Symbian Q&A Knowledge base - Series 60
(Nokia 7650, 3650, 3660, 3230, 6260, 6600, 6630, 7610, 6670, 6680/6681/6682, N70, N90, Sendo X, Siemens SX-1)

Please note that all text on this page is covered by copyright, see the main Knowledge base page for details.

Sections in the Series 60 Knowledge base:
Communications (incl PC) | Applications | Performance | Hardware | Miscellaneous

Communications

The built-in Log application just shows me a summary of the total GPRS bytes sent and received since I last cleared the 'counters'. It's really tiresome having to clear these counters before using an online application just to see how many bytes I use up each time. Is there an easier way? I've seen a third party utility, Extended Log, but I really don't want to pay for something so large and complex just to do this simple job.

Yes, it's actually quite easy to see the GPRS data use for each session online, but you do have to get your head around the way Nokia think. Firstly, Nokia really don't want people's log files growing and growing (remember that voice calls and SMS use is also logged), so they put in a time limit with a very small default value, '1 day'. Outside of the last 24 hours, there's simply nothing available and it's easy to assume that no individual call or session has been recorded.

In addition, the peculiar design of the Log application means that you need to press the navigator right on the opening screen, to get to the log 'proper'. If you select 'Packet data' instead (as seems logical), you simply see the overall summary that you've already found. But once you tab right on the front screen to find the main log, you'll see all voice and GPRS sessions from the last 24 hours and selecting any of these brings up a dialog with the detailed information that you need.

If you need to increase this 24 hour limit, use 'Options | Settings' and change 'Log duration' to either '10 days' or '30 days'.

How can I send short messages to my phone and PDA-owning friends around the classroom or office using Bluetooth?

It's actually quite easy to use this wireless medium to send messages to each other, perhaps as a way of communicating during a meeting, with the content unseen by everybody else in the room? (A SMS text message might take a while to be delivered and would cost real money) All the basic functionality you need for Bluetooth communications is built-in, don't worry.

Somewhere on your main applications menu (often in the 'Extras' folder) will be a shortcut to 'Notes'. Use 'New note' and type in the message to your friend or colleague in the normal way. When ready, use 'Options' 'Send' 'via Bluetooth' and pick the recipient's device from the list of Bluetooth equipment in your environment. If the recipient's device is already paired with yours then he or she won't have to explicitly 'Accept' your Bluetooth transmission.

On the recipient's smartphone or PDA, their Messaging/Inbox application will leap in and allow them to view your message, which will have been transferred as a simple text file. Most devices can display text files without needing third party software.

According to FExplorer, my smartphone's mail system has a number of file attachments, all quite old and all using up valuable space. Yet when I go to Inbox in Messaging, there are no messages at all in my Inbox! How can I delete these attachments and give my smartphone a spring clean?

The attachments you mention are probably associated with entries in other folders in your Messaging system. Press the navigator right to toggle to the different folders. We suspect you'll find plenty of entries in 'Sent' (and possibly some in 'Draft' as well). Assuming that you're happy to clear these, use 'Options' 'Mark all' and then 'C'. Switch back to FExplorer, refresh its view of your 'Inbox' (your Messaging file system) and you should see all the apparently orphaned attachments have vanished.

I've read a lot in the press about a Cabir virus outbreak for Symbian smartphones. Should I be worried, and what can I do to protect myself?

Much of the media coverage of the few Symbian viruses has been ridicuously frenzied, not helped by anti-virus firms (with a vested interest) proclaiming that two variants of the original Cabir concept virus are 'spreading fast'. As you'll know from installing Series 60 applications, there are numerous questions to answer during the installation process (the most fundamental being 'Install xxxxx?'). In addition, there's the initial 'Receive message via Bluetooth?' question if and when your smartphone gets contacted by a theoretically-infected phone. Just say 'No' should this ever happen.

