Review of Nokia 6280 on Three UK’s 3g network

March 18, 2007 11:02 pm

Review of Nokia 6280 on the Three 3g network in the UK.

This kind of got a bit longer than I was expecting, but I hope by chucking a few keywords in here and there, I can help other people to find solutions to things (like the phone root certificate problem) a little quicker, and all in one place. This mainly applies to the UK Three 3G network V5.92 software version of the 6280, but may apply to other phones.
Four main sections to this:

Purchase (how I found the phone)
The phone and its problems
When Things Go Wrong
Useful Links

————————————————————
The Purchase

My old Nokia 2600 was starting to die, and every time I went out, I would take the mobile phone, a camera, an mp3 player and a radio.
I had a look on t’internet, but was rather wary of scams. And so it was that I found myself trawling the high street playing hardball with various tossy salesmen and girls.

Then I went into another store (not named in case some twot complains). The usual patter, the “pretend friend” salesgirl who went all flirty and drew crap like hearts and x’s all over the “here’s the deal I can offer you” bit of paper she was writing out. Actually, it wasn’t a bad deal, but when I got to the “look, I’m going to think about it stage”, she sent the manager over.
I explained that my reluctance was not the deal, it was the way the refunds worked - having to remember to claim chequebacks in exactly the right way - the claim form must arrive between 9 and 9:30 on the third Tuesday after the last full moon, and be opened by a lady called Doris.

As had been perfected at so many other stores, I stood and said “thanks, but I’m going to keep wandering, I might be back”. At which point, the manager pulled £60 out of his pocket and said “would this help?”.

I sat back down.

I’d already done the “what would it take” sums in my head. This tipped the balance.

Here’s how I worked it out (probably wrongly)

Previously, I was averaging about £15 per month on PAYG.
The texts were 5p, the calls were 10p with Tesco. If I compare it to the 18 month minimum contract, it would work out at: 18months * £15 = £270…and no new phone.

With the extra £60, the contract worked out like this on paper:

6months*£4.99 = £29.94
6months*£17.50 = £105
6months*£35 = £210
Round to £345

If we ignore the “wow factor” of the fact that I get more minutes and texts than I was using before, then we can look at it thus:

I would be paying £75 more over the 18 months than if I stuck with Tesco.
A “sim free” 6280 is about £185 from a “proper” shop (ie:not stolen!)
So, £185 - £75 = £110. Therefore, the phone is “costing” me £110.
However, in spite of being appallingly bad build quality, and riddled with bugs like “there’s no way to make the backlight stay on > 10 seconds, even while playing a game”, it’s still not bad. It does all I want it to.

The plan I went for is this:
http://www.three.co.uk/personal/price_plans_/pay_monthly_/plan_detail.omp?cid=1124817779969
I get 400 minutes and 250 texts, 25 UK video call minutes, 25 UK picture or video messages and £5 of downloads/internet/TV/whatever.

BUT if I look at it this way:
400 minutes @ 10p = £40
250 texts @ 5p/min £12.50
so that’s £52.50/month *18 = £945

From what people tell me, an MMS message is about 35p and a video call is about 50p/min (trust me; it’s not even worth it when it’s free!)

Oh, and you get £5 a month to spend on whatever… TV (50p/day), downloads, games (not worth it - tiny and unplayable) etc.

So if I add that:
£5*18 = £90
25 MMS * 35p =£8.75 * 18 = £157.50
25 video * 50p = £12.50 * 18 = £225

If I add the WHOLE lot together (which I didn’t do when factoring it
all out as I’m not likely to use much of the last bits), for an 18
month cost of £345 I’m getting a grand total of £1602.50 of product
and phone!
Which I declare to be an actual bargain!

D’ya think I spent too much time working all this out?!?! Found a better plan?

I checked my stats at the end of the first month
I’ve managed to get to 5-and-a-half hours from the end of the month
with the following left:
Voice minutes 14
Video minutes 0
Text messages 6
Downloads £0.05
Inclusive video or photo messages 0

Not bad timing! And the packet data log says I’ve downloaded 39.11Mb and uploaded 9.132Mb in the last month. That’ll be the tv and stuff
probably. Not going to surf the net much

One bizarre thing - mobile phone insurance (wangled free from my bank to stop me leaving) takes 21 days to kick in. And a coded keylock is essential, then if someone nicks it, they can’t even use the minutes up. Annoying to unlock each time, but infinitely less annoying than having a chav use your minutes!

