Random Chaos

Mobile CPR - S55 back from the dead

Whoever it was that sent me an SMS in the early hours of today, don't ever send that message again! And for good measure don't let me ever find out who it was.

And for the rest of you if you happen to know this person whom people politely refer to as "Richard", don't let him handle your mobile phone... EVER!

I spent the better part of today restarting my Siemens S55 more times than I've probably done in the past 2 years that I've owned the phone. Took me until around noon to realise that the phone was crashing while trying to load the SMS archive.

And thanks to Richard, I've had my "phonecode" locked for the past year and a half and so couldn't format the filesystem either. Luckily I had the service menu enabled on my phone so I was able to see the "hidden" SMS archive but it wouldn't let me delete it.

Considering the cause for all this was Richard, I got him to call the Siemens service centre for me and try and get the de-activation code but they wouldn't do it without physically having the phone.

Charging Rs.400-500 for giving a longish numeric code that resets your password is plain dumb. Couldn't they just give that code along with the phone when you buy it ? Just like some operators give you the PUK codes along with your SIM card. I wonder if the fee is something that is charged in India alone or whether Siemens charges it worldwide, none of the other references I found on the net said anything about them being charged for the reset code.

Anyways since I won't be anywhere near a Siemens service centre for a while, I decided to poke around some more, and delete as many files on the phone as I could. And I found that I could rename the SMS.dat file! It still wouldn't allow me to delete the renamed file. But a reboot fixed that And there was a new SMS.dat file and the old file was deletable.

And there have been no crashes since late afternoon, and I've been using it for nearly 6 hours without a break! And for the first time since I got the phone I have over 650kb free on my <1MB file system!

I hope the phone lasts a couple of more months so that I can pick up either the S75 or S65 at a reduced rate.