own wireless network at home. There's no way they can bill you for usage they don't even know about.

So, in this instance, the answer is an emphatic "no".

2) Your mobile operator

Some mobile network operators (T-Mobile UK for one) have a network of publicly visible WiFi hotspots in places like pubs, fast food outlets, railway stations, airports etc. While they may be visible to all and sundry, not anyone can actually use them. They're protected by a login and password that you're not given until you pay for them.

Access can be flat-rate or PAYG. In the former case you pay the same amount whether you use the service or not, regardless of how much you use it (within the limits of a fair use policy established by the operator). In the latter case you pay according to how much data you use, either as an addition to your mobile bill or in the form of pre-paid credit.

So, in this case, the answer is an emphatic "yes". Your operator will bill you for using WiFi.

3) Third-party providers

Go into any "Varsity" pub in the UK and you'll be in range of a WiFi hotspot. Best of all, it's absolutely free. You can use their wireless network for free while downing a pint. Great for photographing or filming your mates doing silly things with bottles and sticking it up on flickr, Facebook, YouTube or whatever before they have time to say "whoops!"...

Another place that offers free WiFi if you stay with them is "Premier Inn" hotels. Once you've checked in you are given the network's ESSID and preshared key enabling you to connect to the network.

Not all such third-party providers allow you to use their wireless network for free, though. Some will charge. If you do have to pay to use the WiFi network, you will be billed directly by the owner or, in some cases where the owner and your operator have billing agreements, by your mobile operator.

In this case, the answer is a rather evasive "maybe, it depends on the owner of the WLAN".

In conclusion

Don't be dismissive. The answer is not always "no". It can be "yes" in certain circumstances!

Spotify on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

2009-11-25T13:23:00.006Z

Yep. It works fine (thanks to Juhis for the invite)!

Spotify is a subscription-based streaming music network. I'll not go into all the details of what they offer here, you can read about that on their site: www.spotify.com, but I will add a little to their instructions on getting their application working under Linux, more specifically for the variant of Linux I've been working with for the past week or so, Ubuntu Linux 9.10, aka "Karmic Koala".

There are only versions of the Spotify application for MacOS 10.4 or later, or Microsoft Windows XP or later, but the fine folks at Spotify also point out that it will work on a Linux system using the WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) Microsoft Windows Compatibility layer. See this FAQ entry on Spotify's site.

The instructions given there are for a generic Debian setup. Ubuntu is indeed based on Debian, but there are a few things built in to it that make life easier for users.

The first thing we're going to do differently is the installation of WINE itself. It's already in the main Ubuntu repositories so its installation is no more than a few clicks away.

Go in to the "Applications" menu on your desktop and select "Ubuntu Software Centre". There will be a search box at the top-right of the application window that will appear. Type "wine" in that search box. You should see something like this (click on the image to enlarge it):

Click on "Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer" (note that there's a tick on a green background in this screenshot because WINE is already installed on my system) and then on the yellow arrow to the right. You will be prompted to click on an "install" button for the software to be pulled down and installed. After a few seconds, or maybe longer depending on the speed of your internet connection and your machine, you will be informed that the installation was successful.

Next, we need to tell WINE how to use the sound hardware. The default settings do work after a fashion, but you get far better results by asking WINE to use the old OSS (Open Sound System) method to output sound. For this, press Alt-F2. In the "Run application" box that will appear, type winecfg and hit the enter key. It'll take a few seconds for WINE to fire up and show you its setup application. Click on the "Audio" tab and select just the OSS driver as illustrated here (click on the image to enlarge it):

Click on the "Test Sound" button. You should hear something in your speakers.

Click on the "OK" button to save this setting and dismiss the window.

Next, we have to download the Spotify application itself.

Right-click on the link below and choose "Save link as...". Save it on your desktop.

http://www.spotify.com/download/spotify.exe

There will now be a Windows executable file, spotify.exe, on your desktop. You should now move it to its rightful place within the filesystem set up by WINE to mimic a Windows machine's hard disk.