————————————————————
The phone itself.
I don’t need to tell you what it’s got - the Nokia site can tell you that. But here’s how I found it in practice:

I once read someone asking “What is 3g”?
The answer given was “It’s an effective way of reducing your battery life by 40%”.
Yes, yes it is. That’s all I’ll say on that! If you like a battery life of under one day if you even think about doing anything remotely 3g-ish, even when the battery’s fully conditioned, then 3g is for you!

The build quality is quite poor - I found myself back in the store within 20 minutes as, the first time I tried to slide the back of the phone off, the tacky silver coloured bit of plastic that covers the camera pinged off.

Also, the phone doesn’t feel like it slides open properly, and doesn’t leave enough room to press the top row of keys easily, so if you have large hands texting is no fun.

It crashes. Lots. The screen blanks for a second, then it comes back asking for pin code.
Nokia know about this - there’s no fix.

The backlight only stays on for 10 seconds. There’s NO way to fix this, and Nokia say this is due to some bizarre EU law that they can’t tell me about and

no-one’s ever heard of, about backlights being on for more than 10 seconds in case it’s distracting in a car.
This is daft - you’re driving along, the radio’s on, the dashboard lights are on, you’ve got your eyes open for bright yellow speed cameras, other cars with lights on are whizzing by, your brain’s processing object and hazards…but somehow you’re gonna crash because the backlight goes off after 30 seconds instead of 10!?!?
Don’t believe it for one moment - there’s a bug they seemingly can’t fix, and this is a weak cover-up.

When you send an MMS to many people at once, each recipient can see the other recipients when they do a reply via “reply all”.
Potentially a security problem, or very embarrassing!
There’s no documentation to tell you this and apparently no way of stopping it.

If you create an MMS and add a sound to a slide via “new sound” option, every other sound in that message will actually be the first sound. In other words, you have to record and save all your sounds first, and then add them to the message later. Definite bug.

The video player doesn’t have fast forward or rewind, even though there’s a setting for fast forward and rewind interval.
The Audio player has fast forward and rewind, even through there’s no setting for the fast forward and rewind interval.

I learnt that an MMS can contain as many object as will fit in 267k.
I sent 6 pics and a sound clip to several people. Works fine.
Although, one time when it fell back from 3g to “normal”, it took nearly 3 hours sending the MMS as a series of texts! Of course, it doesn’t use the text allowance, but it’s annoying having the “me me-me me me-me me” sound that radios pick up, all that time!
It seems totally random as to how much will arrive at the other end before it gets cropped - mostly, people get the first few pics, then something telling them to visit a website to see the rest.

You can’t save MMS messages to the PC.
You can’t save messages onto the memory card.
You can’t use a Three sim in any other type of phone, or those SIM copier/backup gadgets.

The camera’s not bad - for some examples of “second highest” quality see either
http://www.mythreewebsite.co.uk/36810
or more here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitaltoast/sets/72157600007407996/

Video calls are shocking - one to my brother had the sound out of synch (late) by nearly 50 seconds! Waste of time. As is mobile TV. The novelty very, very quickly wears off.

————————————————————
When Things Go Wrong:

I was bluetoothing some stuff and the phone was starting to play up.
So, I turned it off, left it a minute, and turned it back on. It asked me for the pin, then as soon as it got to saying “enter keypad security code” (or

something) that was it. The phone became totally unresponsive. If I rang the phone from another phone, I could hear the “ring ring” down the line, but the phone did nothing. But it DID keep the time correctly. I turned it off, took everything out - sim, memory card, battery..left it out for 20 mins, put it back…just the same.
It seemed to freeze right after the bluetooth symbol came on.
And the battery drained from full to near empty in under 2 hours.

So, I phoned up Three’s customer service department.
Shradeep in Bangalore diligently regurgitated a script and then I explained carefully that as soon as I’d entered the pin, the phone would freeze and the keypad did not work.
“OK please sir please, if I can please ask you please to please enter *0000#”.

Deep breath. I tried so hard not be rude.

Once I’d ever-so-slowly explained that frozen phone and non-working keypad made this tricky, he told me that I should get it couriered away for a firmware

upgrade.
I said that this would be great as I didn’t know there WAS a firmware upgrade, as I’d been told v5.92 was the latest.
It was, he said, and then we went through a cyclical argument until I got bored and gave up.

So then I phoned the place I bought it from.
“Duh” reached a new level.

I explained carefully that as soon as I’d entered the pin, the phone would freeze and the keypad did not work.
I also explained that I’d contacted Three’s customer services.

“You need to dial 3333 from your handset to get the phone repaired”.

What, on the handset I’d just explained didn’t work? Classy.

