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.

transferring files from a nokia mobile phone to Kubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04)

I had high hopes for Kubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron) with regard to bluetooth transfers from our mobile phones to our computers. Apparently it got better for most of the world from 7.10 (the Gutsy Gibbon) to the current version, but not for users of Symbian-based phones like our Nokia E50 and E61i models.

Then I noticed apparently receiving bluetooth file transfers from our Mac mini to our Kubuntu Linux machine running 8.04 worked just fine — so why not from our phones? Was it related to our phones or to the software on our Linux machine?

It’s apparently related to the bluez-utils package in the Ubuntu repositories. A user posted on launchpad.net (original post here) that using the bluez-utils package from the Debian “sid” (unstable) repositories worked for him.

So, get the unstable bluez-utils package from here, install it with

sudo dpkg -i bluez-utils_3.30-3_i386.deb

reboot, and that’s it…at least, that’s how I did it. I hope I’ve saved someone some self-hair-pulling and googling.