Configure your Unlocked Nokia on AT&T

A while back I documented my year of cell phone drama concerning the iPhone and Samsung Epix, and how I eventually landed on the Nokia 3600 Slide, which I bought directly from Nokia. I maintain that the Nokia 3600 Slide is the absolute best buy for $160. For those on a service like T-Mobile, which supports many Nokia phones, getting a 3600s or other Nokia product is a matter of plug and play. For thus of us suffering on AT&T, however, the situation is different.

Before I get into this, I want to say that I remain glad I bought this phone directly from Nokia and not AT&T, as my previous phones were purchased. When I had a problem with the phone (some dropping may have been involved…), Nokia gladly repaired it under warranty with a fast and easy process. My disappointment was that I would be receiving a refurbished phone so soon after buying a brand-new one. But I was wrong. Not only does Nokia have an excellent warranty service that allows you to register and track right through their website, but the replacement I received was a brand-new phone. AT&T had always replaced with a refurb.

Back to the task at hand: setting up your phone. Plugging my SIM card into my new cell phone gave it instant access to calling and basic text message, but when it tried to download the MMS and Internet settings, it failed. I quickly marched over to the AT&T store, figuring one of their little minions could type a few keys into it and make it work. AH, but that would be too simple for AT&T. Instead, I was told that if I don’t buy the phone directly from AT&T, it won’t have the proper software installed, and won’t work on their data network. I left disappointed that I would have to return my 3600s and buy a phone direct from AT&T.

WRONG.

Despite what the AT&T store will tell you, there is no special software required. A (long) call to AT&T support revealed that, in actuality, the AT&T data network will send a message to phones it recognizes to automatically configure them, but if AT&T doesn’t sell it, they don’t program it into the network. The person at the store just didn’t want to deal with me. The person on the phone tried to get the network to configure my phone, but it simply would not. I asked him my options, and he told me to Google it and find the settings. From all the doom and gloom I had been hearing, you would have thought that these settings are long, complicated, and hours of work.

WRONG AGAIN.

If you know the settings (which every AT&T employee and tech support technician does), the setup is easy. And there aren’t that many of them. The technician lied and told me he didn’t know the settings I would need because he wasn’t familiar with the phone, but that was another lie. All phones on the AT&T network need the same settings. Fortunately, Google also knows all the settings you need. The only learning curve is figuring out where to put them in your phone. That’s usually pretty straight forward, too.

What follows is a process to configure your Nokia V4 (Symbian S40) phone for data and MMS, although it should be rather simple to extrapolate to S60. You need to setup the data settings first, since MMS needs an active data connection to work.

DATA

1. From main screen, click Menu, then Settings, then Configuration, then  Personal Config. Settings.

2. Click Options, then Add New.

3.  Select Access Point and enter in the following settings:

Account Name: Media Net

Select Access point Settings…

Data Bearer: Packet data

Select Bearer settings…

Packet data acc. pt. :  wap.cingular

Network Type:  IPv4

Authentication type: Secure

User Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

PASSWORD: CINGULAR1

Keep hitting back (probably the right menu key on the face of your phone) until you return to the Configuration settings screen.

Select Preferred access pt. and choose Media Net.

MMS

1. Now it’s time for the MMS settings.  Scroll back down toPersonal Config. Settings.

2. Click Options, then Add New.

3.  Select Multimedia and enter the following settings.

Account Name: Media Net

Server Address: http://mmsc.cingular.com

Use pref. access Pt. No

Under Access Point Settings:

Proxy:  Enabled

Proxy Address: wireless.cingular.com

Proxy Port:  8080

Bearer Setttings:

Packet data acc. pt. :  wap.cingular

Network Type:  IPv4

Authentication type: Normal

User Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

PASSWORD: CINGULAR1

Almost done! The rest is easy.

Select back until you’re back at the main screen. Select MENU to bring the main menu up again, then select Messaging. Scroll down to Message settings, select Multimedia messages, and scroll down to configuration sett. We just need to tell the MMS program which data connection to use. Select Configuration and set it to Personnal config. Then, select Account and set it to Media Net.

Done! You should now have data and MMS.