Eventually, I ended up in a Nokia service centre.
Apparently, it can take “up to 28 days”.

No, I don’t get a replacement phone.
No, the account isn’t put on hold.

I’m really not enjoying the experience so far!

————————————————————
Useful links

Top tip - synch your mobile with the internet and
Google Calendar - VERY VERY useful:
https://zyb.com/
http://www.gcalsync.com/

Links to forums:
Reviewcentre Three forum:
http://www.reviewcentre.com/forum210.html

3g Forum’s Nokia 6280 forum
http://www.3g.co.uk/3GForum/forumdisplay.php?f=496

Nokia Support Forums phone forum
http://discussions.nokia.co.uk/discussions/board?board.id=phones

Talk 3Gs 6280 forum
http://www.talk3g.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=106

I also found this comprehensive forum post listing more problems with the 6280
http://www.talk3g.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2381

How to convert movies onto a mobile
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=MediaCoder_Mobile_Phone_HOWTO
http://osnews.com/story.php/16983/Tutorial-Get-Your-Movies-on-Your-Cellphone/

Cheap memory cards: I got a 2gb miniSD card for £12:
http://www.mobymemory.com/

And cheap accessories come from these people:
http://www.directmobileaccessories.co.uk/

The gmail mobile app is great, but on the 6280 it just wasn’t working. The error was:
“Sorry, the Gmail mobile app will not work on your phone. Your phone doesn’t have the appropriate certificate to communicate with Gmail. Try accessing Gmail on your mobile browser at http://m.gmail.com”
Eventually, I found this blog:
http://tiensoon.blogspot.com/2006/11/gmail-mobile-app-is-great-but-doesnt.html
which in turn told me to point my phone at
https://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/support/rootcert/getrootcert.cer
And this made the gmail mobile app work

Something I’ve not found yet is an nbu decoder - so I can actually make some use of the backup files!
I’ve found and nfb decoder here: http://engo.de/nfb_decode.htm but Nokia decided to completely change the format and make it not backwards compatible (much to the annoyance of Nokia users upgrading their phones)

Oh, and finally, a general blog for all that’s new in the mobile industry: http://www.smstextnews.com/

Phew! I think that covers it - any questions?!?

Categories: my stuff

10 Responses to “Review of Nokia 6280 on Three UK’s 3g network”

Text To Screen » Blog Archive » Nokia 6280 and Three UK under an exhaustive spot light sent a pingback on March 19, 2007

[...] digitaltoast » Blog Archive » Review of Nokia 6280 on Three UK’s 3g network This kind of got a bit longer than I was expecting, but I hope by chucking a few keywords in here [...]

Rob Fisher wrote a comment on March 20, 2007

Rob writes (in quotes)

Hm, your cost analyses need to factor in a generous rate for your own time, effort and angst. I rate my time pretty highly — I’d rather spend £20 than spend half an hour doing stuff I don’t want to do. And time spent worrying and thinking about things I don’t want to think about costs even more.

(This is the argument I use when confronted with gas or electricity salespeople who want me to switch suppliers so I can save £12 a year, and it completely confounds them.)

Ah, well in my case, I’m saving about twice that every MONTH! But then, I didn’t go via a salesperson, I got an “online” account

I pay Orange about £35 a month and I get 100 minutes and 100 free texts. That’s what I use so that’s what I asked for

Er, I hate to break the news to you, but you’re paying 15p per text and call! Below, you tell me that “no-one is actually paying for calls at 10p per minute”.
Well, people on PAYG plans are, and you’d be better off with one of those.

and they gave me a customised (Orange Value Promise) plan — I couldn’t be bothered with their daft animal-named plans.

That includes about the amount of 3G data I use (for surfing and TomTom traffic) and (the best bit) Orange Care, which is worth the £4 a month to avoid worry and paid for itself several times over when I went swimming in the sea with my N80 in my pocket.

Again, you’re actually paying about £25 per month for those - £10 of your plan will be calls. (BTW, there’s no such thing as a “free phone/minute/text” - which is why companies aren’t allowed to call them that any more).

In your situation I’d have had a phone cross-shipped to me overnight.

That’s a benefit, but not one worth £300 a year to me.

The other thing is that all these so-called freebies aren’t really free. A lot of that £1602 is in stuff you can’t use (calls you don’t actually make). If you modify your behaviour to take advantage of a deal, that actually *costs* you in terms of time, effort, and worrying about whether you’re making the most of your deal or not. Also, it’s in no sense *worth* what they say, because no-one is actually paying for calls at 10p a minute, and no-one is really selling calls at 10p a minute (they’re all free or part of some deal or other).