The Cabir virus is no different to any other Symbian application and needs quite a bit of implicit acceptance on your behalf, so there's no danger in being invisibly infected, as happens in the PC world. Apart from the remote possibility of someone else's smartphone trying to beam you Cabir, or one of its variants, the other way for your smartphone to contract something nasty is to download and install an application that's not all it claims to be, for example a game or utility. Such deceptive programs are usually only found on 'warez' (illegal software) sites, so by staying within mainstream download sites (and their links) you will be perfectly safe. In general, when looking for third party software for Symbian smartphones, start looking on AllAboutSymbian's shop, www.my-symbian.com or, of course, here on 3lib.ukonline.co.uk.

I've acquired a Sendo X and have been generally impressed so far by this Symbian-based smartphone. But I can't seem to get it properly connected to my PC. I've upgraded the PC Connect suite to the latest version, and yet after a few seconds of being connected it disconnects and I'm not able to browse its files or synchronise. Any ideas?

Two other updates to check include the latest USB drivers and latest firmware for the phone itself. Unlike Nokia, Sendo let you update the phone's ROM yourself with a simple download from their web site, so this is the first thing to check in case of problems. In addition, make sure you plug the Sendo's cable into your PC directly and not via a USB hub, as this is a known issue. If you're still having problems, there must be something conflicting with the connection software, so try gradually disabling any other PDA connection software, checking to see if PC Connect now works. In fact, look at any other software which might be interfering with your PC's and USB COM ports.

Every time I connect my Series 60 smartphone to my PC, I get a flurry of ‘Accept connection from xxxxxx’ messages, which have to be acknowledged by a keypress on the phone. Is there any way to tell it ‘Yes, stop asking me’?

Yes, just look in ‘Tools | Bluetooth’ and then on your ‘Paired devices’ tab. Highlight your PC device name and use the menu option ‘Set as authorised’. Et voila, no more messages!

Applications

I want to start moblogging from my Nokia megapixel smartphone but I'm very wary of the GPRS costs of sending my megapixel images (over 300K each) over the air. Is there any software that can reduce the pixel size of each image prior to sending it? I don't want to take my photos in a lower resolution because at the end of the day I also want to print most of them.

An interesting problem and I've found a solution, although you'll need to pay up for a third party application, PhotoRite SP.

Start up PhotoRite SP and browse to an image that you'd like to save in 'reduced' form. Note that the trial version is fully working apart from including it's own 'advert' watermark as part of your picture, so you'll need to register the program before using it to work on images destined for your moblog.

With your megapixel image open in PhotoRite SP, press 'Options' and scroll down the menu to 'Save as'. Press the navigator right to see the various save options. These include '640 by 480', the optimum resolution for moblogging these days. Give the new file a name and your photo will be resized.

Now go back and open up the new image, which should have appeared in your Pictures folder. Press 'Options' and scroll down to 'Image details'. You can confirm the resolution of the new photo here, although 120K or so is still perhaps on the large size for GPRS sending on a pay-as-you-go tariff.

I just got myself a Nokia smartphone and I cannot seem to find a way of setting its alarm to wake me up just on workdays. So I end up having to set the alarm manually every night, which is a bit annoying and I also often forget. Am I missing something obvious, or are there any applications that I can install to do this job?

It's true that the Series 60 Calendar is still some way behind that of the UIQ and Series 80 applications in terms of advanced scheduling. Rather than search for a different program though, there's an easy workaround. Simply use Calendar and set up five alarms (i.e. one on Monday, one on Tuesday, etc.), at the right time, with each one set to 'Repeat' 'Weekly'. This arrangement is quick to set up and has the advantage that if your working days change, you simply move the repeating alarm from the old day of the week and onto the new one.

OPL seems still-born for Series 60. How else can I program my smartphone?

Try downloading the trial version of a new product, Go-DB Lite. This has a strong emphasis on 'forms', screens where you place text fields, controls and images, and you can supplement the form-to-form behaviour with custom code written in a dialect of BASIC. Once you've got to grips with the system and with the language, it's relatively painless to create standard Symbian SIS files from within the program. There's an emulator included, too, letting you preview how things will look and work without having to build and install onto a real smartphone over and over again. Go-DB Lite is expensive, at over a hundred pounds, which is why it's essential to really hammer the trial version to make sure that you can get to grips with it.

