I took it to the service centre, it was another month away from the expiry of the 1 year warranty period, the service centre people shocked me by saying that the warranty is already expired. Luckily I had my original bills (with the purchase date partially clear) which helped me get the service done on warranty. As usual they just reinstalled the phone software and gave, but mentioned that I need to scan my external memory for visruses, which might be the cause of frequent restarts.

I scanned my memory card from PC, nothing was found. Then I decided to format my external memory to boost up my phone.
Now the question – How can I format my Nokia 5800 phone’s external memory? I began crawling Google’s SERPs for the answer to my question – as usual it wasn’t so easy to find what I want – and hence this post, just to add more workload for Google crawler and Google’s search algo to rate my page high for searches related to this..

Here is the way to format Nokia 5800′s external memory

If you Google, you migt find solutions like soft reset which is by typing in *#7370# or holding RED+GREEN+CAMERA while starting. Remember, these WILL NOT FORMAT your external memory. I too tried all these before getting into the actual solution.

Now, here is the way to format your Nokia 5800 tube’s external memory.

Navigate to Applications > File Manager > External Memory Card > Memory Card Options > Format

Remember the above formatting method completely erases the contents on your external memory, it is needless to mention that you should have a backup of your important images and messages.

I happen to be one of the Nokia 5800 users, who face countless issues from this phone, but try to post my issues and possible solutions. Follow my instructions at your own risk. Feel free to post your experiences.

After a long gap, I wrote few lines of PHP code – a simpleXML parser to parse this xml file and list down the different mobile OS’es in it. I am posting what I got out of it.

I am just wondering, is this list complete? Have I missed some other?

I have a Nokia 5800 too which I have successfully connected to PC and browsed using Aircel Pocket internet.Get Aircel Pocket Internet active on your mobile. Once you subscribe, you will receive settings to use it which need to be saved on the mobile phone. On SE K750i, you can see these profiles under Settings > Connectivity > Internet Settings , you may see a number of profiles listed along with “pocket internet” itself. “Pocket Internet” is the profile used to connect to internet and browse on PC / Laptop. Find at what position, “Pocket Internet” profile is listed on the above said section, if its at serial number 1, it is 1. This position is used in the dial up number configured on the PC / laptop.

Connect your mobile phone to PC / Laptop. As said earlier, use USB cable or use bluetooth and make sure it is connected.

Create a new dial up connection (Go to control panel, network and internet connection > Network connections and choose create a new connection). Name it as “Aircel” or something (name isn’t very much dependant).
Choose to set up the connection manually and choose dial up modem. For the dial up modem, keep username and password as blank and the number to dial is *99***1# (if pocket internet is your first profile – see explanation above), or *99***2# if pocket internet is listed as the second profile and so on. Create connection and dial the connection, you should see a status bar indicating that connection is established on successful connection.

Now open your web browser (say IE), go to Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN settings and enter the proxy details as 192.168.35.201 and port 8081 , use this proxy for other protocols too.

Now open any page say http://www.google.com/ the page should load if you have followed the instructions as stated above.

The procedure will be almost similar on other mobile phones too, one need to identify the internet profiles listed on the phone, identify the position of the “pocket Internet” settings, create the dial up number accordingly, use the proxy on the browser. It should work on any mobile phone which allows connection to PC / laptop.

Post your queries !

Today I did give another try to test the speed of Aircel Pocket Internet, surprisingly it gave speeds ranging from 47 kbps to 100kbps !!

http://speedtest.net didn’t open as I mentioned earlier, but I was able to check the speed with http://2wire.com .

So, the conclusion is for 98 Rs, Aircel Pocket Internet isn’t a bad option to be used as a backup internet or for light weight browsing / checking mails etc.

I connected my SE K750i to PC over bluetooth, dialled *99***3# (since Airtel Pocket Internet is the third profile on phone) , used a proxy address – 192.168.35.201 with port 8081 , I browsed few web pages to see the performance.

I have used Tata Indicom’s 64 kbps internet connection (worth over 400 Rs per month) , compared to that 98 Rs is a very much better option.

I can recommend this connection to students, job seekers etc who can browse unlimited but not for downloading any huge files. I tried downloading a 10 MB file, which took close to 25 minutes, isn’t very bad either.

Share your experiences as comments.

(This blog post is written using the Pocket Internet Connection from Aircel !)

I searched Ebay.com for a good deal for SE K750i housing and bought one for about 8.95 USD from Hong Kong .

Next, no shop was ready to replace the housing with the one provided by me, because they weren’t getting the marging like what was quoted by them, so I decided to it my selves. This wasn’t so tough, thanks to a couple of YouTube videos!

