21 September 2007
I like my Blackjack
Posted by Barnabas under: How To .
I got a new phone a few weeks ago: the Samsung Blackjack, otherwise known as the SGH-i607. It works great with Skweezer, and since it’s a Windows Mobile device, I’ve also gotten a chance to see it in action with the Yahoo! Go and Live applications, both of which have their pluses (Flickr/Maps & Directions respectively) and minuses. Overall I’m very pleased with the new phone though.
One thing that has been a little odd has been the fact that sometimes my network connection has trouble restarting. After the phone has been idle for a while, and more often when I’ve traveled (perhaps switching cell towers?) my phone’s browser would be unable to make any connections. Navigating to new pages would show “Connecting” in the status bar for a few minutes before returning an error. Network-enabled applications such as Yahoo! Go would also stop working, showing time-out errors or “unable to refresh” messages. I called up Cingular AT&T tech support and they told me it was probably a coverage problem: they claimed you need at least four bars to browse the web, whereas you can send SMS and talk with fewer bars of course. That is only half the story, as this problem sometimes crops up even with great signal. Fortunately, I finally found the cause and solution.
After downloading a utility from Microsoft that tests the network, I concluded that it was probably an IP/DHCP problem. If it were a computer, I could renew my IP address at the command line or use the “repair my network connection” utility in Windows which does the same behind the scenes. How do you renew your IP address on a Windows Mobile phone? You can restart the phone for ten minutes, buy network utility apps for this, or you can use this little trick, which is quick and free.
- Access the Wireless Manager application. You can quickly get to it on the Blackjack by pressing the power button on the top and then selecting #2.
- Disable the phone. This is “airplane mode”.
- Enable the phone.
- Wait until the phone displays the network is available. On my phone at my house, it shows “Home Service” (which is a lie) then “Emergency Service” (which is disturbing) before settling on “AT&T”.
- Resume network-dependent activities. It is usually not necessary to restart the offending application, just retry whatever it was that failed, such as refreshing content or navigating to a link.
I can not yet figure out how to make YouTube mobile work with the built-in Media Player. However I stopped trying to make it work after I realized that I do not care to watch YouTube on my mobile phone.
One Comment so far...
protijy Says:
12 November 2007 at 12:02 pm.
I have the same issue ATT said same thing a service area issue which is BS as if I reboot the phone it works fine this is really getting annoying!