Caution: May cause addiction

I bought a Nokia E63 last Wednesday (23-September-2009). Not a big Nokia fan myself, getting convinced by the ‘value for money’ fact and decent looks , I wanted to try that out and went for the sexy black color.

I faced some problems (common) and fixed it myself / from the internet. Just thought of sharing them for the sake of fellow E63ians.

I had a Sony Ericsson T610, and have been using that for 5 years. It is a rock solid phone, by all means. It survived my rough use, rains, numerous fall downs, over 1000 hours of talk time, and 20000+ texts. I did not even go to the service center once in its life time (even the battery is stock) and I am still using that as my secondary mobile. Recently the battery started fading out quickly within a day .  I was bored of the ALARM tone , polyphonic ringtones, service provider’s no-support for GPRS, no third party application support, 4MB memory, VGA camera, etc. Decided it was time for a change, and went for E63 after considering IPhone, HTC G1, HTC Touch Diamond on the higher end, Blackberry Curve 8520, Nokia E71, E63 on the lower end. Finally settled down with E63.

Glitches faced during mobile switch:

Phonebook copy

To put simple, all options of transferring my 500 odd contacts to new phone failed.

Bluetooth to bluetooth phone transfer failed for some weird reason, T610 to my laptop bluetooth transfer was failing for some reason, wire transfer to my laptop could not be done because I had already thrown the T610 USB connectors and CDs away. I then tried synchronizing my contacts with outlook and Voila!! It worked. My laptop’s Outlook now had the contacts in it. I found I could transfer them in two ways – simply synchronize using PC suite or use the software vCard export V3.0 to export all the contacts as separate vcfs and transfer to the E63. All’s well now.

GPRS activated and working. but WIFI?

Pissed off with the Wi-Fi thingy. E63 wouldn’t work in my home WAN. I was not able to download anything from GPRS as my current data plan was expensive for bulk downloads.

E63 would detect the wi-fi network, accept my wi-fi password, add it to the access point, but always threw WEB: GATEWAY NO REPLY when I tried to browse. Took quite a bit of time to figure it out. But, worth jotting it down somewhere for someone to refer. Here is what I did and which finally worked (after seeing so many forums and so many solutions)

And ya, I am using a Huawei WA1003A router.

- Set up a home page in the access point – ya I did, but it did not work. Same ‘Package No Reply’ error.

- Give manual IP4 settings, restart the phone – did not work. Same ‘Package No Reply’ error.

- Change the WPA key if at all you use for your wireless security to 10 digit HEX WEP string – tried it, did not work. Same ‘Package No Reply’ error.

- Removed the wireless security, let my connection open, tried connecting now. Same ‘Package No Reply’ error.

- Give the MAC address of the phone and unfilter it in the router home page – did not try, thought it was just stupid since my router was set such that did not filter any devices.

- Update the phone’s firmware to the latest one – did not try since I wanted to do keep this if there is no other go. By the way, my phone’s firmware is 100.21.110 which is good enough for wi-fi.

- Update the router’s firmware -did not try since I wanted to do this after updating phone’s firmware – lastest option.

- tried with hotspot wifi connections. sadly it threw ‘WLAN could not be connected’ or ‘web: gateway no reply’ all the time.

- After all this, I remembered that I give the broadband connection user id and password from my laptop and is not STORED in the router. DAMN!!!! so stupid that was. I quickly went through the router homepage, tweaked it, gave the user id and password, saved, enabled DHCP (for some reason from some forum), restarted the router and Wi-fi now works like a charm in my E63. Complete configuration details of Huawei WA1003A router can be found HERE.

- Understood that ‘Web: No Gateway Found’ is a generic error message that comes out for various reasons.

- Don’t recommend giving the phone to Nokia Care before you try your hands down with your router / connection thing because the Nokia Care folks just flush the phone and install the latest firmware. Nothing else as I enquired them.

- Better to talk to the Nokia promoters in the Nokia priority sales showroom (not Nokia care service center), they can actually help by connecting to the showroom wi-fi. I found out that the problem is not with the phone, but with the connection only after browsing for sometime from within a Nokia priority sales showroom.

Writing this alongside enjoying some music videos in youtube through my wlan connected E63

Have fun, hope this helps!!!