Go into the "Places" menu on your desktop and select "Home folder". In order to access WINE's files we need to access a hidden directory. There are many hidden objects in your home directory so we'll simply use a trick to enter a hidden directory of which we know the name. On the left hand side of the location bar you'll see an icon that looks like a pencil. Click on it. The buttons representing where you are in the machine's filesystem are replaced with a text input box containing something like:

/home/[username]

Add "/.wine" onto the end of this so that it now reads:

/home/[username]/.wine

Press enter and click on the "pencil" icon again.

Double-click on "drive_c" to enter that folder, then on "Program Files".

Right-click in this window and select "Create folder". Name the folder "Spotify". Double-click on it to enter it.

Grab that spotify.exe file on your desktop and drop it in this newly-created folder.

You can now close the file manager window.

The last thing to do is create a shortcut on the desktop that will launch Spotify.

Right-click on the desktop and select "Create launcher..."

Put "Spotify" in the "Name" field, and enter this in the "Command" field:

wine "C:/Program Files/Spotify/spotify.exe"

See screenshot (click to enlarge):

That's it, click on OK and you're done.

Firmware availability and distribution

2009-09-30T14:14:00.001+01:00

This is an area where there's a huge amount of confusion. With any luck this article will clear a certain amount of it up.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of each model of phone. It's actually far more complicated than that with regional variants, promotional offers etc., but let's keep it simple for the moment. On the one hand, you have the phone as it was originally designed by Nokia and containing Nokia's firmware. On the other hand you have phones that are distributed not directly by Nokia or their retailers but by mobile network operators. In the latter case, the firmware installed in these phones is modified by the network operator to include their logo, links to their services and a few custom features and settings. Occasionally, network operators will also deactivate features of the original phone that they don't want you using. AT&T come straight to mind with their paid-for voice dialling service − the phone already has such a feature built in but AT&T deactivate it and make users who want it pay for their own network-based version of the same thing. Firmware that has been altered in this way is called "branded" firmware because of the operator branding to which it is subjected.

With different people involved, the release date for the firmware will be different from one variant to another. Generally speaking, the original Nokia firmware will be available for release earlier (sometimes significantly so) than branded firmware. This is because network operators have to make their alterations to the "vanilla" firmware that has already been (or is about to be) released, and then test and approve their version. Also, bear in mind that ensuring its users' phones are up to date is not the primary concern of a mobile network operator. They would much rather you bought a new phone (and renewed your contract). Users sometimes therefore have to be prepared for a long wait before their operator releases a firmware update that users of unbranded phones have long since been able to install.

Note that lifting the SIM-lock on your branded phone, ie. entering the restriction code supplied by your operator so that you can use SIM cards from competing networks, will not remove the branding. You will still have a branded phone stuffed full of, for example, T-Mobile features but you will be able to use it on O2, Vodafone or whatever.

So, as a general rule, if you have an unbranded phone you'll get firmware updates within a week or two of their release, as and when they're made available around the world. If you have a phone that you obtained through your operator then the chances are that it'll be a branded phone and you'll have to wait for your operator to approve the update before you can install it.

As with all rules, there are exceptions. Here in the UK, phones sold by the Carphone Warehouse seem to have their own product codes and, as such, are more like branded phones than generic phones. I don't know why this should be because there's no apparent branding. The only indication that something is different is the unavailability of updates because Carphone Warehouse don't bother approving them. Your only course of action here is to approach the Carphone Warehouse and ask for written permission to "debrand" your phone and have generic Nokia firmware installed. With that written permission and the phone, you go to your nearest Nokia Care Point and they'll do the necessary. Ironically, more often than not, the Carphone Warehouse is the Nokia Care Point...

Another exception that comes to mind is the USA. Phones sold over there are in fact slightly different models because of the different frequency bands used, which means that Nokia USA has to become involved, and this tends to slow things down.

The UK is another exception to the rule. UK-specific, unbranded variants of recent phones are now 2 versions behind the corresponding variants of the phones for the rest of Europe and many other parts of the world. The culprit is thought to be a third party involved with Nokia Care in the UK. Some branded variants of these phones are seeing updates before the unbranded ones, which is unacceptable since customers who paid the full price for their phones (no network subsidy) are entitled to better service than this.

Anyway....