I followed those videos and changed the housing myself! The operation was successful and the patient still alive. Following are some snaps from the entire process!

If you are looking for information on setting up Aircel Pocket Internet on PC / Laptop, then read my post explaining it by following the link.

This was my first trial on Aircel Pocket Internet. Read my speed review part 2 here.

I was using Airtel Online / NOP for quite a while until recently Airtel pulled these back. I know the reason behind Airtel’s move to withdraw Airtel Online / NOP – there has been a number of hacks and tricks around through which one can use Airtel Online / NOP on pc, even though they aren’t for pc and to be used only on mobile and comes with a nominal charge of 99 Rs for unlimited mobile browsing for a month on the postpaid plan.

Quite dejected, I decided to test the Aircel’s Pocket Internet. Power cuts for two hours – one each in morning and evening, I decided to spend my time walking during power cut.

I walked to Thippasandra market in Bangalore, which is quite near to my home, and went into at least 4 mobile recharge stores for Aircel’s Pocket Internet. All had the poster mentioning about Aircel’s Pocket Internet cards worth Rs 14 and 98, but when I asked “Aircel Pocket Internet card iddaya?” (Do you have Aircel’s Pocket Internet card, all of them told “NO”! Well, everyone had the poster of this ad posted on the Wall !! Its quite a shame that Aircel people aren’t educating these people about new offers, schemes and something like this when they provide such ads to be pasted on their shops!

I ended up in front of a small shop where they sell the DTH services and they looked to be selling the mobile phone SIMs and recharge coupons too. Seeing the same sticker again, I repeated the same question to get the same answer ! But this time my question was noticed by a man standing in front of the shop – he must be the actual owner of the shop and I asked my question to the boy standing inside the shop. This person asked me what I am looking for.. I pointed at the same ad which was on the wall – I am looking for this. He asked the boy, do you know what is this – The boy said ‘NO’. He shouted at the boy, we are the distributor and you don’t know what is this, how others will know then? I told I have visited 4 shops prior to this.. The person made a quick phone call to some Aircel office and confirmed that we can do an easy recharge to get the plans activated. I was happy, at last I can get Aircel to test the Pocket Internet!

I took the SIM, got a life time recharge done for 49 Rs and activated Pocket Internet with another recharge of 98 Rs.

Now the real review of Pocket Internet

On my Sony Ericsson K750i, I could open the mobile friendly pages without any issue, but the GMail for Mobile didn’t fetch my emails. So I would say, on mobile phone this connection works fairly okay for light web browsing. I tried downloading mini fring of 575 KB, this is where I felt the connection lacks ! It took at least 20 minutes for me for the 575KB download with many network errors and resuming download.

I connected mobile to my PC to test the speed and run a speed test using http://speedtest.net . For the dial up settings for Aircel Pocket Internet on PC/Laptop, one may use *99***1# if Pocket Internet is the first internet profile in the phone, with user name and password empty. iGoogle took close to 90 seconds to load, I tried opening up GMail.com which opened up in about 30 seconds, but subsequently it showed ‘Internet Connection Lost’ message on top of the GMail page.

SpeedTest.net page didn’t load completely for continous attempts for an hour! Finally I decided to load the SpeedTest.net page components using my broadband and then do a refresh to test using Pocket Internet. The initial latency check on SpeedTest.net showed something close to 5800 ms and gave an error after wards, I couldn’t continue the Speed test at all.

Whichever is cheap isn’t always the best – This holds true in this case as well. For 98 Rs one can browse at home, cheap, but mind what you can do in 5 minutes on Broadband, needs an hour or more on Pocket Internet. Are you ready for it? By the way if you are too much dependant on a cyber cafe which uses age old machines and have many viruses in it, safeguarding your email credentials can be achieved with use of Pocket Internet connected to your own PC / Laptop – I am not seeing any reliability score for this connection.

Airtel, why did you stop the 99 Rs Airtel Online? It was much better than this so called ‘Pocket Internet’ !

]]> http://www.ramkumarkr.com/aircel-pocket-internet-review.html/feed 4 http://www.ramkumarkr.com/facebook-for-nokia-available-at-ovi-store.html http://www.ramkumarkr.com/facebook-for-nokia-available-at-ovi-store.html#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:54:44 +0000 Ramkumar K R http://www.webreviewer.info/facebook-from-nokia-available-at-ovi-store/ I did try Facebook for Nokia app from OVI store on my Nokia 5800.
Well, if you haven’t been to OVI store yet, open http://www.ovi.com and sign up for an account. OVI store hosts applications for your Nokia phone – both free as well as paid.
Coming back to Facebook for Nokia, if you are a Nokia 5800 user, you might have already seen a facebook widget under your internet and browser section. This is not a standalone application, but a link to the facebook mobile site. What I mentioning here – Facebook for Nokia is a full fledged standalone application through which you can even upload a new snap taken using your phone camera.
Once you sign up at the OVI store, you can download an OVI application onto your mobile phone to browse OVI store, and install application straightaway.
I did download OVI app and installed facebook for nokia on my Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic. The application looks really cool, why dont you try it as well?

