Last year my wife got me a really keen swissbit MP3-player/Swiss Army Knife gadget for my birthday.

It made a pretty darn good MP3 player for walking, since I didn’t have to worry about destroying a hard disk, and it made a pretty decent, uh, well, knife, nail file, and scissors. It doesn’t really have a lot of knifey bits, but it’s a swiss army knife that plays MP3s and that’s really good enough for me.

Swissbit, knowing that they produced a product that didn’t have to try very much harder to be cool, really didn’t try very hard after they came up with the “It’s a knife that plays music” concept, so I did have a couple of gripes – nothing serious, just the sorts of things that fall short of perfection.

It doesn’t have any kanji support, and I couldn’t use it as a drive under Windows (it was my first introduction to the concept of “MTP” devices, which was pretty educational) and if you plugged it in to a PC and launched Windows Media Player before it had a chance to charge for a bit, Windows Media Player would crash very very hard. It was the crashing Media Player thing that really vexed me.

Still, these are pretty minor gripes and I learned to work around them. Mostly just a matter of making sure to plug the player in at least 30 minutes before I wanted to sync anything to it.

Yesterday I decided to see if they’d done anything about these, and I found that there was a new firmware version that let you use it as a removable disk AND seems to have fixed the crashing media player thing. It also added OGG support and a bunch of general usability stuff.

It installed with no problems, and the player is greatly improved by it.

Still no kanji support, but I can deal with that.

Flush with the heady glow of success, I decided to see what else I could find new firmware for…

I settled on my phone.

Nokia isn’t too fussy about keeping their firmware updates locked away. Download their updater tool, plug in your phone, it will go out and find the newest stuff and hook you RIGHT up.

I am no fool, though.  Before I went updating any firmware, I used their PC Suite software and a cheap USB-to-Nokia adapter cable and backed up all my contacts, photos, and so on.

The firmware update went without a hitch. I was kind of hoping for Unicode support, but it didn’t happen.

About all I knew for sure is that the firmware version is higher than it used to be and in theory that’s better.

…Then things start going a little awry.

The new firmware disabled the USB support of the phone. It can still talk to stuff via bluetooth, but no more USB. Most unexpected.

All those contacts I backed up to the PC… are still safely stored on the PC, but now the two can’t communicate. No Bluetooth on the PC, no USB on the phone, I am stumped.

My wife suggests I try my laptop.

It has a button on it to enable and disable bluetooth – it’s right next to the button that enables and disables the wireless LAN adapter. I am stunned at the wisdom of her suggestion and decide to try installing the Nokia software on it.

I boot the laptop, I press the button with the bluetooth logo on it, I get a “No Bluetooth Device” message, I curse a bit and google it.

Turns out that, yes, my Acer Aspire 9300 DOES have a button with the bluetooth logo on it, but it doesn’t come with a bluetooth module installed. If I DID go out and install a third-party bluetooth module in it, that button would enable and disable it. This is of little use to me.

I glare at the PC with the contacts safely backed up, I glare at the traitorous phone, and I glare a bit in the vague direction of Taiwan because I just think the Acer company deserves to be glared at.

Then I remember playing around with iSync on our Mac mini a few months ago, and I take the phone out to our living room where the Mac lives, re-pair the Mac with the phone, download the iSync module for Nokias, and suddenly I have the 62 contacts I synced to the Mac back in June back on the phone. I say a small prayer in the name of The Steve, Who Forgiveth me even though I Owneth Not An iPhone.

Since June, I’ve only added five contacts, and those were quickly transferred from the PC by a complicated process involving reading stuff off the screen and pushing buttons on the phone. I pulled the MMC card out of the phone, dropped it in a memory card reader, and moved all my ringtones and wallpapers back that way… suddenly, it was like my phone hadn’t changed a bit!

Except I needed to re-set up, oh, my gmail account, and my web browser bookmarks that weren’t backed up, and… I’m sure I’ll find some more stuff. And, yeah, I lost USB support and about 90 minutes of my night that would have been better put to studying.

Not my best showing. A good “If it ain’t broke” lesson, though.

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 37/52.