Once the new firmware for your phone is available, there are three possible ways you can install it.

Firstly, there's the classic "Nokia Software Updater". In a nutshell, you run NSU, it pulls down the firmware for your particular model and variant of phone and flashes it into the phone's ROM via a USB cable. The software for this is only available for MS-Windows XP SP2 or later, so users of MacOS and other Unix-based operating systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are left out in the cold. As usual.

Then there's the "Firmware Over The Air" (FOTA) method, whereby your phone connects to the internet and pulls down the update itself without the need for a computer at all. FOTA is quicker and much more reliable than NSU because it only downloads what's changed in the firmware since the version currently installed in your phone instead of downloading full ROM images, and because it doesn't rely on a notoriously flaky and unpredictable operating system.

The only fly in the ointment here is the fact that firmware is almost always released via one method alone, and the mechanisms behind one are not aware of what's available with the other. So, for example, if an update has been released via FOTA and you run NSU, you will be told that no updates are available because NSU is not aware of what's being distributed over-the-air. Similarly, if an update is released via NSU and you check FOTA, you will also be told that no updates are available.

Just to make things that bit more confusing, there are also discrepancies between what the "can I update" page is telling you and what NSU actually finds.

The third way to update the firmware in your phone is to take it to a Nokia Care Point and have them do it. If the phone is still within the warranty period the update will be free of charge. This said, updates are sometimes released to the public before the Nokia Care network (they use different tools to the ones made available to the public), meaning that the Care Point won't be able to help.

The whole thing is a bit shambolic, to be honest, and needs to be unified. However, as things are, it boils down to the following:

* If you have a branded phone you're in for a long wait before you get updates. Don't hold your breath.

* If you have an unbranded phone, the availability of updates is a postcode lottery.

* Once updates are available you have to look in two different locations to find them.

* Even if you're told that an update is available you might still not be able to install it due to inconsistencies in the updates database, and Nokia's Care network may not even be able to help you because they don't have the required updates.

So, what's up with the flashing envelope?

2009-09-29T20:25:00.001+01:00

Older mobile phones would store received text messages on your SIM card rather than in their own (very limited) memory. Service messages sent to you by your mobile provider are also stored on the SIM card, even today.

Modern phones store inbound text messages in their own (significantly more capacious than their predecessors') memory or even, in some cases, on a removable memory card (miniSD or microSD most of the time). Nokia phones based on S60v3 with feature pack 2 and later (N78, N96, 5800 XpressMusic, N97 etc.) detect messages on the SIM card and, if they find any, alert the user to their presence by displaying a flashing envelope on the screen.

The only way to get rid of it is to delete the messages on the SIM card. To achieve this:

Menu > Messaging > Options > SIM messages

Select all the messages visible here:

Options > Mark/unmark > Mark all

Then delete them by pressing the "C" key for phones that have it (keypad-operated phones) or by tapping "Options" and selecting "Delete" for touchscreen-driven phones.

The messages on the SIM will be deleted and the flashing envelope will be removed.

My language has disappeared from my phone! How do I get it back?

2009-09-04T23:02:00.001+01:00

A problem frequently seen on the Nokia Support Discussion forums relates to people who have just had to reset their phones or who have just updated their firmware. Upon restarting the phone, they are faced with a problem in that their language has disappeared! Actually, the problem goes much deeper than that. The language disappearing is merely the visible part of willful deceit on the part of some rogue retailers.

Nokia phones are sold all over the world. It is unreasonable to expect them all to "speak" all the languages of the world, so, depending on which part of the world each individual batch of phones is intended for, it will have a particular set of languages installed. For example, phones sold in Western Europe have English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and sometimes Dutch languages installed. Those sold in Nokia's home country, Finland, have English, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.

I'm going to use the examples of Malaysia and Arabic language below purely in order to make writing this article easier. If you lost your Russian, Chinese, Greek, Turkish or whatever language support when you reset your phone or upgraded the firmware then substitute for Arabic where necessary. By no means am I implying that cheap phones only come from Malaysia or that only retailers in Arabic-speaking countries are deceitful.

