New life into an old Nokia 7610

Nokia 7610

As promised I follow with an article on how to breathe new life into an aging phone.

Well, the 7610 was never lightning fast and over the years it became more and more troublesome, to the point where my wife thought it was about to break. She also got a good deal on a 500 Mb/month data plan so new software was in order. Although the prospect of a new gadget in the house was appealing I decided to see what was to be done with this one.

Since this was the first smartphone in the family, when it was new, we tried all kinds of apps on it installing and uninstalling a lot of stuff. Since the original card was small some were installed in the phone’s memory. Even if today is good practice to install your apps on the phone’s memory so you can swap cards easily it’s not the same with a phone with just a few megs of space.

So what I did to get it up to speed:

  1. I went out and searched the biggest RS-MMC card I could find. I managed to find a 1 Gb card for just a few bucks. It was the last in stock 🙂
  2. I used Nokia PC Suite to back-up contacts and messages (I didn’t use the back-up tool - that one, in my opinion, also backs up a lot of junk, junk you try to get rid of in the first place).
  3. I pressed Green * 3 and started the phone, I kept them pressed untill Formatting apeared on screen. This is for a complete software reformat.
  4. I added the contacts, calendar, messages backed up at step 2.
  5. I installed the following:
    1. slick - for messenging
    2. opera mobile - for faster browsing
    3. gmail - for full email access, it’s slow but works, for the quick inbox check I just configured the default email client
    4. Mobireader - for the occasional reading on the road
    5. Frozen bubble for S60
    6. Adobe pdf, quickoffice - she got some free versions with the phone, it’s enough for what she needs on the road.
    7. Dictionaries - she’s a professional translator - interpreter so those should come handy

Everything was installed on the 1 Gb mmc card leaving the phone memory free so now the phone is able to receive big files via bluetooth, and has enough space for contacts, calendar and so on.

Even if the phone is S60v2 I could still find a wealth of software available, many free, some payed.

The phone still occasionally locks up when answering a call but not as often as it did before, but again this is a problem that all Nokia 7610 phones I saw had. It’s still slow, especially when browsing or running the gmail java app, but it’s usable again, even for some light web, messenger, email tasks.