Just a quick note for myself to remember how to get to the service menu on my se k750i.

Press the following sequence: right * left left * left *

Got it from a thread on the neowin.net forums.

<rant>
Yesterday I finally got my SE k750i back from service. I must say I’m not impressed by how OnOff, the store here in Sweden where I bought the phone, handled the whole thing.

About two months ago the camera application on my phone stopped working. After upgrading the software as recommeded by Sony-Ericsson’s support failed to correct the issue I dropped the phone off for service at store where I bought it. Contrary to what SE’s support had told me that the service would take a maximum of 15 days OnOff told me it could take up to 30 days, they have their own people doing the service I was told. That’s a long time to be without one’s new phone.

A month later I got a letter from OnOff that told me the service would not be done within the promised month, adding about 9 days to the service time. Fine, I thought and waited. This time, luckily, they had apparently guessed the amount of time needed correctly because a month and a week after I turned my phone in I was told it was repaired.

Unfortunatly things didn’t turn out so well after all, because about 15 minutes after I had picked the phone up I noticed it had no reception what so ever. Somehow during the service of the camera they had broken the antenna, how could they have missed that the phone was completely unusable as a phone after they had serviced it? Shouldn’t they at least try and turn the phone on as a test? It would hardly take much of their time. Anyways, I had to turn it in a second time, third actually since the first phone I got when I bought it didn’t work at all so I got a new one the day after I bought it. And now, two months later I got it back, and it seems like they have finally fixed it.

The conclusion is, if you are in Sweden, never buy anything from OnOff that could possibly break.
</rant>

Carlo Longino has written an interesting piece on how DRM will kill the mobile music.

I’ve had some similar experiences to those described in the post. When contacting an artist, Mustasch, about what to do if the copy protection on their latest album made it unplayable, or stopped me from copying the songs to my mp3 player, I was told that if I couldn’t rip them I could download the songs illegally from the internet.

When it comes to copy protected songs bought online I’ve been instructed only to buy songs that allows me to burn them as a music-cd and then rip them as unprotected mp3s so I can play them on my mp3 player.

So what is the point of the copy protection now again? Or maybe my use case is so uncommon that it isn’t considered a problem. Who knows. I know one thing, I want to be able to pay for the music I listen to, as long as I can listen to it easily on any of my devices. Making it more difficult for a paying customer is not the way to go.

Today I took the plunge, created a temporary visa card, registered on allofmp3.com and sent them some money. It all went very smooth, and then after I installed their little browse, preview and download application I bought some albums. When buying you can choose from a multitude of formats, wma, mp3, uncompressed and so on, and the bitrate. You pay per MB downloaded so mp3s with a somewhat high bitrate seemed best to me. My phone can only play mp3s so..

Why are other online music stores not this simple? For a service this simple to use I wouldn’t mind paying more though. ~$1 per album is way below the limit I am willing to pay for an album, if I get the songs in a format I can use.

Albums I bought:
Gorillaz – Demon Days
Green Day – American Idiot
Audioslave – Out of Exile
Foo Fighters – In Your Honor

I wonder if any of them are any good?

No idea how it started but my relatively new cell phone started malfunctioning. First the built in camera application stopped working. It simply wouldn’t start. Then while I was trying to troubleshoot I noticed that if I didn’t remove the battery before starting the phone I wouldn’t get any reception. The tip I got from SE support was to install the latest version of the software for the phone which I did.

A process which required me to install new drivers, applications and what not on my windows machine. Why does everything have to be so difficult?

Anyways, that didn’t help but resulted in the shortcut function of the phone resetting everytime I turned the phone off. Great. So now I’ve turned it in for service, extremely annoying.. I miss my radio 🙁