In order to remain competitive in local markets, phones are sold at different prices in different countries. It is not uncommon, for example, for phones to be sold cheaper in Eastern Europe or in parts of the Far East. Some retailers, particularly in the Middle-East, are aware of this, so instead of ordering their stock from their local representative, they order them in bulk from, for example, Malaysia.

This presents another problem. Neither Arabic nor Farsi are official languages in Malaysia, so the phones intended for that market come only with English, Chinese and Malay (and possibly an Indonesian language or two). In that state they are not fit for sale in the country where the retailer who ordered them from Malaysia is located.

There are two potential solutions to this problem. The first is to install an Arabic language pack. This language pack is composed of fonts supporting Arabic script and right-to-left text, menu labels and other files for the localization of software.

The second solution is to reflash the phone with the firmware of a version of the same phone intended for sale locally and therefore containing that language pack as part of the firmware itself.

In both cases, the phone will have support for Arabic language after the operation and will be "fit" for sale.

I put "fit" in quotes because it's not entirely true.

There may come a time when you need to reset your phone because some software you installed just isn't playing ball and you need to get rid of it and wipe the phone clean. If the retailer from whom you bought the phone opted for the first, "language pack", solution then you're in for a nasty surprise because this operation will ERASE the language pack that was installed.

You'll still be okay, though, if your phone was reflashed with local firmware.

Let's fast-forward in time now to the day you find out that there's a firmware update. Quite sensibly, you decide to update your phone in order to benefit from the latest versions of the various applications built into it and from improvements in stability and speed, and in memory and power management.

Once again, you're in for a nasty surprise. Just like a reset, a software update will wipe out any extra language packs installed independently of the firmware. If, however, the retailer opted for the second solution and installed a local firmware variant into the phone, you'll still lose your Arabic support if you update the firmware. Why? Because the software updater will look at the phone model and pull down the original firmware variant for the phone rather than the updated version of the variant for your country. Instead of the language set you were used to, the phone will revert to its original language set (English, Chinese, Malay and Indonesian).

It's unfortunate for you but this is not a fault in your phone. It was simply not intended for sale in your country.

If anyone should take responsibility for this it's the retailer who sold you the phone. They should have told you that the phone was bought from another part of the world and modified to support your language, and warned you that a reset or a firmware update would remove your language from the phone.

The thing is, you have no warranty on your phone because of the retailer's actions. The warranty on a phone intended for sale in Malaysia is not valid in the Middle-East. Not only that, but in tampering with the phone by installing a language pack or by flashing a local firmware variant, both of which can only be done with software that is only available officially to Nokia Care Points and not to retailers or the general public, the retailer has voided any warranty that there may have been on the phone anyway. Given this, Nokia are within their rights to refuse to support the phone at all regardless of any warranty issues. They may, however, be willing to help you. It's a bit of a lottery, but some Care Points will be willing to install the missing language pack for a nominal fee. They are within their rights to charge for the service because the language missing from the phone is not a fault in the phone and is therefore not covered by the warranty, which is void anyway.

On the other hand, if ever the phone needs service of any kind, you can forget Nokia Care. Your only options are independent repairs shops, do it yourself, or bin the phone. Whichever option you choose, you're going to be out of pocket and the retailer will undoubtedly refuse to pay a penny.

While the phone may have been cheaper than if you had bought it directly from Nokia in your country or from a reputable dealer, it does come with a risk and, above all, without a warranty. It's always best to buy from Nokia directly or from a reputable dealer.

Caveat emptor!

PIN code, PUK code, security code, lock code, unlock code, restriction code...

2009-09-01T18:02:00.001+01:00

Clearly, there's alot of confusion out there as to what all these codes do, what they protect, how to get them and how to manage them. I'd like to clear that confusion up a litle bit with this article.

The first thing you have to bear in mind is that your SIM card is actually the property of your network operator. SIM stands for "Subscriber Information Module". Stored in it is information that identifies you as the user of the phone in which the SIM is installed, and which ties that phone to your mobile phone number. Proof of this is if you swap SIMs with another phone and call your number it's the other phone that will ring, and if you place a call with your phone it's the other phone's owner who will be billed!

