kEnny's New Toy

My latest toy is finally almost fully operational. A few months ago I purchased a wireless phone on Ebay, which I had thought I thoroughly researched. I had read that the mechanism required to unlock this phone was rather complicated, and that it would cost a little more than most others. The combination of features offered by this phone seemed to be worth it to me. It’s the Sony Ericsson K790a.

I made the purchase from a Canadian seller who got the phone to me in good time. Being as it was locked to Rogers AT&T, I could not use it yet. When I set out to find the best place to get the phone unlocked, I seemed to be suddenly running across lots of places saying they could no longer unlock any of the Sony Ericsson db2020 phones (that’s the name for the encrypted locking technique or something associated with it). I made an inquiry to a business that had unlocked another phone for me before, and they said they could unlock it with no problem. Right there I was both happy and suspicious. Could they really do it, or did they possibly not know about the recent “Lockdown on unlocking?” It turned out to be the latter. They were able to unbrand (this removes the software limitations and new software installed for Rogers) the phone right away, but unlocking was a different matter entirely. I let them hang onto it for about a month and a half, so they could try new releases of whatever product they are using to unlock phones, with no success. When I asked for the phone back, it was returned promptly and I was refunded most of the money I paid. Half of it had been for the successful unbranding of the phone. I consider this to have been very generous, as I felt like I was taking advantage of their misunderstanding about their being able to unlock the phone in the first place.

Getting the phone unlocked was an interesting adventure. While there are many b&m stores inviting you to mail or carry your db2020 phone to them for unlocking, I could only find one that would perform remote unlocking of db2020 phones. They had all kinds of downloads available for connecting hidden USB devices, flashing, & unlocking phones. I followed their instructions to generate a file to email to them. My first attempt to send this file was thwarted by my choice of email service. I use Earthlink as my email address, but have it set to forward everything to Gmail, which is set to send messages with Earthlink as my return address. It’s great for dropping the spam, but not when the place you need to send a file to is expecting it from the domain you originally gave to them. I logged into Earthlink’s webmail interface to send the file and waited for about 8 hours for the return file to arrive. I was at work when I got it, and of course the unlocking software required access to the internet. My employer uses proxy servers to access the outside world’s internet, and of course the unlocking software did not have options for using proxies, so I drove to a local strip-mall where a number of businesses have free wi-fi. I sat there for almost an hour trying to get it to work. I finally figured out that I didn’t have all of the correct drivers installed, but by the time I got them running, my laptop had decided to turn off it’s wi-fi adapter. Doh!! I at lunch and tried it again. BINGO!!! I made a call, received an SMS message, and went back to work.

That night I spent a good bit of time getting to know the phone, the camera, and many of their various options. The Sony Ericsson website has lots of useful information, including a feature that will send an SMS message to you to automatically configure your phone for MMS, web access, and email. I used them all. Once I had everything working to my satisfaction, I (watch out!!!) changed my data plan from 200 SMS messages per month, to unlimited web/video & 200 messages (SMS/MMS/IM/Email) per month. Immediately, nothing worked. Coincidentally, my wife couldn’t send or receive MMS messages for the rest of the night either.

The next morning, I found I could send SMS messages out, even to email addresses. The return address was rejected when replying from email accounts, however. Using a specific combination of phone number and Cingular email extension, I was finally able to find an address that would get messages from my email account to the phone as well. I called Cingular with my now-specific complaint, and after spending almost an hour and a half explaining that the phone does the job fine, that they needed to fix the way they were handling (or not) messages for me after changing my data plan, I was left with two interesting things: The CSR I was speaking with didn’t really know what was going on as he told me I should not expect the addressing problem to be resolved, and that everything was going to start working okay again. Allison sent a message from her Gmail account, which I replied to, then she replied back and my phone saw it just fine. WOW!!

After some time getting to know how to navigate with the phone’s built in Netfront web browser, and playing with Opera Mobile, I still don’t know which one I like more, but I’m left to use Netfront more in general because the phone’s built in RSS reader opens links with it. I used to get an SMS message every morning to tell me what to expect for weather, but now I don’t have to waste messages on that, because the phone gets RSS feeds for weather and news headlines every day.

I’ll add updates later as I smooth out my day-to-day operations with this phone. For now, I’m gonna say that I love it, and am glad I waited for it.