Got a new phone at work today, a Sony Ericsson M600i. It’s a 3G phone. Unfortunately, our cellular network provider (Tele2) requires you to change SIM-card to a new one when you want to use 3G instead of just GSM. The SIM-card has been ordered and will probably be in my hands tomorrow.

Eager to begin playing, erm, I mean working. with this new toy, erm, I mean “critical tool for my working environment”, I tried to insert the GSM SIM-card I already had. It seemed to work well.

However, after a while, I noticed that the symbol for network coverage was going up, then down, then up, then down. Also, initiating calls only worked 1 out of 10 atttempts.

I phoned (one of the ten attempts) to the customer service, and they were quite sure the problem is that the phone simply doesn’t work well with a GSM card.

Gah! How hard can it be to make a phone that works with GSM SIM-cards? I’m just asking! If the SIM-card says that it’s just GSM, then use just GSM, and don’t try to get 3G access. Grr!

On the same level of stupidity, it seems like you need to have a SIM-card inserted into the phone to be able to access anything else than the welcome screens (and possibly the emergency number, 112). That’s very well thought out, since you also need a SIM-card to be able to transfer contacts etc. from your old phone to your new one via Bluetooth or IR. So, if you only have one SIM card, you have no simple way to transfer your contacts.

Stupid!

Apart from that, it seems to be a nice phone. I’ll probably be back later with some more reviews of its functionality. Hopefully, I’ll be able to synchronize it with some desktop application on Linux.
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