The PIN, or "Personal Identification Number" is a 4-digit code (well, actually, some phones allow up to 8 digits but it is nearly always 4 digits), stored in encrypted form in the SIM and which protects your SIM from unauthorised use. That it is the SIM being protected can be seen if you put your SIM in another phone. You'll only be able to use that phone after you've entered your PIN.

You set the PIN yourself. When you get the SIM it contains the default PIN set up by your mobile network operator or a random code that will be printed on the paperwork. Many operators in the UK will even send you a SIM that is set not to request a PIN at all, which is a bit pointless because such a SIM that is "intercepted" and falls into the wrong hands can be used straight away by anyone to place calls, on your account. Note that a PIN is still stored in the SIM even if the latter is set not to request one, and you have to enter the correct PIN in order to have the SIM activate the PIN request upon startup.

If you enter an incorrect PIN three times in succession, the SIM will lock itself and you'll have to enter the PUK (PIN Unlock Key) in order to unlock it and use the phone. Your operator can give you the PUK for your SIM. Only your operator can do this because the SIM is what is locked, not your phone, and the SIM is the property of your network operator. There's no point asking your phone manufacturer for the PUK because they can't help you. Some operators give you the PUK straight away and print it on the paperwork. Some display the PUK in your account on their website. Some will only give it over the phone or by mail. Most will charge you for it if you phone up asking for it when you can get it yourself simply by logging into your account on their website.

If the SIM has been locked, the phone will ask you for the PUK before going any further. Once you've entered the PUK correctly you are prompted for a new PIN. If you enter the PUK incorrectly ten (I think, but don't quote me on that) times in succession, the SIM is permanently deactivated and you have to request another from your operator.

The PIN does not, however, protect your phone in the event that someone steals it and uses their own SIM in it. This is where the security code (or lock code, they both refer to the same thing) comes into play. To be honest, it's not so much the phone as the data inside it that is protected by the security code. While I'm not prepared to give out that information here, someone who knows where to look on the Internet can find out how to reset the security code on a phone. The only downside is that it will also wipe clean any data that the phone contained. A thief doesn't care about your data as much as you care about other people not seeing it so, in a sense, it functions as intended in that a phone protected by a security code will not allow anyone who doesn't know that security code to access its data.

The default security code on all Nokia phones is 12345. That piece of information is widely known so there's no harm in publishing it here. You are strongly advised to change it to something more personal as soon as you have the phone.

The security code is requested whenever you attempt to clear the phone's settings (*#7780#), call timers or data meters or if you try and reformat it with a "soft reset" (*#7370#). You can also set the phone to request the security code if the SIM is changed (the first thing a thief is going to do is throw away your SIM and put a new one in so this feature will render the phone unusable by anyone but you). You can also lock the phone directly from the menu or after a certain duration of inactivity. More recent phones have a remote lock facility which will lock the phone if you send it a predefined message in a text message. This method assumes that your SIM is still in the phone by the time you get round to sending the lock message, which is not a very safe assumption to be honest.

The security code cannot be bypassed without wiping the phone clean. If there was a way to bypass it, it would be on the Internet before you'd have time to say "oops" and would render the whole concept of this security feature totally useless. This means that you only have one option if you forget the security code of your phone: take it to a service point with proof of ownership and ask them to reset the phone. This will have the effect of resetting the security code back to its default 12345, but it will also wipe everything in the phone's memory. Proof of ownership of the phone will be required so that the service point knows that it definitely is your phone and not one that you "found" or that "belongs to a friend" (hint hint, nudge nudge, you know what I mean).

The restriction code, often called "unlock code", is used to neutralise the SIM-lock. The SIM-lock is a mechanism set up by your mobile network operator to ensure that you cannot use a SIM from a competing network in a phone supplied by yours. It's pretty pointless on contract phones if you ask me because you're still tied to your network for 12, 18 or 24 months and you have to pay your line rental regardless of whether or not you use their services or someone else's for your calls. Regardless of any justification, it's what operators do.

