As someone who has owned a P800, P900, and now a P910i, I’ve experienced the same issue with all three phones. Over the weekend, without warning, my phone completely flipped out and required a master reset. I received a text message, replied, put the phone down, picked it up 10 minutes later, and the phone just locked up.

Pulled the battery out, powered it back on, and tried again. Same problem. After trying various options, and confirming that my SIM card was not corrupted (by trying it it another handset), the only option was to give my P910i a master reset.

Unfortunately, any attempt to go into any menu resulted in the phone crashing. Luckily, I had a backup of my phone (though it was over three months old), and initiated a restore. In typical fashion, my PC rebooted without warning 80% into the restore, though at least by then the phone was working enough to get into the master reset menu and get everything working again.

Annoyingly, I lost an excellent MacOSX theme I was using, which I can’t find anywhere online, and I don’t have a backup. Having said that, I’m just thankful that my phone is working again!

When they work, Smartphones are great, but with all three of my SonyEricsson handsets experiencing these random crashes, I think SE need to improve the reliability of their smartphones. Several Orange SPV owners I know have also had similar reliability issues with their phones.

As phones get more complex, and scare away the older generation, it’s no wonder that Kyocera’s simple phone has been a hot seller in Japan tapping into the market of children and old people who just want a basic phone without all the million extras.

But all said and done, I still love technology

Scott Hanselman has the 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List, which is worth a look.

I’ve been using a few of the tools on the list… Notepad2 is a brilliant replacement to Notepad, though it falls over when working with large files (as Jeff Atwood points out in Notepad strikes back).

There’s a whole stack of useful tools over at SysInternals. Like Scott, I also love ProcExp which is a great help with removing spyware which AdAware and Spybot can’t remove.

Check out the full list on Scott’s blog!

There’s a new people network in town, and it’s going to be big! Founded by Nick Swan and Flemming Madsen, ConnectViaBooks is a network designed around books, allowing people to connect with one another based on their reading interests.

Connect with people who love the same books as you do!
Ever read a great book and wanted to discuss it with someone?
Ever wanted to find people locally who like the same books as you do?
Find people who share your interests, your hobbies or just read the same books.

Registration is free, and takes 2 minutes. Once registered, you can enter a list of books that you own. When this is done, you can search for people who own the same books, narrowing down the search by location and other criteria.

So, what are you waiting for? C’mon, let’s ConnectViaBooks! Don’t you wanna see what I’m reading?

With my fiancee on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I’ve been using Skype a lot more to keep in touch. Calls to the US using SkypeOut are amazingly cheap at only 1.2p/minute (unfortunately, my fiancee is still on dial-up, so we can’t really take advantage of free skype-to-skype calls).

After using a headset for a few days, I decided to invest in a Skype phone, and purchased the CyberphoneK which seems to be a popular handset. There are also cordless phones, but these are significantly more expensive costing more than double the price of the standard handset.

The device was relatively easy to set up – plug into the USB port, install the skype integration software, and voila! I was up and running in under 10 minutes.

Although the device generally works well, I have had some weird issues with people on the end being unable to hear me, me being unable to hear them, etc. These generally seem to be configuration issues, and can probably be resolved by some fiddling around with the windows audio settings.

However, I’d like to see the Skype phone (or other VoIP phone) idea taken further, and made even more user friendly. It must be possible to create a phone with the VoIP software built in. The device could have an ethernet connector that can be connected straight to a network (or maybe even make it wireless?), configured via a web interface (similar to configuring a wireless router) and used to make calls without needing a PC or Windows. That’s when I can see my parents taking advantage of this great technology!

Overall though, I am impressed. My fiancee is very happy too

Big thanks to Skype and VoIPVoice – Good work folks!