[Warning: This post is slightly geeky.]
I have to clean up and transfer all my mobile phone contacts from my old to my new phone before I move to a new provider tomorrow—thereby saving about two-thirds on my mobile bill. For Friends of the Geek (and clients) reading this, my mobile number will remain unchanged, but I might disappear off the grid for few hours.
Unfortunately, I keep a slightly different address book on my mobile from the one I keep on my Palm Pilot and on my PC so this isn’t a straightforward job. One thing that’s making this worse is my installing Nokia PC Suite software. It’s not the software itself that’s the problem. (According to various online forums it’s no longer as difficult to remove from your PC as it used to be and there’s even a tool to help if you have problems.) It’s that the freshly installed program tries to update itself as soon as it finds an active connection to the Net. If you let it do this then it immediately sets up a conflict that blocks communication with any Nokia mobile you connect. When you plug in your phone and follow the instructions your only reward will be the sight of the Windows hourglass flipping endlessly. Many innocent souls have suffered.
If you are about to install Nokia PC Suite from the CD that came with your phone, don’t. (Normally I never use an install CD if the same software can also be downloaded, but I forgot in this case.) Download the latest version directly from the Nokia Website.
If you didn’t do this and have stumbled on this post via a search engine, having struggled to get your computer to talk to your phone, then follow these instructions [scroll down to “Professor” miksu] from the Nokia forum exactly. You must remove all three packages, especially the “PC connectivity” software, cleanly before you proceed to reinstall. After that everything should work fine.
Well, it worked fine for me anyway.
Now I’ve got to do some address book pruning.
I feel deprived – I’ve never had a problem with it since installing.
I got stiffed into buying a white-label cable to do the actual connection and after that nothing worked at all. Haven’t dared reinstall onto new laptop…
I bought a white-label cable too, and did wonder at first if my problems were a deserved punishment for paying 97p to a Jersey-based outfit called “Cheeky Croc” for said connector, but they weren’t, so I thoroughly recommend them. They deliver promptly and the Nokia-branded product costs ten times as much.
I upgraded my nokia last month (from the 6320i to the 6322 -excellent phone by the way) and went from having a flawlessly working PC Suite to spending 40 minutes on the phone with customer support. I would get to a certain point in the installation and the next button would be greyed out. Over and over and over again. I was advised to a) not connect the cable to a hub but directly to the USB port on the PC b) to do this before beginning the installation process c) to download the software directly from the site instead of using the CD. Then it worked.
I could now spend the next two hours informing you of the Nazi regime operated by Carphone Warehouse and how I risked my life walking over the Alps into the safety of neutral 02, but I only write for money.
I have always been gadget-crazed, but mobiles arouse primitive suspicions in me. Mine is a completely witless Nokia with green letters or a green screen. All you can do with it is, well, telephone someone, or play minesweeper. My friend K has a spiffy all-singing all-dancing Nokia but it’s useless phonewise because it’s contracted a virus. Promiscuous technology extracts a price.
I will not let this thoughtless slur go unanswered!
The true geek follows the Way Of UNIX: (s)he uses one specialized tool for each task.
“Convergence”? Pah! No true geek would buy one of those little portable TVs with a VHS deck built-in. No true geek would buy a “Microsoft Media Center” PC. No true geek would own a “music centre”.
I buy an MP3 player to play MP3s. I buy a Palm Pilot to pilot my palm. I buy a mobile phone to phone people. My Palm Pilot is large enough and smart enough to be useful; my mobile phone is small enough and cheap enough for me to put it in my jeans back pocket without worrying about it. A “converged” device would, literally, be a pain in the arse.
I even use a fountain pen—though mine is a bit cheaper than Oliver Kamm’s.
Okay, you’re a geek — the UNIX gets you that. But: UNIX might be better than everything else, but how functional does is REALLY make you? Take me. I think Microsoft platforms and software suck. They are broken and ugly in every way. But I’m in business and I like to get things done, and being in the MS boat is the only way, so I’m all MS all the time (and I use a lot of technology in my business and in my work). If I got idealistic about software and platforms, my family would be starving. But why anyone would want three or four different devices to lug around, and have to constantly manage and transfer various and differing address books, and stick things in cradles or line up IR ports to synch them, or, worse yet, not synch them at all, and not have one’s e-mail with one whenever one wishes, is beyond me. My phone makes calls as well and as easily as the best of them, it is as good a pda as any of the stylus-driven Palm Pilots I used to have (actually a far better one because my Contacts, Calendar and e-mail are always automatically up-to-date at every point in time without my needing to do anything so primitive as “synch my device”) and considerably smarter, too, and if I were the sort to listen to music with earphones when I’m out and about, then it would be a satisfactory mp3 player I am sure. Even if there were a pure phone that worked better as a phone, or a pda that worked better as a pda, I cannot imagine the superiority would be great enough to make up for the pain of juggling all that hardware. It’s a little more expensive than most phones but it’s a business expense — and as a man in business for himself, you can do the same. You really should try it — you’ll never go back.
Hey PG, this is just a note to thank you for the advice about the network access, which helped end a rather frustrating evening with PC Suite hanging. That’s a very irritating non-feature, with no documentation anywhere.
You’re welcome.
thanks mate. altho it would help if the nokia site wasnt down at the moment. i am frustrated.
[…] paid me to write this, but, following the popularity of my previous Nokia post, I thought some more random visitors might be interested. I’ll make the same recommendation […]