The key phrase here is "it's what operators do". Your operator enforced the SIM-lock and, consequently, your operator is the only organisation that can supply the restriction code to neutralise it. There's no point asking Nokia or anyone else for the restriction code, they can't supply it. As for market stalls and shops that offer to unlock your phone, it might work, it might not work, it might brick your phone. There's no telling in advance. My own choice would be to spend the £15 or so and get the restriction code from the operator and unlock the phone legitimately.

So, to recap:

PIN: protects your SIM from unauthorised use.
PUK: unlocks the SIM in the event that you enter an incorrect PIN too many times in succession. Supplied by your operator.
Security/lock code: protects the data in your phone from prying eyes. Cannot be bypassed but can be reset by a service centre, in which case all data will be lost.
Restriction/unlock code: cancels the SIM-lock and lets you use SIM cards from competing networks. Supplied by your network operator and nobody else.

Should I buy a phone SIM-free and pay the full price for it, or should I get it on the cheap with a contract?

2009-09-01T12:58:00.001+01:00

In Europe, the overwhelming majority of mobile phones in circulation are phones that were supplied to the users with a contract or pay-as-you-go SIM, up to 90% in the UK and probably similar figures elsewhere in Europe. In the Far-East, however, things are the other way round. Most people buy their phones directly from the manufacturer's outlets or from third-party retailers and get just the line and communications from the mobile network operator.

The aim of this small article is to outline the pros and cons of each method so that you can make an informed choice based on budget and on your thirst for a regular technology fix.

Initial cost:

This is about the only area where a contract phone wins hands down. Many operators will have huge flashy signs all over the place touting a "free" phone with the contract. Of course, the phone isn't free at all, you're paying for it over the duration of your contract, but you have no initial expense over the cost of your contract itself and any usage not included in your bundle. If the phone isn't "free" it is certainly at a price considerably lower than that of the SIM-free version of the phone from Nokia themselves or other retailers.

Contract cost and flexibility:

In most countries, if you take out a SIM-only contract with the operator, the monthly payments will be lower than if you took out a phone with a contract. In the UK, there's usually a £15/month or so difference.

Not only that, but you are also legally bound to stay on that contract with the operator until its expiry, which is usually 12, 18 or 24 months long. Assuming an 18-month contract that's £15/mo cheaper SIM-only, you've just saved £270 over the course of your contract, and that could pay for a pretty decent phone.

With a SIM-only subscription, you can jump ship to another operator at less than a month's notice with no penalty incurred. If you want to do so on a contract with a phone, you have to pay the full subscription up until the contract's expiry before they'll let you go.

So, in short,

Contract with phone: more expensive contract that you're locked into until its expiry 12, 18 or 24 months later.

SIM-only subscription: cheaper monthly payments that can save you enough to cover the SIM-free phone, and you can switch providers whenever you want.

Locking issues:

Most contract phones are locked to the networks that supplied them. This means that you can only use a phone locked this way with SIM cards from the operator that enforced the lock. If you want to use SIM cards from competing operators you have to obtain the restriction code from the original operator.

The policy of giving out restriction codes for locked phones varies from one operator to another. Some will give it for free once you've been with them for a certain number of months, some will make you pay for it while you're still in the contract period but will give it for free thereafter, and some will flat out refuse to give it inside the contract period.

Note that lifting the SIM-lock on a locked phone by entering the restriction code will NOT remove the network branding (see "Features and updates" below).

If you buy a SIM-free phone then that's exactly what it'll be: SIM-free. You'll be able to use SIM cards from ANY operator in it and you won't have to go through the hassle (and cost, albeit small) of getting the restriction code if you want to switch operators.

Features and updates:

Phones supplied by network operators are network-branded. This means that they alter the features of the phone to suit their marketing needs and basically turn it into a semi-functional device used to advertise to you. Features that they don't want you using are removed, their logo is plastered all over the place and links to their services are stuffed into the menus.

In some cases, they add a few features that are required to take full advantage of their subscriber services.

Given that the firmware in these phones is something based on Nokia's original firmware but subsequently modified by the network operator, any updates that the operator is planning on releasing will become available to your branded phone AFTER they've been made available to generic, SIM-free phones. You will have to wait for your network operator to modify the firmware and release it, and this can often take a very long time, if indeed the operator bothers doing it at all. You may well be left with buggy firmware while users of SIM-free phones have already updated theirs and thus eliminated the bugs. Not to mention bugs introduced by the networks themselves during the branding process.

