Yeah, I know that wasn't the smartest idea. It was the quickest tho!

I stuck a piece of paper between SIM and battery and all is fine again. I guess I didn't even have to reset. All fixed now!

I've been playing around with it, and it seems that only SIM-cards from my operator (BASE) aren't recognized. SIM-cards from other operators (Mobistar, Proximus) work fine! Or at least, they're recognized and after typing in the PIN-code I'm connected to the network.

I think this calls for a reset ...

Lol, I'm from Belgium. I've always recharged it in Europe.

My brother in law didn't replace the fuse (too much effort for me to find a replacement), he just bridged it. It's working again!!! But now, it can't find the SIM-card. Do you guys think I might have screwed something up? Or could it just be a software problem fixable by a soft or hard reset?

I'm stuck at the second step. I took out the screws, but I don't know where to put the screwdriver to unclip the cover. If I put it in the two holes facing each other, I can press a little, but then the plastic gets all deformed and I'm too scared to press harder.

Could someone please explain in detail how to unclip the body?

It looks like a fuse has blown. I'm going to use this guide by huckfinn to try and save it.

I'm really digging this M500 (HTC Magician). Is it nice to work on? Is it fast? Could you please tell me your thoughts about it, JamieDow? And be very sceptical!

I'm having doubts about Motorola right now. But they still make very pretty and affordable phones. I hope my dead phone was just an incident. Apart from that, I have no preferences about manufacturer. As long as the phone works on European networks, it's cool.

Hehe, touche. I just like to have something useful to read around when I'm waiting or on the train. I usually have a book with me, but there's a lot of stuff I'd like to read that's only in digital form like howto's and tutorials on IT subjects.

I'll check the battery's readings this weekend: I don't have a voltmeter around.

And I don't know anyone with the same phone as mine. That was something I liked up until now: to have a "unique" phone.

Someone on a different forum told me to manually recharge the battery for a few minutes by connecting it to a few AA-batteries. He thought the battery was so low that the phone didn't even recognize the charger.

My SmartPhone (Motorola MPx200) recently passed away, or at least that's what it looks like (cf my thread). Now I'm planning to buy a new cell phone. I'm not sure what I should do though: I could get a simple phone that does what it's supposed for less than 100 Euros. Or I can spend twice that amount (probably more) on a phone that's also a PDA.

I did that once, with the MPx200, and although I got it for only 180 Euros, I haven't been entirely pleased with the PDA part. Some drawbacks:

- slow:
* it takes around a minute to turn on. This isn't a big problem, but in some occasions, eg. when the battery is low, a quicker boot would still allow me to send that crucial SMS. Now it just boots and half way through it switches off.
* menus were slow
* the overall latency is very high compared to standard phones, which is annoying in some cases
- instability:
* sometimes Windows would just crash. Or at least stop to react. All I could do in such an event was to remove the battery and restart the phone.
* sometimes the phone wouldn't start either: it would just hang at the "Hello Moto" screen. Removing the battery AND SD-card and restarting it after replacing just the battery would sort this out. Once it had booted correctly, I could turn it off and put the SD-card back and then start it fine.
- limited use:
* I bought it because of the affordable price. I wasn't planning on watching films or anything on it, I just liked the idea of being able to read ebooks and stuff like that on the way. The screen isn't perfect for that, but as long as I stuck to .html or .txt files opened in Internet Explorer, it worked really well. Internet Explorer was surprisingly fast. However, .pdf or .doc or other files were a nightmare: first of all they need 3rd party viewers that aren't freeware. Once installed, those programs either produced unreadable results (one PDF-viewer didn't have the resizing option so I had to scroll like a madman constantly) or took about a month to load a document
* when I got the phone, I immediately started looking for programs to install. Some of them were useful and nice (eg. Quickclose) but most of the programs available for SmartPhone just seemed crappy to me: if they worked on my phone, they usually didn't really do what they we're supposed to do, or only did it half assed BUT did have a bunch of other equally useless features I wasn't looking for. On top of that, only a handful of programs were freeware.

Those are my experiences with the Motorola MPx200 in combination with SmartPhone 2002 and 2003 (the latter being the better OS).

What I'm looking for in my next cell phone is:
- better reaction time
- lower boot time
- the ability to comfortably read documents on it. I don't mind the small screen (Internet Explorer was pretty nice to use), but I would like to be able to read all major document types without having to scroll all the time
- MP3 or WMA or OGG or whatever ringtones: can't help it, they're the nicest ringtones.
- the availability of freeware programs that do what they claim: I like the "KISS" approach (keep it small, simple), so I don't like software suites with a gazillion features. I want a small program that does one thing and does it well. If that's not possible, I'd consider a phone with a well documented SDK so I can (try to) develop my own tools.

I don't know if my wishes are realistic. But that's why I started this topic: I'd like to know if I can find such a phone or if I should just stick with a simple phone and get a seperate PDA or possibly laptop to the other stuff.

Also, I'd like to hear experiences with other cell phone OS'es like Symbian and GNU/Linux as I haven't worked with those yet.

I remember the phone was on when I hooked it up to the computer, I got the "new hardware" dialog. When I woke up, the screen was blank. So I pressed a few keys, but the display wouldn't light up. I'm guessing it had shutdown, because when I pressed the ON button, it showed the "Hello Moto" screen.

When I come to think of it: it would still turn on when I took it to the store. They took it in the backroom and probably did something to it, but when I got back home with it, it had stopped working entirely.

Now, I don't think two clerks can do anything I can't do with a phone so I really have no idea what happened back there. All they could say was that it definetely wasn't the battery that had gone.

I still have the original CD-Rom's so I should be able to do a ROM flash. I already tried the blue button + on button trick, but still nothing happens. I think the battery is dead now, but it won't recharge.

As of now, the phone won't even turn on anymore. :cry:

Yesterday, I connected my phone to a USB-port on my computer for it to charge up. I got the Windows dialog "New hardware found" but I ignored as I was too drunk at the moment and wanted to go to sleep. The phone was on at that moment.

This morning I woke up and noticed the phone was turned off. I turned it on and after entering my PIN, I saw I was connected to my operator. Seconds later the screen went blank. The cell phone had shut down. Now, that's all it does anymore. I took it back to the store to see what they had to say. I thought it was the battery since I get no reaction from the phone whatsoever when I try to recharge it: no nice indicators on the display, nothing.

The guys at the store took a look and told me it was probably a software error, not the battery. Since it's out of warranty, this would cost me € 119 to fix! Obviously I'd rather get a new phone altogether if I can't sort this problem out.

The phone is running SmartPhone 2003, but it has been doing that for well over a year now. It's also been working fine up until now, apart from some occasional quirks that are solved by removing the battery.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

I was wondering if I could improve the reaction time of my MPx200 (SmartPhone 2003) by removing files I don't need, like all sorts of mediafiles (.gif, .wav, ...) and other stuff. Is it possible to safely remove files from the Windows-directory in a way that they're not reinstalled after rebooting the phone?

I installed it on my Belgian MPx200, and while it said the install had failed, I can now run .CAB's I couldn't run before. Seems to work.

Thanks a lot!