Peter's Blog

Got Motorola V547 back from 'repair' but it still keeps disconnecting during calls or fails to dial with a 'call failure'. As the problem is intermittent there is little hope in convincing O2 or their repairers that the phone has a problem so we have given up and she has gone back to a Nokia 6610. No camera!

The v547 isn't totally useless: it still reminds her to take her pill every day.

Wife's Motorola V547 has been sent off for repair. It keeps giving 'call failures' or dropping calls. They tried resetting something in firmware at the O2 shop but this didn't fix the problem. Should take a week or two for them to fix it, which isn't bad as we have an old phone to put the SIM in.

My contract expires next month. The Samsung D500 is tempting me:

• MP3 player
• 88M memory (not great but ok for an hour or two's music)
• bluetooth (hate to think how long it would take to transfer 88M over bluetooth at 100kbps or so).
• 1M pixel camera with flash
• not a boring Nokia.

I'm one step further along in the Domain Name Saga, I have heard from Nominet and they have transferred my tag for bisiand.me.uk to 123-reg. I have told them to start the transfer and I am waiting for them to confirm.

Google progress is interesting (to me), petersblog.org is getting hits in it's own right for newer content, particularly regarding the v547 phone (which out of about 261,000 results, google places on the first page at number 8 ), and the crazy frog ringtone. The old content is getting odd visits but that may be through random dns successes for bisiand.me.uk.

I was getting about 100 visitors/day on bisiand.me.uk, I'm currently at 31 today (according to Statcounter) and it looks like either petersblog.org or statcounter went down a while last night as traffic dropped to zero.

My wife has had her phone for a year so down to the O2 shop for an upgrade. She fancied a change from Nokia and liked the colour of the Motorola V600 but unfortunately that is discontinued, it has been replaced by the V547 so I got her one of those. For free . It has:

• Clamshell design
• Bluetooth
• Big clear screen
• Camera: slightly better than nokia cameras (e.g. my 6610i, wife's old 7250i) don't look quite so much like they were taken through the bottom of a dirty jam jar. Still no match for a digital camera.
• MP3 ringtones! Cool, was able to download the crazy frog which has everyone in stitches.
• Good build quality
• The keyboard has a nicer feel than the Nokias which are a bit cheap and clicky.
• The UI is rather like my late lamented Sony-ericsson T68i: fiddly and annoying.
• Good predictive text: it quickly learns that you want to type 'am home' more often than 'an good'.

With the free phone I got 25% off a Jabra BT200 FreeSpeak Bluetooth Headset and a car charger for £5.

The Jabra headset Just Worked with the phone and it is indeed cool. My wife was delighted with it, she wants me to ring her whenever she goes out so she can pose with it. I set it up to voice dial and told her she can leave the phone in her handbag.

I wanted to try the headset with Skype so I tried reinstalling my existing bluetooth USB dongles:

Smart Modular Technologies

I downloaded their latest blueopal drivers and installed them. On first installation the Audio drivers and some other bits failed to install. It did manage to install an OBEX network driver and I was able to copy files to and from the phone. This is how I installed the crazy frog .mp3 file which I downloaded above. (Am I missing something? Was I supposed to pay for it?). I tried reinstalling the blueopal drivers to get headset support and was rewarded with my first every BSOD under windows XP. The setup program kept trying to reinstall, giving more BSOD's so I had to uninstall it manually by deleting files and picking the nasty bits out of the registry by hand.

MicroStar International (MSI) dongle

Luckily I had an MSI dongle as well. I downloaded the latest SP1 drivers for this (carefully avoiding the XP SP2 version that uses the new Microsoft USB stack but that not support a headset, not until MS get into the VOIP business) and installed them with no problems.

The headset gives new microphone and audio devices so I redirected everything to the headset and again it Just Worked. Skype worked ok and talking to someone in the same room you can hear a delay of about a second between them speaking and it coming through the headset. Ragarding range, the MSI dongle is supposed to have a 100m range and with the laptop downstairs the headset can receive anywhere in the house, although at the furthest reaches the sound gets a bit choppy. I won't try Skype over Wifi, my Wifi is too flaky.

Peter's vision of the future (well maybe not that visionary):

• full mp3 players in cell phones. If an iPod shuffle is the size of a stick of gum, why not make the cell phone a little bit bigger for a 500M flash memory chip?
• death of land line phones, ripped apart by mobile phones and VOIP.
• Nokia had better pull their fingers out, the V547 makes the Nokia phones look very dull.