When updating a network-branded phone, you are not "debranding" the phone, ie. turning it into a generic, SIM-free phone. You are installing a newer version that has been branded by the network operator, hence the wait for operator approval.

With a SIM-free phone, you get a phone as it was originally intended by the manufacturer and you have access to updates as soon as they are released by the manufacturer. You are no longer being told by your operator what you can do with your phone and whether you can update it (and get rid of software bugs) or not.

In conclusion:

If your only consideration is the initial cost of the phone, then by all means get one from your operator at a cut-down price. Just beware that you may end up paying more in the long run if the value of your phone SIM-free is less than the premium you're paying on your contract for the privilege of getting a phone that's been messed around with.

In all other areas, the SIM-free phone wins comprehensively. Your contract is cheaper (in most countries), you're not tied to the operator for months on end, you get a fully-featured phone without bugs added by the networks, and you get firmware bugfixes before anybody else.

Problems with caller ID

2009-09-01T12:53:00.000+01:00

Obtaining caller ID, processing it and displaying it is actually a fairly complex process involving the caller's operator, yours, your SIM and your phone's software.

If all you see when someone calls you is "Call 1" or "Private number", no actual phone number, then you're not receiving caller ID at all. This can be because the caller is in fact concealing their number (you can do this on a GSM phone by prefixing the number to dial with #31#). In this case, there's nothing you can do.

If the caller IS sending out their caller ID but you're not receiving it, then the problem lies with your network and/or with your SIM. Give your operator a call. The chances are they can remedy this with an over-the-air update of your SIM card.

If you are now receiving caller ID but your phone isn't displaying the corresponding contact's name, it's because it can't tell whose number it is. There are many possible reasons for this, the three most common being duplicate numbers, international format and operator-branded firmware. There's also a quirk in SymbianOS that can potentially come into play.

If multiple contacts have the same number in your contacts list and one of them calls you, your phone has no way of knowing which one is actually on the other end of the line and, quite sensibly, just shows the number instead of trying to "guess" who it really is. Now, most phones can store contacts both in their own memory and on the SIM card. If you have the same contact in both locations then that counts as duplicates and you'll never see that contact's name displayed. The cure for this is to use the phone's built-in search facility and to search for the number in question. If you find it more than once then you'll have to delete all but one occurrance.

Another potential cause is storing the numbers in the "wrong" format. Always store your numbers in international format. Not only does it provide a uniform platform for number detection to work from, it also makes calling your home-country contacts easier from abroad. Assuming you live in the UK as I do and your contact's mobile number is 07890123456, don't store it in your contacts as such, use the international format instead. Prefix the number with a "+" sign (obtained by pressing the "*" key twice in rapid succession on Nokia phones) and the international prefix ("44" in the case of the UK) and strip the leading zero. You end up with:

+ 44 7890123456 (don't include the spaces, they're printed here for clarity)

In many countries, the UK included, the international dialling prefix is "00", so some people think they can get away with using "00" instead of the "+" sign because they don't know how to enter the latter.

Well, they can't.

The phone won't recognise the number as being an international number because it doesn't start with a "+" and therefore won't be able to do a certain number of automatic transformations. Also, it won't work in all countries. In the USA, for example, the international prefix is "01", not "00", so if you take your phone over to the USA and try to ring someone at home, you won't get through and you might also incur roaming charges. It has to be a "+" sign.

Also bear in mind that synchronising with Outlook tends to mess up numbers. Microsoft very helpfully add spaces and a "(0)" in the number sometimes to make it easier for humans to read. It does however mean that the number is altered and therefore incorrect.

Finally, quite a few problems of this nature are down to operators messing things up when they alter the firmware in handsets that they distribute (read here for more information). In some cases it is possible to get written permission from the network operator to remove their buggy firmware and install generic Nokia firmware in its place in order to eliminate this problem (and others besides), but it's far from easy in an industry so tightly controlled by the networks. Characteristic tell-tale signs of operator ineptitude are the phone being able to display the contact's name when that contact calls you but not when they text you, or vice-versa, depending on whether you've stored the contact's number in international format or not.