Why is Gallery on both my Nokia S60 smartphones so incredibly slow? Surely something must be wrong?

The theory behind the Gallery application on most Series 60 smartphones is a good one, and being able to browse through (possibly hundreds) of photo thumbnails makes it easy to find the image you're looking for. But how many times have you gone to Gallery and seen that the thumbnails for all your most recent photos are blank? Perhaps you've stared at the screen for a while and started to see some of the thumbnails appearing... slowly. It's all a bit frustrating. But it pays to work with Gallery rather than just complain about it. Gallery can only construct thumbnail images, saving them to its database, while it's actually running. So opening Gallery, moaning because the thumbnails aren't all there and then closing it again really won't help matters.

Instead, open Gallery when you've got a moment and then leave it (in its thumbnail view) running in the background while you get on with your life, perhaps doing something else on your smartphone. When you switch back, you'll see all the thumbnails neatly constructed and in place. And, importantly, even if you close Gallery down and then re-open it, the thumbnails will still all be there, instantly, because they'll have been saved to your smartphone's internal disk.

Having picked up a reputation as being a very slow application, Gallery is actually quite speedy once you've let it build the thumbnails. On my editorial Nokia 6630, I currently have over 300 photos (mainly on expansion card) and the thumbnails for these can be scrolled down the screen faster than the eye can follow.

I've installed TomTom MOBILE 5 on my Nokia 6680 and the icon's there in the applications screen, but when I activate it the screen just goes white as if it was starting OK and then the icon reappears. Any ideas?

It's almost certainly low RAM (i.e. the dynamic memory used for running applications) - TomTom MOBILE 5 is extremely hungry! Press and hold the Menu key and you'll see anything that's currently running. Close down anything non-essential (either by switching to it and using 'Exit' or by pressing the 'C' key from the pop-up list). After this, you should have around 7 or 8MB of RAM free. TomTom MOBILE 5 should then start OK (it needs around 6MB).

I'm struggling at writing text quickly on my Nokia 6630 smartphone, even with the aid of T9 predictive text. One 'special' character I use a lot is 'carriage return' (i.e. end of paragraph). Surely there's got to be some quick way of entering this common stroke without having to bring up the 'Select symbol' list and then use seven keystrokes to select carriage return?

There is, after a fashion. You'll still need the 'Select symbol' list, but rather than navigating across and down to the symbol for carriage return, simply press navigator left. This takes you back past the first character in the table, wrapping round to the last one, which happens to be carriage return. So inserting a carriage return in your text is simply a matter of pressing and holding '*', then pressing navigator left and finally navigator 'in' to select it. A total of three keystrokes rather than nine, quite a saving!

I've fitted my wife out with a cheap Series 60 smartphone (a Nokia 6670) and need to get our 'master' contacts set over from my Nokia 9500 to her device. I've beamed the most used dozen or so entries, but I can't face beaming five hundred others! How can this be automated?

Well, in principle, you could set her smartphone up as a new device for synchronisation in PC Suite, but why risk messing up your sync settings when there's a simpler and easier way? First up, grab SmartvCard for both devices. Install this on the Nokia 9500 . The trial version is quite adequate for your use here, although do consider registering it if you use it again in the future. Press 'Export' on its front screen and wait while your Contacts are read in. Now press the 'Add All' command button and then 'Export'.

You'll end up with 'contacts.vcf', which needs sending over to the 6670. The only catch is that you can't do it directly by beaming, as Messaging leaps in on the Series 60 device and assumes control of the 'Business card'. Instead copy it over via MMC or RS-MMC (using File manager on the 9500).

Install SmartvCard for Series 60. Once started, select 'Import' and use the supplied file browser to navigate to your memory card and select 'contacts.vcf'. Once the entries are read in, use 'Add all'. Readers with older Series 60 devices should note that with large contact sets you may run into memory problems.

Having switched over from an old Psion Revo to a new Nokia 6680 Symbian-based smartphone, I'm having problems installing most of the programs I've downloaded. The error message is 'Installation security error, unable to install'. I spoke to Nokia and they say there is no security feature to prevent software installation.

The Nokia support team are mistaken, the newer Series 60 smartphones all have a security system in place for applications. By default it's set to just allow the installation of commercial programs that have been 'Symbian signed'. What you need to do is go to 'Tools | Manager | Options | Settings' and set 'Software installation' to 'On'. While you're there, it's well worth setting 'Online certif. check' to 'Off', if it isn't already, as this may also catch you out when installing software from Nokia in the future. Now try installing the third party programs again and all should be well!

I have a Nokia N-Gage and am experimenting with using it as an MP3 player. The trouble is, tracks are shown with the wrong running lengths. Is there anything I can do to get these shown correctly? I've tried both MP3 and AAC file formats.

No, this is (yet another) long standing idiosyncrasy of the N-Gage's hardware MP3 player. All songs are shown as longer than they actually are, as you can verify by timing one of them or comparing it to the same track played on a different system. At least the bug is benign and doesn't actually affect the sound of the music!

My N-Gage is driving me crazy, there’s a bug which bites me every single day. After using the Music Player to play tunes from my 512MB MMC, I find that all my third party application icons have disappeared from the Menu screen and I have to restart the device. Is it just me?

No, this is unfortunately a well known problem. While Music Player is doing its thing (in hardware, remember), it is given exclusive access to your MMC. When Music Player closes down, Menu forgets to go off again and look at your MMC, which is presumably where all your third party applications are loaded.

The bug is obviously in the Menu task itself and you have two workarounds. One, as you’ve discovered, is to restart the N-Gage. The second is simply to kill the Menu task, using any of a number of system utilities that are readily available. Easiest and cheapest is probably the freeware TaskSpy, in which you simply highlight ‘Menu’ and press ‘C’ (Cancel). The next time you press the Menu button, the task will be restarted and will pick up your MMC-installed applications again.

I’m getting "Music player: system error" when I try to play MP3s on my N-Gage.

This is down to a bug in the N-Gage itself. You can get it working again by deleting the file 'playlist.dat' in the root directory of your MMC and then restarting the smartphone.

Performance

Help! I've been trying out the freeware Autolock, which locks my smartphone keypad after a set number of seconds, but I've now decided that I don't want it after all and I've removed it from my Nokia N-Gage. The trouble is that the N-Gage still locks the keypad after a couple of minutes, even though the utility is long gone. Is there something else I need to do in the smartphone's settings?

Yes. Autolock works at quite a low level in Symbian OS Series 60 and its effects remain even after removal. The trick is to power down your smartphone and restart the operating system. Hopefully your keypad will now stay happily unlocked.

Hardware

My Nokia smartphone doesn't seem to take long to get through a full battery charge. I've read tips about checking for rogue programs in memory and I regularly use TaskSpy, but by the end of a day on the road the battery's almost always very low. Do you think it's charging properly?

As you seem to have the software side covered, you're right to look at the hardware instead. I suspect that it's the battery itself rather than the circuitry. Luckily, with most of Nokia's Symbian smartphones using the same battery (BL-5x, for around £10), it's easy to buy a replacement and simply slot it in. Batteries don't have an infinite life and replacing yours should give your smartphone a whole new lease of life.

My new Nokia smartphone has turned off by itself. I thought it was the battery and I tried to charge it but the phone didn't show any sign that it was plugged in. I tried to turn it on again but it only showed a white screen and after 2 sec turned off again. Will flashing it to the latest firmware help to solve the problem?

