Sunday, June 22, 2008

My Nokia thinks the headset is connected even though it isn't!

My old faithful Nokia 3230 showed the first real illness today. Well, first, if you don't count the hangs and instantaneous reboots sometimes seen, because that is almost a 'feature' of Symbian OS. The other thing to discount is the slowness. The phone is notoriously slow. How slow is it? From the time you power it on, you need to wait more than a minute to make your first phone call :) On the positive side, this phone has the best build quality I have seen. It has fallen from all sorts of places without showing any signs of damage, including one incidence when it was rolling down the Savanadurga hill.

Today, the phone claimed that the wired headset, which is both the hands-free and the FM radio device, is connected to the phone, even though the alleged headset was nowhere within 10 feet distance from the phone! The phone refused to send out voice through the speaker, turned off the built-in mic, instead expecting the headphone to do these jobs. Now phone was useless without the headset.

A bit of googling led me to all sorts of suggestions, like the rebooting ritual, hard power cycling ritual, firmware upgrade ritual. None of them worked. The other possibility was liquid ingression (scary terms which just means water getting into the phone) and malfunctioning of the data port pins of the phone. Finally, I left the phone in sunshine for an hour and voila, my phone had cured itself! All it needed was some Vitamin-D :-) The rituals of debugging mobile phone problems is very similar to debugging your computer problems (especially Windows), except computers don't need a suntan.

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