So my phone (a Nokia E62) has been flaky for several months. It started with a couple applications crashing when they tried to update preferences. It progressed to occasional crashes and hangs. Then it started spontaneously turning itself off, even when it was locked and had a full charge. Then it spontaneously put itself into meeting mode (vibrate, but no ring or beep.) Then it started hanging on startup four times out of five, so I had to pull the battery several times before it would eventually respond. (This was very annoying when I was trying to tell plumtreeblossom where I was before Pride.)

I did try doing a factory reset (which is supposed to erase all data) and it claimed to succeed, but didn’t. Neither did it fix the problem nor did it erase any of my apps. I kind of suspect that what’s going on is that there are bad blocks on the phone’s flash memory, and somehow that’s making some things read-only.

So, the short of it is that you shouldn’t rely on me seeing voicemail or text messages in anything like a timely fashion, or being able to tell when you’re calling. It does still vibrate, but I often don’t notice that if I’m driving or on the T, and never notice it if the phone isn’t actually on me at the time.)

Boo.

I have my old phone which I got back from cathijosephine when she bought a new phone, but I can’t find the charger for it (I know I have one; just can’t find it) or the data cable (don’t know whether I kept it or not), and since the main thing I use my phone for is internet access from the T, which requires the data cable, I’m going to keep limping along with my current phone until I can find or replace the data cable for my spare phone.

What I really want is the announced but not yet released Nokia E71, but I don’t know pricing and I don’t know when it’s going to be available in the US, so I may need to just replace my current phone.

(As a side note, I will be so happy in a couple years when my phone runs Linux and I can just sftp or rsync all my data off it. As it is, I haven’t found a way to get my text messages off the phone, so I’m probably going to lose all my LOLspeak lovenotes from plumtreeblossom when I switch phones.)