If you’re at all technically savvy, you’re probably wondering why whatever douche is working at an AT&T store couldn’t have done this for you. I mean, you only pay them every month for their service. The answer is that anyone with any level of experience in cell phones should be able to do this for you.

Samsung Epix Review: Failure of Epix Proportions

In September of last year, I detailed my struggle with the iPhone, Apple, and how AT&T gave me a free and easy way out of the whole debacle. You can read the whole store here: http://penultimateblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/fuck-apple-and-the-iphone-they-rode-in-on/

In the worlds of the late, great Paul Harvey, now here’s the rest of the story.

The Blackberry lasted until December, which was a bit disappointing since I was still riding the “Blackberry From the Toilet Works Better Than iPhone” high, the fact that I even had some type of moral high from that being disappointing in itself. I took it to the AT&T store that had helped me so well before, and the tech there diagnosed the problem: the battery was shot (I’m guessing the toilet had contributed to this somewhat).

To be honest, I was tired of the Blackberry. No, I didn’t miss the iPhone, but I did miss one thing (the only thing?) it did very well: browsing. It surfed the Internet like no other hand-held before it or, from what I’ve seen, since. So I asked the guy what the new hotness in Blackberry’s was, and told him no touchscreen. Well, the new hotness in Blackberry’s IS the touchscreen. There was also something called a Bold, then there was something for $400 that was essentially exactly like the Blackberry I already had, which included a fairly useless Internet Browser. Why have a data plan if you can’t do the Internet? I was becoming unenthusiastic for another Blackberry and started looking around the store for something that could decently display a webpage. Not only that, but if I wanted the blackberry to work with my Exchange server, I needed to spend another $15 a month.

Next to the Blackberry was a jewel of a phone, the Samsung Epix. It ran Windows Mobile 6.1, huge screen, a touch-pad mouse, could sync with Exchange with on a few clicks, and the web-browsing was far better than the Blackberry. It was also $100 cheaper. I handed it to the tech and told him we were going with that one.

“Have you tried Windows Mobile?” he asked.

“No. Why? Does it have problems?”

He looked uneasy, then he said, “No. I’m sure you’ll be happy. I just like the Blackberrys better.”

But I had an Exchange server that my life revolved around, my neighbor loved his WinMo phone, another colleague swore by his, and it was a Samsung to boot. In December 2008, I purchased my Samsung Epix. Two weeks later, when my brother saw mine, he bought the same one.

And that was when the fun began, the word “fun” here meaning a six-month process by which our phones rarely worked for more than 4 hours at a time, of hours on the phone with AT&T, the provider from which we bought the phone, bought insurance for the phone, and which failed not only to solve our problems, but to replace the phone with a workable units.

Over the course of warranty claims by my brother and I, we each received a total of 3 replacement Epix phones. All in all, my brother and I had our hands on 8 Samsung Epixs, and they all had the exact same behavior. The Samsung Epix appears to consistently have the following problems:

1. If the phone is asleep, and an alarm or notification is set, the phone does not wake up. An available update does not completely solve this problem.

2. Wireless connectivity stops working after about an hour connected to a network. The only way to get it back is to restart the phone.

3. Bluetooth, like wireless, is flakey.

4. SLOG dumps start occurring after about 48 hours of usage. Once they start, they don’t stop. The only solution is to pull out the battery. After this happens three or four times, the memory can get corrupted and a hard reset is required. For those unfamiliar with Windows Mobile, a Hard Reset wipes the phone clean, so you have to then put all your info back in.

5. The phone has issues connecting to voicemail regularly.

6. The touchscreen will just stop working, and the phone can’t function without it. The only solution is to pull the battery.

7. The phone will decide it’s just not going to let you answer phone calls anymore. Press the button all you want, but that call is going to voicemail. See item #5.

8. We had a lot of trouble getting Internet to work on the phone. One phone refused to surf the web over wireless, but over the cell network it worked fine. Two of them simply would not surf the Internet at all.

To be fair, the Epix does one thing exceptionally well: the syncing with Exchange was flawless. But that’s Microsoft’s OS taking care of that, not the phone itself. These were business phones and we were having trouble doing business with them. There were many times where people just couldn’t contact us for hours at a time.