I’ve saved more on my home phone bill by making all my calls from my mobile, so I’m having trouble seeing how you worked that one out!
I’ve got two days left in this month, and I have 18 texts left from my 250, and 7 minutes left from my 400.

The correct way to compare deals is by calculating each one’s value to *you*. For that you need to know roughly how you use your phone and how you value your own time, effort and worry. (I actually think you had it about right until you were swayed by the £60 and the freebies).

The freebies were part of the package - the £60? Just for playing hardball? That’s my job as a consumer - it cost me 5 minutes.

The backlight thing is wierd — on my phone the app can control the backlight, so, e.g. TomTom has a setting for backlight always-on, or backlight always-on-when-the-phone-is-connected-to-power.

Yeah. I think Nokia might be in trouble over this backlight thing - after telling everyone that it was due to EU regulations, myself and lots of others in the forums put a lot of sustained pressure on Nokia to name the regulation. They now say that’s not the case, it was a mistake, it’s just their choice to have random backlight times!

Personally, I think it was just shoddy development - they must be a little ashamed of the 6280!

mudassar wrote a comment on March 21, 2007

Hi I wrote a couple of times and since I can not unlock my phone I will write again.Please email me when you find the codes. Thank you
Nokia 6280
Country : paksitan
Operator : 3G
IMEI : 357603000872945

SMS Text News » Nokia 6280 and Three UK under an exhaustive spot light sent a pingback on April 10, 2007

[...] digitaltoast » Blog Archive » Review of Nokia 6280 on Three UK’s 3g network This kind of got a bit longer than I was expecting, but I hope by chucking a few keywords in here [...]

Rob Fisher wrote a comment on April 21, 2007

We seem to be talking the same language, at least. I probably should recalculate what it costs me. It’s not quite 15p per minute/text as I have a £400 phone that cost me something like £55 — so the phone subsidy offsets a lot of the line rental — but then again by my own argument “no-one really pays £400 for a phone”, but maybe PAYG people pay more.

As for my argument about modifying your behaviour to take advantage of a deal — it was a general point. If the deal really does save you money without costing you any effort, then great.

Maybe I should look into PAYG deals, but I’d want to be sure that I didn’t lose any benefits like the phone insurance — and being sure would take some effort. Agh!

Jonathan H wrote a comment on April 21, 2007

No, you’re better off with a contract if you want a “nice” phone.
Probably just not “that” contract! Get bargaining :)

fximi wrote a comment on May 14, 2007

this is a crappy phone.

in the 8 months that I’ve had it, it’s been repaired 7 times. For a variety of problems from the camera totally failing, to the screen blanking out (which happened twice), software problems (twice), stuck slide and another problem which i can’t remember.

yes, it looks great in the shop, and the first few hours you have it in your hands. Use it for a few days and you’ll see how terrible the ui of the phone is. Coming from a sony ericsson, I was shocked to see how terrible the design of the software in the 6280 was. Some operations were just so troublesome!

I haven’t had problems with the random reboots, but i did have the well-known “test mode” problem and “Phone Restricted” problems when I first acquired it. After a few times being repaired, its been alright so far.

The build quality is rubbish. After a couple of months the whole phone felt as if it was about to fall apart. The slide was rattling like hell(especially putting it down in a moving car). The silver edging looked like it was about to fall off.

Having used phones from sony ericsson(k700,z520,k800) and nokia n70, (and a few older ones), this has got to be the worse phone i’ve ever touched. I’ve never heard of any phone with this number of problems. Sure, the N70 has its own problems like the restarts when using bluetooth, or watching a video in realplayer, but after some updates it works great.

The 6288 doesnt seem any better. A relation has one which has a slide that feels like its about to fall off. A friend has one that the slide rail inside has rusted and its impossible to open the slide properly. Sounds similar to my phone to me.

Doesn’t seem that the problems are related to phones from any partiicular operator in any country. im all the way in singapore on the singapore telecom network and my phone was purchased directly from them. The 2 6288s mentioned are both on mobileone singapore.

Thought I’d want to try a nokia when i got this; the screen was fantastic compared to any se at that time. Nokia has totally let me down and I will not be considering a nokia for my next phone (which i am getting in about a week or two).

Jonathan H wrote a comment on May 14, 2007

Thanks for a great comment there, fixmi.
Glad to know others out there are suffering too.
Well, OK, I don’t mean it’s good YOU are suffering, it’s just good to know we’re not alone!