This application is a beta release from Google (version 1.0) which allows you to access your scrapbook, make status updates and upload a photo from your phone camera. Main feature is the last one, you can use your phone’s built in camera to capture an image and upload into your Orkut account ! This feature isn’t available in the WAP version of Orkut which can be accessed on mobile. Another feature is the offline mode, even without internet connection, you can view scraps, friends’ photo album etc which you have already downloaded on to the application.

If your phone supports Java, you could try this app by pointing your phone’s default browser to http://m.google.com/orkut where you can follow the install link.

Those who do not have the java enabled phone (which is a rare chance now, but still few of you may be using those) you can still access Orkut through the mobile friendly Orkut site on the same link as above.

Have fun, post your feedback on using Orkut app on Nokia 5800 or any other phone and discuss it here !

I realized its hard to maintain a touch screen like what Nokia 5800 has and prevent it from scratches. My phone developed scratches.. I ordered a set of scratch guards from dcmugen store in ebay to protect my Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phone from further scratches.

I got my earpieces fixed (replaced) and everything looked to be fine, but it was beginning of another set of issues. I updated my firmware to version 20 from 11. That was around the time I fixed my defective earpieces at Nokia care. Now what happened, the display used to get blank at times while in use and I have to switch off and on my key guard switch to get the display back. This too I didn’t realize as a big issue, but another issue was the menu colour in my Nokia 5800 used to change while in use for 3-5 seconds and used to get back to normal. This was an irritating thing on a phone I bought paying a very high price.

My phone was about 2 months old then, I waited for the version 21 update to see whether it fixes the problem, but it didn’t. I tried all other things I could do like doing a soft reset and formatting the C drive of phone.

This is when I concluded that my phone has a hardware issue, and not a software issue. I decided to take it Nokia care again. It was 10 days back. The next day I got a call from Nokia Care to come and collect my phone. I went there, but withing my initial 10 minute inspection, I found a blank screen again and the phone was again taken back for servicing. I waited further, but yesterday they confirmed that I am getting a replacement handset in the place of the defective one.

They didnt provide me a sealed box, instead a new one with my old battery in it. I am writing this review after using it for a day and I feel more relieved for now.
Thanks again to Nokia Care, but Nokia should have taken more care while releasing their first ever touch screen phone which incidentally happened to be my first Nokia phone

My adice to fellow Nokia 5800 users

• Within warranty, do not try to experiment with your phone. There are many tricks around for repairing the issues such as varying valumes in earpieces. You do it yourself, you are breaking the warranty. Nokia will not answer your questions for free afterwards.
• As far as possible try to go to a main Nokia Care centre with a phone which is within warranty, they would have got better experience with this set than a guy sitting in a shop at the corner of your road.
• Try to use a scratch guard for your phone if you are concerned about keeping the screen scratch less.

My phone is a little over two months old and was a victim of the known Nokia 5800 earpiece speaker volume issue, and it had the display problem as well.

I updated firmware to version 20 from version 11 the day prior to getting it repaired for the speaker issue. The display issue came into attention since then. While in use the menu colour changes to violet, yellow pink etc for a duration of 3-4 seconds and gets back to normal. Also the screen goes blank in between, I need to switch off and on the screen guard to get the display work again.

After doing some research on Nokia discussion forums, other mobile phone discussion forums, I concluded that few Nokia 5800 users face similar issues as mine with the display.

My initial assumption was that it could be a software related issue, I waited for the version 21 upgrade and did it few days back. This didn’t solve my issue. I did a phone reset using *#7370# which formats the phone memory, which again did nothing to solve the issue. This made me conclude that there could be something serious issue with the hardware. Two of my friends own Nokia 5800 and they never had something like this.

I took the mobile to Nokia Care today, the guy over there told me that it need to be checked and if needed might need to be sent to the main office for repair and detailed check. He also mentioned that if it cannot be repaired, I will be given a replacement piece, which is a good news for me now. Thanks to Nokia Care again, but so sad, my first experience with Nokia mobile phones isn’t that great due to this faulty Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic

I pulled out my old Philips Xenium 9@9++ to be used meanwhile for the sake of making and receiving calls.
Waiting for them to check my 5800 tube and give me the results..