AT&T was generally good about replacing the phones the first 4 times and admitted a long list of known problems with the Epix. However, the last time I called them, the attitude changed. That’s because the fifth is the time where they are supposed to replace the phone with a comperable model from another manufacturer, which costs them a bit of money, I suppose. They refused, and insisted we had to download updates, try it out for a few more weeks, then call back and let us know how it worked. It became obvious I was going to be stuck with a flakey, unworkable phone through June, probably until I bought another one.

I yelled. A lot.

Ultimately, I decided that if a smart phone isn’t smart enough to work, I’m not interested in having it. I didn’t have time to spend hours and hours on the phone with AT&T just to get a refurbished replacement, and Nokia offers a trade-in policy. I ditched the Epix for a new Nokia 3600 slide, one of the most wonderful devices I have ever owned and, at $300 less than the Epix, it performs almost all the same functions. After switching to Nokia, AT&T continued to fail me, but there’s more on that in the next article.

My personal take is that the smartphone craze is ending (and there are a lot of industry analysts that agree). Most smartphones cost over $400, have poor battery life, require constant reboot (even the Blackberry models), burn out in less than two years, and work poorly as a phone even on the rare occasions that they excel as a PDA. In the midst of this, Netbooks are hitting the market at $300 with celluar connectivity, run the standard operating systems you’re used to, work far better than a PDA, and are already becomming quite the rage in the business and personal market. A Netbook has the email-anywhere advantages of a smartphone along with a keyboard you can actually use with all 10 fingers.

Part three coming soon…

WordPress: I’m pressing — where are the words?

One of the most frustrating things a computer or program can do is delay keyboard input, and WordPress — a blogging website — where one is to type and type away at heart’s content, has been severely disappointing in this manner lately. Typing in Visual mode (the mode in which I suspect 90% of its users type), makes the keyboard feel like each press required 100 pounds of force. The lag is visible to the typer and severely decreases the speed at which an article can be completed.

My immediate solution was to switch to HTML display, in which the problem is almost non-existent, but that is still a poor solution on an immense site that is all about typing. The text fields are your bread-and-butter, guys! The problem is not localized to me, or even to Windows 7 or Firefox. A quick Google search shows the issue posted on newsgroups and bulletin boards for at least the last two weeks, even on users running a Linux OS, where people have reverted to the same solution as I have (HTML view).

Yet another example where addition of features took precedence over performance, and the overall experience is ruined. And I don’t even blog that much. There must be blog-addicts pulling their hair out over this.

At least this is one of those times where I can offer an solution: pull the script out of the text field. Who needs additional features? Both Firefox and IE can spell-check as you type much more effectively than WordPress, and whatever change in font that WordPress is doing (it changes mine to Times New Roman) is pointless — it’s not even the font that users view the post in.

Fuck Apple and the iPhone they rode in on.

[editorial note:This is a re-print of a letter I sent to apple and posted on a different blog September 3rd, 2008. I am re-posting it here as the beginning of a series of articles detailing what has happened since then.]

[p.s. editorial note: There is no editor here. Only me.]

To Whom it May Concern at Apple:

Three years ago, when I dropped my trusty Blackberry 7130c into a pot of water, I was immediately honest with AT&T and RIM. My first call was to AT&T because I had purchased the phone through them. They offered me a deal on the newest Blackberry, but the lady also suggested I call RIM directly and see if the phone could be repaired. I think she was also suggesting that I “change” my story and neglect to mention the part where I dropped the phone into the water. I didn’t neglect; I told the lady at RIM exactly what happened and she laughed. She told me to wait 3 days before I bought anything and let the phone dry out. If it didn’t work, they would still warrant the phone and send me a new one. Her exact words: “We cover that.”

Three days later and expecting the worst, I put the battery back in the Blackberry 7130 and turned it on. Imagine my surprise when my email started downloading. Fifteen minutes later, a customer called me on the phone and I was using the phone to do what I had bought it for: making money.

