My Motorola E398 was dead - and it's all my fault

My Mototrola E398 was so dead that I had to send it to the Causeway Bay Motorola repair center.

It's was all started yesterday when I started wondering if I should spend some money to buy a TransFlash card to trun my mobile phone to a MP3 player. I brought with me the headphone that came with the E398 and tried it out this morning when I commuted to work. The sound quality was OK was the control was sluggish. But it was not the worst.

The worst part of E398 Mp3 playback support was that it got juggled once in a while. It's like every 10 seconds it skipped like 0.25 seconds. Very annoying. And it seemed to happen on file bigger than 1Mb. All my file (MIDI + MP3) which is smaller than 1Mb has no problem. And two of the bigger file I tired (a 1.5Mb audio book file, and a 4Mb song file) both failed to play smoothly.

So I started to wonder if upgrading the firmware may solve the problme.

Big mistake.

And on the top of that, there's a rumor that I can convert my mobile into a iTune phone. That gives me more incentive to do the advanture.

I follow this update firmware procedure and try to find the new firmware.

First, I found this new update. DAted back to 2005-05. Not current enough. However, I then find this newer and more advanturous one. So I tried this.

It required the machine to be in Flashcard mode. Fine, but caused by office machine to spend a lot of time to find the driver.

And then the firmware update apps started. AFter about 10 minutes, the firmware update completed.

And when I restarted the phone, it blinked, darken, blinked, darken. Never went back to the regular mode.

So I have to go to the Causeway Bay Moto repair center and turned in my E398.

At this momment I am still waiting for the repair verdict.

But then, this may be a good thing since now the repair center will have to refresh my firmware. Maybe they will give me the firmware that solves the mp3 playback problem.