There is also a bit of silly "optimisation" in SymbianOS itself, which can rear its ugly head from time to time. The operating system only compares the last 7 digits of the caller ID number it's receiving with entries in its contacts list. The probability of two people sharing the same 7 digits at the end of their phone number is one in ten million, but it has been known to happen. In this case, the phone can't distinguish between the two. So, for example, +441204123456 and +33634123456 are percieved as being the same number when they're clearly even in different countries (the UK and France). If one of those calls you or sends you a text message then the name will not be displayed because the phone doesn't know which one it is.

Caller ID in text messages is also a bit of a problem sometimes.

Assuming the phone is clear of operator-induced problems (see above), if it can't identify the contact correctly when they're calling you, it won't be able to identify them any better when they text you. So, you fix the problem, and yet the text message you received earlier still shows a number as the sender and not the contact that the phone is now able to identify correctly. Why is that?

It's because the list of messages displayed is built as and when inbound messages arrive. It is not updated every time you look at the list (think of the overhead that would be for phones with thousands of messages in the list!). The phone was not able to identify the contact at the time the message was received, so that's how it stays.

So, in short:

1) Eliminate duplicate entries, including on the SIM card.
2) Make sure all your numbers are in international format with "+" as the international dialling prefix.
3) If problems persist then it's related to operator branding.
4) SymbianOS only looks at the last 7 digits of phone numbers.
5) SMS/MMS message lists are built as and when messages are added, not in real time.

How do I stop or silence that annoying startup animation?

2009-09-01T11:18:00.001+01:00

While starting up, Nokia Series 60 smartphones show a short animation of two hands reaching out and grasping each other and play back a snippet of the "Nokia Tune" (which is actually an excerpt of the "Gran Vals" by Francesco Tárrega). This can be annoying or even embarrassing in some situations.

If you're quick enough you can make the phone skip the animation before it starts playing back the jingle.

On touch-screen phones: simply tap the screen.

On keypad phones: press any key.

Alternatively, if you're likely not to catch the animation quickly enough, then you can silence it altogether.

You need to edit the settings for your active profile (consult your manual for instructions how to do this). More specifically, you need to set "Warning tones" to "Off".

If you switch to another profile before switching off then you'll have to make sure THAT profile's warning tones are also deactivated.

While this will silence the animation, you will also lose other pieces of audio information. For example, you won't hear the beep that's emitted when the battery is fully charged or any other audio signal that accompanies an information box. Java applets will also be mute (this is most evident with games).

So, you can skip the animation if you're quick enough or you can silence it at the cost of silencing many notifications, but you can't deactivate it completely.

About this blog...

2009-09-01T09:53:00.002+01:00

Nothing pretentious here. Just a few tips and tricks as and when I come up with them.

The material here is mostly going to relate to Linux on the one hand, and to SymbianOS S60 smartphones on the other. I'll obviously tag the entries accordingly in order to facilitate searches.

This will be a permanent work in progress. If you want to be informed of new posts then feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed or ask me to add you to the e-mail notification list.

As for my background and the reasons why I think I'm qualified to do this, I've been using computers for 30 years now, since even before Microsoft existed (yes, there were computers before Microsoft!). I've used many operating systems including multiple variants of Linux, several FreeBSD versions and Solaris. I've used and programmed for most versions of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, 9x and NT, and I'm currently self-employed as a Unix systems administrator and web-based application developer, working primarily in PHP and MySQL on Unix-based systems. I am also a co-founder of a local Linux User Group in central France, where I used to live.

Aside from the world of Unix and Linux, I'm a fan of Nokia mobile phones and have used quite a few in my time. The ones I can remember are a heavily branded handset from the French operator SFR of which I don't even know the model number, a 3510i, 2650, 6280, N73, N95, N96, N97 and I own a 5800 XpressMusic right now. I also happen to be the all-time number 2 participant in the official Nokia Support Discussion forums.

I hope you find the information here useful!

Thanks in advance for reading :)