My Kyocera 7035 smartphone has died. Sometimes my phone will be at 100% signal strength and drop to zero. When I restart the phone, I get this message:
My best guess is that something in the antenna shorted out. In any case, the timing was fortuitous. Alltel does much better with reception in the Arkansas Valley of Colorado where I currently reside. In addition, there is speculation that EVDO high speed cellular wireless internet is going to arrive here via Alltel at some point. So I decided to switch to Alltel and get their “best reception phone” for now. I ended up with a Nokia 2865i.
Overall, it’s a pretty impressive phone for the inexpensive price ($30 w/2yr contract). It’s tiny and sports features such as bluetooth and quite a bit of memory (12mb). At least, that’s enough to store my entire 450 something entry phone book and a few ring tones! Since it had bluetooth, and my new laptop has bluetooth, anytime it gets within range of my computer, it syncs thanks to the free Nokia PC Suite.
Well… I don’t mean offer much gratitude to Nokia PC Suite actually. It is a system hog, taking up plenty of memory and running a number of processes. It’s customization capability is horrendous. IE, there is none. I’ll go into more detail below, but fields just don’t sync up right on my phone. But hey… it’s free
I’d wager that this suite was probably designed for a variety of phones, including smart phones. Most fields probably sync up just fine with some of the more expensive phones, but not so with my little cheap phone. For example, Nokia PC Suite has decided that the company name field in Outlook isn’t important on the Nokia 2865i. I have plenty of contacts that do not have anything in the Full Name field, but have a populated Company Name field. Outlook is pretty smart in providing a “File As” field. Using this field, you can store/sort items just as you want to look them up… IE last, first for people, and company name for companies. Assuming that if the “Full Name” field is empty, “File As” properly defaults to the “Company Name” field. For my phone, Nokia PC Suite should simply pick up the “File As” field and stuff it in the “Name” field on my phone, but instead, it just throws a blank name in there. Lovely… so I have bunch of address book entries on my phone with a blank name. Not very useful. Support gave me an unhelpful answer: “Put the company name in the last name field.” So I’m supposed to screw up all my Outlook data for Nokia PC Suite? I don’t think so. lookOut screws with my data enough as it is, thank you very much.
So I have written a macro to copy off the contacts to a new folder, and stuff the “File As” field into the “Last Name” field so the contact name is properly written to the phone.
More details plus the download can be found here: