I’ve had my E71 for nearly two years now and that’s given me ample time to dis­cover what an unmit­i­gated pile of crap it truly is. When things work, it’s fine. The GPS is kinda cute, and seri­ously handy, and I really like the BBC iplayer. In fact it’s prob­a­bly the main app I use.

The iplayer has caused me grief in the past, time­outs and freez­ing, solved only by the highly tech­ni­cal process of throw­ing away the router and get­ting another one. But that was a while ago now and it’s been great of ever such a long time. Until two days ago. Lis­ten­ing to iplayer then after about 10 min­utes, it stopped. Prob­a­bly just a fluke, I thought.

Over the last cou­ple of days I’ve tested it a few times and sure enough, I’m get­ting the old favourite:

Not an uncom­mon error mes­sage for the E71. Var­i­ous sug­ges­tions are offered, includ­ing man­u­ally set­ting IP address, DNS set­tings and tweak­ing router set­tings. All tried, all failed. I installed a nifty util­ity called IfInfo that told me my phone’s net­work set­tings, and the router was pretty sure it was there too. I tried a util­ity called Nokia Device Sta­tus, from the Beta Labs, but all I got was “Licence Expired”, so that was a waste of time.

More exper­i­ments showed that iplayer would run for a few min­utes, then time­out with the Gate­way error. Every­thing else on the LAN still hap­pily con­nected to the inter­net. Inter­est­ingly, the E71 would then refuse to con­nect to the inter­net at all using any browser (tried opera plus the default), via the wire­less router (Zyxel) or Wire­less access points (Netgear).

One of the more promis­ing avenues was installing a util­ity called HandyWi. This imme­di­ately got me con­nected and I thought my prob­lems were solved. But then, after about 5 or 10 min­utes the famil­iar Time­out and Gate­way error mes­sages. But I could still ini­ti­ate new ses­sions, they just didn’t last very long. Which kinda sug­gests this might be some­thing about the way the E71 default con­nec­tiv­ity soft­ware doesn’t work. Dur­ing all this I also rein­stalled the firmware and restored from backup.

Curi­ously no-one has sug­gested climb­ing to the top of a very tall build­ing and chuck­ing the E71 out of a win­dow, or plac­ing it on a set of rail­way tracks, or hit­ting it many many many times with a very very very big ham­mer. My con­tract expires in a few months and I shall count the days until I can get rid of this wretched machine.

In the mean­time, it’s Big Red Switch time. A fac­tory reset, rein­stall, then start again from a very early backup, and we shall see what we shall see.

Update: 10 Jan 2012

Hmmmm, inter­est­ing. I wiped and restarted from an old backup and the prob­lem per­sisted. I tried using man­ual address­ing instead of DHCP and the prob­lem per­sisted. I gave up. And now, well, it’s work­ing again. Some­one, some­where, is, as they say, hav­ing a laugh. I did won­der whether ‘some­thing had changed’ at the BBC end given the prob­lems watch­ing video on some smart­phones. It seems a bit unlikely, and wouldn’t explain the con­nec­tiv­ity issues with my E71 and browsers. But it’s work­ing for now, until it stops again. Ho hum.