The smartphone is turning itself off because, in its opinion, the battery doesn't have enough power left to support it. The fact that there's no animated charging icon when plugged in is a bad sign; this should appear even with the phone nominally turned off. The problem may be as simple as your charger being faulty, beg or borrow another one from a Nokia-owning friend (the chargers are nearly all identical) and try again. If this still doesn't work, try removing the battery completely for a minute or two (to reset all the electronics) and then try charging again. As a last resort try changing the battery as well, in case this has failed catastrophically. If you still haven't got anywhere (very unlikely), your smartphone hardware is itself faulty and you need to head for your nearest service centre.

Miscellaneous

I'd been trying out trial versions of some utilities on my Nokia S60 smartphone and after installing the last one, suddenly the smartphone rebooted itself. Or rather it tried to. Now when I power it on, all I get is the work 'Nokia' in big letters and then it starts again, over and over. I realise that the problem is self-inflicted here and it serves me right for fiddling too much, but what can I do to get my smartphone back to factory defaults and start syncing my data back onto it?

All Series 60 version 2 smartphones (from the Nokia 6600 onwards) have a special 'reformat' function built into their ROM, but you have to know exactly how to activate it and need to be fairly dexterous. Hold down the following three buttons: Green (call answer), '*' and '3'. While continuing to hold these buttons, press the power button and switch on the phone. Keep holding the three buttons down, counting to ten slowly and then release them. The device will restart again within a few seconds, and when it comes back up it should present the same location/time/date dialogs as when you first got it. All your data on the internal disk will be gone, but then so also will the rogue files and applications. Restore from your last good backup or re-sync with Outlook as necessary.

The stereo headset supplied with my Nokia smartphone isn't bad for listening to music on the go, but when I'm in a quiet environment (like my boat or caravan) I'd like to use my own set of professional headphones. Can the two be plugged together?

Yes, you can adapt the standard Nokia Pop-Port to accept normal headphones by using Nokia's new Audio Adapter AD-15. This plugs into the Pop-Port and provides a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone socket. There is one slight catch, though. Even though you may not have ever tried this feature, the standard (supplied) HDS-3 headset includes a microphone and call answering/terminating button. So if a call comes in, you just press the button and talk away. The AD-15 doesn't include a microphone, so you need to unplug the adapter in order to make or receive a phone call. Still, if you're out to relax with some music, you probably don't want to be bothered with incoming calls anyway!

Despite Nokia's pretty good manual and despite me surfing a number of popular web sites, I'm still struggling with the Series 60 interface and get confused easily. Isn't there a 'Beginners' book for people like me?

Symbian produced a short booklet 'Smartphones for Beginners' in 2004, although this covered all Symbian OS devices and didn't really go into the depth you need. Of roughly the same length (and exactly the same title) but geared specifically for your device is my PDF book available free on the Internet. You can download it from 3lib.ukonline.co.uk/dummies.htm . If this doesn't answer all your questions, try contacting me, as PDF books are far easier to add to than the paper variety!

My Nokia 6630 is quite an early example and I've had few problems with it. I've read quite a bit about making sure to keep Symbian smartphones upgraded to the latest firmware version, but I'm worried about losing data and about the inconvenience of being without my device. Is it all worth it and what should I do to ensure I keep all my information?

One of the first rules of computing is that if something's actually working, don't fiddle with it! Having said that, it is always a good idea to keep PDAs and smartphones up to date, as there will be bug fixes behind the scenes that may prevent you hitting problems in the future. The latest Nokia 6630 firmware version in the UK is currently at 4.03.18, you should upgrade if you've still got one with firmware starting '2.' You can find out the version number of your firmware by going to the standby screen and typing '*#0000#'. You shouldn't have to do without your smartphone for more than a day, most service centres will do the job (in warranty, of course, as the 6630 is less than a year old) in a few hours.

Before you go, take out your DV RS-MMC card, then connect your device to PC Suite and do a 'full' backup of the main (internal) disk. When complete, turn the 6630 off and remove the SIM card as well. Once the device has been upgraded, pop in your SIM and memory card, power it up and check it boots OK, using the same keypress to check the new software version. Finally, 'Restore' your data using PC Suite. Once thing you'll almost certainly have to do is to 're-pair' with other Bluetooth devices, but this only takes a few seconds.