If you’re surprised or amused by this story, I suspect it is because Apple would never warrant their phone for being submerged into water, mainly because if the fragile iPhone were ever dropped into water, it would likely die a fast, electronic death from which it could never recover.

Let me be clear: I do not expect Apple, or any other electronics manufacturer, to warrant their products against submersion or unreasonable exposure to water. What I do expect when an expensive product is still under warranty and has a history of problems is the benefit of a doubt.

My iPhone has been problematic since day one. It had a funny vibrating problem; that is to say, it would suddenly start vibrating violently and keep going until the battery ran out. I shouldn’t use the word “funny” because I found nothing amusing about it. The phone locked up often. These were the reasons for my first two tech support calls, and after the second I was told that, next time, I should take the phone to a Apple Store to be examined.

Which is what I did 30 days later when the problem occurred again. I was told that the firmware had been corrupted, and they re-loaded it. If I had another problem, I should bring it back.

Problems from that time on were minimal until today. Last night I went to bed and plugged my phone into the charger. My wife, coming home late from work, woke me up to say my phone was vibrating. I told her it was just getting email and went to sleep. When I woke up to go to work and grabbed my phone, it was dead and warm. I called Apple, explained the problem, and tried a few of their tests. I was told the phone was dead. Really? I hadn’t noticed.

She scheduled me a time at the nearest Apple store to meet with, and I quote, a “Genius.” I thought she was being funny, but then I walked into the Apple Store to wait for my turn at The Genius Bar. For a 3:20 appointment, I waited thirty minutes being graced by a conversation with one of the Geniuses. I don’t claim to be a genius myself, but I was not impressed.

“It doesn’t turn on,” he said. Ah ha! Truly a genius. I explained my problem and how I had awakened to find the phone dead. He looked at me. “Did you get it wet?” I said no. It was on the counter, where it goes every night. It was on the charger. I went to bed, and when I woke up, it wasn’t working. He glared at me.

“You got it wet,” he said, and he pulled out a magnifying glass. “There’s green on the contacts. That means they got wet.” Then he handed me back my phone and glared at me, as if I was supposed to apologize for wasting the time of one of the geniuses. As if oxygen or moisture in the air couldn’t cause corrosion. He tilted his head, as if waiting for me to plead his forgiveness. Since he wasn’t saying anything, I said, “So what do I do now?”

He said I could give Apple $199, and they can fix it. But it won’t be covered under warranty.

And at that point I looked at “The Genius” the way “The Genius” was looking at me: like an idiot, like a liar. I told him I had decided to pass. That I had a Blackberry I could re-activate, and it had never given me a problem. That this phone had been nothing but a problem since I got it, that this was the phone’s fourth tech support issue, that I had to stop what I was doing at work to come down to the Apple Store, that the phone was more hassle than it was worth, and I left.

I returned to work, where I pulled my old Blackberry of the IT cabinet, caught up on work, and then I went to the AT&T store. Without an appointment, at 6:00 in the evening at one of the busiest malls in my state, I was immediately attended to. This courteous twenty-something did not have a t-shirt proclaiming him a Genius, but you may want to ship him one. I started explaining my problem, and the attendant plugged my old phone into a charger. I said I would need the number transferred off the phone, and he handed me a blue card. “Your number is on there already,” he said. I explained that my company required I keep my old number, I couldn’t get a new one, and he nodded. “You don’t understand; I already put that number on the card you’re holding. Don’t lose the card.” I waited 10 minutes for my old Blackberry to charge up, put the new SIM card in, and viola! I had a working phone, my old phone number, and it hadn’t cost me $199. It cost me nothing.

I respectfully submit the following arguments: That it is a bit egotistical to advertise your employees as geniuses when your products are documented as faulty. They are not geniuses with computers, and they are certainly not geniuses with regard to customer service. But, more than that, I put to you that assuming the worst about your customers will cause them to assume the worst about your company. I did not drop my iPhone in water or get it wet, and I would not have denied it if I had; I used my iPhone normally and carefully.

