Brandon Fuller

GSM Sucks So Far

So I got off the plane in San Jose last night, powered on my new Nokia 3650 phone and it started going nuts. That didn’t happen in Colorado. All kinds of lights and messages — we have lift off. Yeah…but wait..I don’t live here anymore. So unless they activated me while I was on the plane, we are in trouble. Doubtful. I called Kim and she checked her phone which was still in Colorado and it still says “No Service”. So it seems that I do not have GSM coverage at my house. It must not be active at Denver International Airport either since my phone didn’t work there. I guess I will have to confirm when I come back home. But how weird is it that they claim support in the Denver area but there is a chance it doesn’t work at the airport. WTF?

Here in San Jose, I took a humorous picture at the airport and went to e-mail it to the blog via the new phone — very exciting geek moment. Doh. The phone returned “Cannot connect to e-mail server”. What? Man. This isn’t going smoothly.

So at this point I now have a camera phone that works in San Jose but not at home. It has a camera that can take pictures but I can’t e-mail them from the phone because that isn’t working.

Then to top it off, I tried using the Bluetooth support for the phone and found Bluetooth to be…what is that technical term…shitty! My god, how complicated. If you ever tried using serial devices in the past, you know they suck. Especially if you ever tried synchronizing some of the early PDAs and such. Now Bluetooth turns out to be the same old serial port with no cable. This only adds yet another level of shit that can go wrong.

I bought the Belkin Bluetooth USB adapter. The issue is that whenever I disconnect — meaning power the phone off — the Bluetooth adapter hangs and I have to reboot to fix. Also, when my phone tries to connnect to the computer it gets some “Connection refused” message. I contacted Belkin technical support and got the usual runaround: disable everything, reboot, reinstall, replace product, its not us, etc. Its so painful when they can’t troubleshoot the actual software. They just make you go through a million hoops and then end up telling you that you are screwed and you should return the product.

I am a pretty technical and geeky guy and I can’t get this stuff to work. How is this ready for primetime? I am about to conclude that its not ready and return the whole thing. But I feel let down at this point. Must not give up. I MAY given T-Mobile a try but I haven’t decided if its worth it. Maybe this is all just service provider-related.