tenthofjune

I’ve recently seen a bug with text messaging that could cause trouble for someone or even be used for fraudulent purposes.

A colleague (on Orange) sent a picture message to myself (on Vodafone) and another colleague (on O2). He sent it as one message with two recipients rather than two separate messages. Nothing wrong there.

In later conversation, the first colleague mentioned what I had said in reply to his picture. What reply? I asked. He then showed me a message on his Nokia 6310 that clearly appeared to have come from my number. I had not sent this message and I could prove it by showing him my itemised bill on the Vodafone website. Looking at the style of the message it looked like it had come from the second recipient which it turned out was the case.

Despite having a Nokia smartphone, this second recipient on O2 has a corporate restriction on receiving picture messages directly on the phone and instead receives a message telling him to visit the O2 website to view the picture. When he did this he sent a reply via this O2 website. Because I had been the first recipient on the original message, the O2 website falsely inserted my number as the sender.

Fortunately, our relationship is good enough to realise who had really sent the message but depending on the content of the message this could easily have caused an argument or bad feeling. This could also be used for fraudulent purposes?

How is it possible for O2 to spoof the sender details?

I get so many search engine hits on my Nokia 6300 post where the search string is “How do I open the USB cover on Nokia 6300” that I thought I’d knock up a quick post on this.

To be perfectly honest, I’m quite curious as to why people are asking this in the first place. It’s not that difficult and if you’re not sure, I’m sure it’s in the manual. Anyway, if you’re still struggling read on…

The USB socket is located on the bottom of the phone. To open the cover there is a slot to the left of the cover.

Insert your fingernail… (if you’ve got no nails or you’re a girly with nails you don’t want to break, a small flat bladed screwdriver is just as good)

and flick it towards you. The cover hinges down.

The cover is now open.

Having changed from a Sony Ericsson k750i to a Nokia 6300, I was amazed that the Nokia did not support the wholesale copying of my phonebook by Bluetooth, so I had to find another way round. This was to set up a temporary account on my Mac and use iSync to synchronise the two bluetooth phones. (It also has the benefit of making a backup copy of my phonebook on the Mac).

Unfortunately, the Nokia 6300 is too new to be listed as supported by iSync, but Koos Kaspers has a post on how to modify the iSync files to include it in the list of supported phones. This worked a treat, and my phonebook was copied over in no time at all.

If you are looking for information on opening the USB cover, see this post.

My Sony Ericsson k750i started playing up recently: locking up requiring a battery removal to reset, but then continuously vibrating on switch on, or going very slow, not responding to key presses, so I decided it was time for a change.

The question was, “what to?”. I had always stuck with Ericsson phones (starting with the analogue EH237, then on digital: GH388, I888, R320, T39m, T68i, T630 and lastly the K750i) because the menu system always made sense compared to Nokia, and prior to Sony getting involved, Ericsson had always made the serious phones with useful features, whereas Nokia had gone the route of appealing to those more interested in silly ringtones and swappable covers. Some Nokias didn’t even have a normal telephone ringtone.

Unfortunately, Sony appears to be trying to turn all the phones into Walkman clones, and the last three (T68i, T630 and k750i) have all exhibited the common Sony Ericsson joystick failure problems, so I decided to give Nokia a try and chose the Nokia 6300.

A Glaring Omission

First thing to do on receipt of the new phone was to transfer my phone book from the old phone. Here I hit a snag. Ever since my first bluetooth phone (T39m), I have been able to ‘send all contacts’ via bluetooth to the new phone. Unfortunately, Nokia phones don’t seem to support this. Sending a single contact at a time works, but not the whole phone book. I was not prepared to sit and transfer one contact at a time and copying to the SIM was not an option, as this truncates the names, so I would have to spend time correcting all the contacts. I did find a way round this using my Apple Mac, but I shouldn’t have had to resort to that.

This is a glaring omission on a modern bluetooth enabled phone.

Buried Memory

I had realised that I would have to change from the Memory Stick Duo in the k750i to a MicroSD card, but was at first stumped when I came to look for the slot. Whereas the k750i has a rubber cover for the memory card, the slot on the 6300 is buried away and you have to remove the back cover to get to the memory card slot. This is not some ‘fit and forget’ item like the SIM card. If you are using the phone’s camera on a day-to-day basis, you need to be able to remove the card easily.

Speaking of the camera, it is a shame there is no lens cover to protect it, nor is there a light or macro mode.

The phone does has a mini-USB port on the bottom, (good, so you don’t have to buy a special Nokia lead) so it is actually possible to connect the phone to a computer and access the memory card directly, effectively using the phone as a card reader, but I shouldn’t have to carry an extra lead.

There is also a missed opportunity here. If you’ve provided a USB connection, why not charge the phone using it?

Use with Tom Tom

I was pleasantly surprised that the Nokia paired up very quickly with my Tom Tom GO 500 and the wireless data side also works, whereas my k750i refused to pair up at all under current Tom Tom firmware (6.x) requiring to pair under 5.42 and then upgrade the Tom Tom. Also the k750i wireless data never worked and had to be disabled. Considering that Ericsson developed the Bluetooth standard, it is rather odd to see another manufacturer’s phone working better than an Ericsson phone. Plus point for Nokia.

However, it then goes and falls flat on its face for two reasons:

• incoming SMS messages do not show on the Tom Tom. Minus 3 for Nokia.
• Importing the phonebook to the TomTom only brings in one phone number per contact. Nokia was late in the day introducing multiple numbers per contact and it would appear that they still don’t have it properly implemented.

Minor niggles

The following are minor niggles, but show that a little more thought would have gone a long way.

Changing the wallpaper to a colour similar to the menu text makes the menu text invisible. Not very clever! There is no warning about this. Note this is using the supplied Nokia wallpaper, so someone obviously forgot to check this. The k750i would automatically swap the text to a contrasting colour.

Pressing the green ‘call’ button brings up a list of recent contacts, both incoming and outgoing. The icons for in and out are very similar and difficult to distinguish. More importantly, there is no indication against the contact’s name whether the call was home, mobile or work. For this you have to go into details, check, then come back out to make the call. Again, on the k750i, an icon appeared against each entry. You can switch icons on for the main names list, but this does not affect the recent caller list.

There is no tone or message when you get a receipt for a text message (Sorry, Delivery Report in Nokia-speak). You need to open each message in your sent items list and check the message details and scroll down to delivery status – very long winded. On Ericsson, apart from getting a tone and message, each sent item has a tick next to it if a delivery report has been received.

This next one make me think that Nokia just haven’t thought the interface through. Let’s say I have a contact ‘John Smith’ which currently contains only his landline number. He sends me a text with his new shiny mobile number. On my Sony Ericsson, I would simply open the text, select ‘options-save number’, then select existing contact and tell it what type of number (home/work/mobile/other) it was. It would then add the new number to the existing contact. Simple. Not so on Nokia. True enough, there is an ‘option-save number’, but it does not allow you to save it to an existing contact. Never mind, I thought, enter the same name and it will ask if you want to add the number to the existing contact (in much the same way as MS Outlook does). No. Instead I get “contact exists, do you want to replace it?” “No I **** don’t you stupid phone”. In the end, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and manually edited the existing contact. I think it boils down to the fact that Ericsson’s phonebooks have been able to hold multiple numbers against a single name for a lot longer than Nokia’s have, and Nokia hasn’t got the hang of it yet.

Overall

Overall, the screen is very good and the in-call sound quality is comparable to a landline.

I’m still getting used to using unlock-* rather than *-unlock, and the different keys for space, and upper/lower case, but that’s to be expected.