I was a loyal Apple customer when I woke up this morning to find my dead iPhone, and even when I walked into the Apple Store I still had every confidence that the situation could be resolved. I own two Apple computers, I have an iTunes account, I had an iPhone, and my wife has an iPod. Since leaving the Apple Store, I now have a resurrected Blackberry which has so far doubled the life of the iPhone and is going strong. My old iMac wasn’t worth keeping, and my new music production software runs perfectly well on the Windows XP machine my company provides, which was half the price new of my used Mac. My wife can keep her iPod, but I’ll be closing my iTunes account once I pick up my new Zune tomorrow. All in all, it will take six hours of time and $199 for a Zune to eliminate Apple from my life completely.

Now there’s $199 well-spent.

I will never buy an Apple product again.

Practicing guitar without practicing guitar

I knew I wouldn’t like skiing. I’m an indoors person. I play guitar indoors, I  rehearse indoors, I work indoors, I chase children indoors, I get yelled at by The Lithuanian indoors, I drink indoors. I do all my favorite things indoors. Skiing is an outdoors thing, and it’s a snow thing. I hate snow.

But it was my brother’s 30th birthday, and he wanted to go skiing in Colorado. I had a great trip in Breckenridge and made some new friends, but I also made some doctors richer by breaking my thumb on the hills. On my first run. On the blues. Sking isn’t my thing, adding to a long list of things that aren’t my thing.

That presented me with a problem, though. I joined a new band and I’m back to playing guitar. I was in the process of not only getting back to where I was on guitar, but also becoming better than I had been. Now, I had a setback, and the gigs in May are already booked.

So how have I been practicing guitar when I can’t even grip a guitar? I’ve been studying.

It’s not that I was completely oblivious to the way things worked in music. I’ve studied music theory, I understand guitar, I can tell you what note I’m on. That’s been true for years. What I can’t do is whip it off lightning speed in the middle of a song. I always thought I would just absorb everything as I went along, but I’ve been playing guitar 15 years, and I’m still lacking. So, I’ve started working on learning guitar and memorizing triads, fretboard positions, and other tools.

Here are some tools I’ve been using to quiz myself and push myself to be honest in my improvement and response times. I think any musicians and guitar/bass player can make use of these tools:

1. http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/story.php?title=major-chords

This is a link to a set of flash card I made, but navigate yourself to the main site and you’ll find flash cards for a ton of subjects. Any teacher of any subject, or any student of any subject, has a wealth of study-aids available. For me,  this was a good way to make a set of flash cards on Major Triads (and future things I’m focusing on), have then shuffled, and then quiz myself. There are other music sets already made. If you want to memorize simple sets of information, this is a great way to make digital flash cards you can use anywhere.

Here’s a helpful link to the fretboard cards I made:

Fretboard Training: Odd Frets 1-11 » flash cards
Tags : fretboard guitar

2. http://www.musictheory.net/

Ricci Adams made a set of lessons and trainer programs that are fantastic. I’m currently focused on the fretboard trainer, but you can (and I will) use this site to improve your sightreading and ear training. Admittedly, I’ve found it more useful and usable in the real world to use the flashcards to improve memorization. I’ve even made a whole series on the odd frets on proprofs (see above), but I do like this site very much and you can’t do ear training on a flashcard. Memorization is a problem for me, and always has been. For the average person, this site will probably may advance them very quickly.

3. http://waltribeiro.net/

I have to admit that Walt reminds me of the Dell kid of years back (“Dude, you’re getting a music education!”). But Walt obviously knows his shit, and there is a wealth of info on his site, all in video form. Log on at the right time, and you can ask him questions as he broadcasts live (I haven’t tried this, but the archive footage shows it in action). Not just for guitarists, Walt does a great job of explaining what his topic de jeur, and he is upbeat enough to keep it interesting.

I won’t lie: most of the topics on Walt’s website are rather basic; hell with rather…they’re basic. But I like what he’s doing, and for players just starting out, it’s a good site to visit.

One more thing I’ve been able to do because I can’t play guitar and need to work the wrecked tendons in my hand comes from a tip a business colleage told me. I was talking about the stiff tendons in my hand and the exercises my doctor recommended, and he overheard and mentioned that he had been through something similar. He recommended what he did: he squeezed Play Doh. When his injury was all better, he switched to clay, which has a bit more resistance but is much more comfortable than squeezing a ball (and more effective because it works some extra finger muscles). For any string player that has tried squeezing a tennis ball and found it resulted in wrist pain, I can highly recommend this.

