What happens when you put a Nokia 6610 mobile phone through a washing machine cycle? Um, it stops working, as I found out yesterday.
Pulled it apart and left it in front of an electric heater for a few hours, put it back together and — voila — it worked, sort of. Actually, it worked in every respect except the most important one: it won’t connect to the mobile network. Drat. My theory: because it was switched on, the first time it tried to access the network (which mobiles do every few minutes when idling) the suds made it cook something.
Had to get a new phone. Thought it’d be nice to transfer the several dozen contacts I had in the phone memory into the new phone via infrared. But, of course, you can’t access any menus unless the card has a SIM card. Both phones for this purpose. Lucky I had a spare one I could put in for a while, but isn’t this an engineering oversight? Surely when you upgrade your phone you want to be able to IrDA all your stuff over. But you can’t without the SIM.
Even with the SIM, you can’t IrDA over either MMS or SMS messages. The only way to transfer those is via the network. So, it seems, the infrared communciation facility of the Nokia phone is of quite marginal value.