Recently, I hit a serious issue with the phone. My phone now crashes and reboots continuously when I’m at home. Well, it eventually shuts off. The interesting bit is that I see this issue only at home. Turning 3G off does solve the problem. But where’s the fun in that? It turns out that AT&T is upgrading its network and is deploying a third WCDMA channel in certain markets. The e71 and other symbian s60 3G phones have a software bug that makes them reboot continuously in such areas.

Thats still okay, it seems to be a rarely used configuration and Nokia should probably be able to fix it soon enough right? Not so soon! I’ve found instances of people from other regions complaining about this issue since August 2009 and Nokia still does not have a software update with the fix. Here comes the kicker, the last available update for the U.S. e71 version is 200.21.118 (built 27th November 2008). Some versions seem to blessed with a more recent firmware upate though.

I do not think Nokia gets it! The days of releasing a new phone every couple of weeks is gone. Its all in the software now. A great phone like the e71 would have been far more successful with a company who understood the new realities.

PS: AT&T apparently stopped selling the e71x and other s60 in some regions.

Update – 5th May 2010

Nokia finally responded to all the 0569371 complaints and released firmware version 410.21.010 for this e71 product code yesterday. This update seems to have fixed the issue with the 3rd WCDMA channel.

Its not lack of real estate, most of them find space for elaborate sign-up forms. All I ask for is a simple one line login form which shouldn’t take more than 24×240 pixels. While we’re at it can we all agree to set tabindex=1 on the username field so that I don’t have to tab over a gazillion times?

Now, the most important feature of Google voice is call forwarding where it can ring multiple registered phones when your Google voice number is called. Here’s a bit of fun with this feature –

• From a registered phone, dial your Google voice number
• Key in your PIN, press 2 and dial your registered phone number (the same one you’re calling from)
• Say “hello” and enjoy the infinite loop, its more fun if you love hearing your own voice

With the explosion of Web 2.0 services, I find it a pain to sign on to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and the million other sites that have mushroomed. (I’m paranoid about staying signed on to sites with everyone and their brothers abusing beacons). So, on this day, the 13th of November 2008, I nominate our friendly neighbourhood do-no-evil company to implement a single sign on that I can indiscriminately blindly trust.

I don’t understand why five of the top twenty most active ASes must be Indian ISPs. For a country with 3.6% of the World’s internet users and 0.5174% of the World’s IP addresses, it does seem more than a bit unusual.

It does point to very incompetent ISPs.

[14:45:27 jaidev@~]$ host -t mx yahoogroups.com
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 10 mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 20 mta1.grp.vip.re1.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta12.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta13.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta14.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
[14:45:31 jaidev@~]$ telnet mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com 25
Trying 66.218.67.194...
Connected to mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 yahoogroups.com ESMTP
helo <censored>
250 yahoogroups.com
mail from: <censored>
250 ok
rcpt to: <censored>@yahoogroups.com
250 ok
data
354 go ahead
Subject: Photos
.
554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1)
quit
221 yahoogroups.com
Connection closed by foreign host.


Yahoogroups just refuses to accept emails with a subject line containing just Photos. Wow, my spamassassin setup is better than that.

Someone brought this to my attention recently. I don’t care much for attribution, but he’s stripped the original copyright message and even attached his own terms. I’m officially peeved.

Update: And now, another!

How would you deal with a GPL violation?

I didn’t want to flash the phone, so I figured out a simpler way of recovering the code off the phone. This may or may not work with other phones and may or may not hose it. Here goes (windoze based) –

• Install Nemesis Service Suite (NSS).
• Connect the phone through a USB cable, choose pc-suite mode on the phone.
• In NSS, go to the Phone Info section and the Permanent Memory tab.
• Read the permanent memory into a file.
• Open this file in a text-editor, it is organised in numbered sections. Locate section [308] and the line starting with 5= within this section.
• The 5 ASCII values (in hexadecimal) following 5= should be the security code. For instance, if the code was 12345, the line would be 5=3132333435 …

For older Nokia phones, just use this master security code generator.

Coming back to privacy, I talk of Google but its true of anyone. Even if someone doesn’t use private data right now, there’ll always be an evil project manager who’ll wonder why they never thought of using it – its an obvious gold mine. The amount of data someone can collect about you with just a cookie (and an IP Address) is freaky! Just look at the cookies stored by your browser (beyond the necessary authentication cookies) to know how many companies love to collect data!

A couple of months ago, when apple announced its iphone, I happened to read about a relatively young project to free up the mobile phone, albeit in the form of an incomplete comparison between two phones which weren’t available yet. While the iphone was cool and exciting and apple could be relied upon to come up with a tightly integrated phone with a classy user interface, the restrictions on third party applications and the closed nature meant that you couldn’t conjure up your own apps and scripts. The vendor specific enhanced features was also a big turn off. The notion of an open smart phone was extremely exciting.

Recently, I attended a presentation on OpenMoko (Open Mobile Kommunikations), the project to create a completely open mobile phone platform. Sean Moss-Pultz, the project lead spoke on the motivation behind the project and the business model while Harald Welte went into technical details and gave a demo. It was most informative. An open phone means a lot more than just open source and free upgrades.

Phones have always been a very restrictive platform. The margins being wafer thin, a manufacturer needs to sell millions of units to be profitable. Its in their interests to encourage phone upgrades. One important motivation behind OpenMoko was to reduce the rate at which phones are rendered obsolete. According to Sean, hardware undergoes fewer changes than software so traditionally one ended up upgrading a phone where a software upgrade would suffice.

Of course, FIC has plans to benefit from OpenMoko. Sean mentioned that a major part of the manufacturing cost was software licenses, hence they benefit from free software. FIC also has a few companies interested in innovative uses for OpenMoko based devices. Carriers too would benefit from an increase in ARPU due to increased data usage, reduction in SAC and churn and the possibility of offering value added services such as data backup, etc.

The phone itself follows a simple philosophy, build a phone with great hardware and basic software (dialer, contacts, SMS, browser, drivers for bluetooth, wifi, gps and gsm, etc.). OpenMoko would have a apt like package manager system which would help users install additional applications for their tastes. Applications themselves could be either OpenMoko certified or community driven as in any desktop linux distribution operating system. Thats not all, an open phone allows unlimited flexibility that we’ve been trained to think impossible. For example, when a wifi or bluetooth network is available one could switch to (cheaper) VOIP calls and IM instead of SMS.

For a power user of course, the phone throws up endless possibilities. Some of them are so simple, yet would change the way you look at phones –

• GPS aware profiles – automatically switch phone profiles based on location
• ACLs, any number not in contacts can be made to pass through a set of access control rules before the call is accepted
• Phone Tracking

More interesting ideas are here and elsewhere in the wiki. The first OpenMoko phone Neo1973 is coming real soon! The only question is to see if one should wait for the phase 2 device (which has a faster CPU and wifi) or if FIC comes up with an interesting upgrade deal.