The Trouble with Vaccination

Ironically, in a year when Tamiflu will have limited effect against the prevalent strains of flu viruses, something I have suspected for the last several months is getting confirmed by those in the know: that anti-virus software has become all-but-useless against modern viruses, trojans, and spyware.

What began as a suspicion is quickly becomming backed up by hard numbers. Recent estimates as to the efficacy of anti-virus software at keeping new malicious software off of your computer rate it at 20-30%. This is down from only 50-60% one or two years ago. If you’re like me and you’re thinking about how much you or your company spends on anti-virus software subscriptions every year, your initial reaction should be, “It was only 50% effective to begin with!?!?” At 20% effective, anti-virus software has gone from being a waste of money to an out-right ripoff.

I can’t begin to enumerate the countless posts I have seen online from people trusting in their anti-virus or anti-spyware software completely, often brave enough to download files they knew were infected with malware, assuming that their computer would automatically filter it out. They expect, having been sold on a belief from companies like McAffe, Symantec, and TrendMicro, that they are 100% shielded, guaranteed from infection so long as they regularly update their computers. This could be no further from the truth.

Why the change from mediorcre to useless?

• Viruses used to be written by bored, angry kids with a modicum of skill. Even more common, they had simply downloaded an existing virus, or a program that would create a virus to specification, and changed the author’s name in it. No longer. Those high-tech viruses/worms/trojans you’ve been reading about are written by professional programs on the payroll of a large corporation.
• The intent of malware in the old days was to be mischevious and destructive. Once it was on your computer, it didn’t care if you knew it, and its behavior was fairly easy to discern. But the benefits of having a software running secretly on an internet-connected computer have become obvious to many corporations. No longer interested in destroying your data, these companies want a slice of your CPU processor or to pump ads at you. These days, malware is taking great pains to be hidden and firmly rooted deep into your system.

So, if virus protection is a waste of money, and a serious resource hog on your computer’s performance, how do you protect yourself without pissing away $50 to McAffe, Eset, or Symantec? The best solution I’ve found is simply a personal firewall, even if you’re already operating behind a hardware firewall. A good personal firewall installed on your computer will make you invisible to the worms looking for vulnerable computers on the Internet, so you won’t get a virus simply by turning your computer on.

And the good news about personal firewalls is that even the best of them are free. My personal favorite right now is Comodo at http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/. It’s annoying for the first two days as it learns about your system, but after that it’s an excellent product that won’t annoy you much at all. And save yourself the processor power by opting not to install the Anti-Virus solution bundled with it for free. If you’re a fan of the ubiquitous ZoneLabs personal firewall, you’ll be hard-pressed to find much difference between the two.

Make sure Automatic Updates is on. There will be days when all of a sudden something on your computer won’t work, and you’ll hear from CNN or MSNBC that it’s a patch Microsoft pushed down through Automatic Updates. But the need to get the updates they push down, and the sheer volume of updates they have been releasing lately, make it a waste of spirit to keep up with it manually. You bought your computer to work for you, not the other way around, right?

Other than that, you just need to be a bit smarter about your web-surfing habits. You might be a big fan of peer-to-peer networks like Limewire, but using Limewire is a great way to get a virus. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t using Limewire that didn’t effentually bring me their computer to remove a virus. And that porn you’re watching could very well be infecting your computer, albeit not as badly as you could get infected at a brothel.

If you do get infected with a virus, online scanners are free. My current favorite is the Microsoft offering at http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm because it will also clean up your registry, install needed patches, and make sure your computer is tuned up for optimum performance. It’s not perfect, but the once-excellent TrendMicro offering is truly lacking these days. However, the sad reality is that a lot of these viruses simply can’t be removed permanently, and the best (and quickest) solution is often to just restore your system. You still keep your data, and the malware is gone. Just be sure that your system restore is properly set up, something you can google for better information than I can provide.

Now if only they could get Tamiflu to work…