Nokia E50 stuck in headset mode

Had a little heart attack this morning since I’m on a day trip to another location and suddenly my trusty phone — used for both work and personal communication (I think it’s called DuoBill and it’s pretty slick; no need for two phones that way) — appeared to think headphones were plugged in even when they weren’t. I couldn’t get the speaker or the microphone built into the handset to work at all. I could get a bluetooth headset connection established to the phone, but the phone wouldn’t send or receive audio to the bluetooth headset. I tried turning the phone on and off and even removing the battery for a few minutes. None of it worked.

Then I googled something the following terms

Nokia E50 headset stuck

and found a good tip: try drying out the phone guts with a hairdryer.* So I did. First with hot air, and then that made me nervous, so I switched to cool air. I aimed the hairdryer into the port where the headphones would plug in (the stupid Nokia-specific weirdo port for synchronizing and hands-free headsets and all that), and into the cavity where the battery resides.

That seemed to work, but I’m not confident that it’ll stay working, because since then periodically this morning, I’ve gotten a beep and a warning from my phone that says “Zubehör nicht unterstützt” (“Unsupported accessory” — my phone’s set up with German for the OS) even though I haven’t tried using any accessory with it since then.

Cross your fingers that it’ll stay functional over the weekend; I’m going to need this phone for our upcoming trip to Berlin.

*So when did my phone get wet? I got caught in a rainstorm Monday of last week, but I’m pretty sure my phone was in my backpack then and well-protected. And today was the first day I saw any strange behavior. I’m stymied. Maybe it’s just time for work to kick in for a new phone.

headache prevention

I’m pretty sure at least part of the reason people feel so crappy after long flights is the drone of the engines and air rushing past and internal cabin systems. So when I saw a pair of noise-cancellation headphones before our most recent trip over at woot.com — purveyor of geeky stuff at can’t-bear-to-pass-it-up prices — I knew I had to try it. Especially because it was not a several hundred dollar pair of the big-name headphones. In fact, even amazon.de wants 170 € for the same set.

Nope, these cost a mere 60 bones that day on woot.com. I’d say they were worth it, because we could watch the in-flight movies without having to blast our ears with volume to overcome the ambience, and just generally talk to each other without having to yell. These were great: carrying case, adaptor kits for various jack formats, and they were even pretty comfortable for a couple hours at a time.

I should have bought two of them.