Nokia E71

I’ve had my E71 for nearly two years now and that’s given me ample time to discover what an unmitigated pile of crap it truly is. When things work, it’s fine. The GPS is kinda cute, and seriously handy, and I really like the BBC iplayer. In fact it’s probably the main app I use.

The iplayer has caused me grief in the past, timeouts and freezing, solved only by the highly technical process of throwing away the router and getting another one. But that was a while ago now and it’s been great of ever such a long time. Until two days ago. Listening to iplayer then after about 10 minutes, it stopped. Probably just a fluke, I thought.

Over the last couple of days I’ve tested it a few times and sure enough, I’m getting the old favourite:

BBC Iplayer - No gateway replyNot an uncommon error message for the E71. Various suggestions are offered, including manually setting IP address, DNS settings and tweaking router settings. All tried, all failed. I installed a nifty utility called IfInfo that told me my phone’s network settings, and the router was pretty sure it was there too. I tried a utility called Nokia Device Status, from the Beta Labs, but all I got was “Licence Expired”, so that was a waste of time.

More experiments showed that iplayer would run for a few minutes, then timeout with the Gateway error. Everything else on the LAN still happily connected to the internet. Interestingly, the E71 would then refuse to connect to the internet at all using any browser (tried opera plus the default), via the wireless router (Zyxel) or Wireless access points (Netgear).

One of the more promising avenues was installing a utility called HandyWi. This immediately got me connected and I thought my problems were solved. But then, after about 5 or 10 minutes the familiar Timeout and Gateway error messages. But I could still initiate new sessions, they just didn’t last very long. Which kinda suggests this might be something about the way the E71 default connectivity software doesn’t work. During all this I also reinstalled the firmware and restored from backup.

Curiously no-one has suggested climbing to the top of a very tall building and chucking the E71 out of a window, or placing it on a set of railway tracks, or hitting it many many many times with a very very very big hammer. My contract expires in a few months and I shall count the days until I can get rid of this wretched machine.

In the meantime, it’s Big Red Switch time. A factory reset, reinstall, then start again from a very early backup, and we shall see what we shall see.

Update: 10 Jan 2012

Hmmmm, interesting. I wiped and restarted from an old backup and the problem persisted. I tried using manual addressing instead of DHCP and the problem persisted. I gave up. And now, well, it’s working again. Someone, somewhere, is, as they say, having a laugh. I did wonder whether ‘something had changed’ at the BBC end given the problems watching video on some smartphones. It seems a bit unlikely, and wouldn’t explain the connectivity issues with my E71 and browsers. But it’s working for now, until it stops again. Ho hum.

The curious conflict of the Nokia E71 and the Netgear DG834

I’ve just replaced my ageing and trusty router (A Zyxel Prestige P652R-11) with a new model, the Zyxel P-660HW. This isn’t the first time I’ve decided to update my router. Last year I decided to take the plunge and went with a popular Netgear model that seemed to get good reviews.

It took me a long time to realise there was some peculiar conflict between my Nokia E71 and the new router. I use iplayer on the E71 and occasionally it would freeze after a period of playing; usually anything between 10 minutes and half and hour. There would be no alternative but to restart the application.

Initially I didn’t suspect the Netgear as I was accessing the wi-fi via WAPs, and not the router itself. I’m not sure at what point I dusted of the old router and put it back into operation and found the problem disappeared. I’m not sure if I’m the only person in the known universe who had this problem (now academic as I got rid of the Netgear router) but I’d be curious if anyone stumbles upon this post during a search and had the same issue.