K700i update (Aug 5, 2005)



Lots of stuff to update on the K700i subject. Still have a love hate relationship with this phone.

First, Nexxcell never sent me my $50 rebate, and have since gone out of business. Bastards. Their site comes up as foncentral.com, so my guess is that they have something to do with one another and I wouldn't recommend doing business with them as a result.

Since my last post about the K700 I've had to send in my phone two more times. The last time Sony Ericcson sent me a non-functioning replacement K700i. That cost me another two weeks without service.

So far I estimate that my K700i has cost me about $300 plus the cost of the phone but not including, of course, my T-Mobile service. That doesn't even include the cost of the phone. Crazy.

Next is the cool stuff. When I first bought a pair of K700i's I read that the battery life sucked. That was true. Still is despite the various updates released through the SE Update Service.

At some point I read about some users who put Nokia's BLD 3 batteries in their K700's. I promptly bought a pair because they reportedly had twice the capacity as the factory K700 battery.

When they arrived the exterior battery lacked two terminals protruding from one end. These terminals are present on the SE battery and they clearly have some function, but I have now idea what they do.

Upon putting in the battery, the K700 wouldn't boot up. I tried both batteries in both of our K700's. Didn't work. I entertained the idea of gluing on two terminals to BLD 3, but wisely didn't.

At that point I assumed that the batteries required some modification to work in the K700i. I had dropped $400 on each phone, so I wasn't very motivated to mess around with them. I put the Nokia batteries in a box and forgot about them. Until today.

I was looking for something today when I ran across the Nokia batteries again. I searched Google for more information on using them in a K700 but the information was more or less the same: very limited. In fact, there are a lot of doom and gloom stories about exploding K700's but no one confirmed that it had happened to them.

Not finding anything on Google, I popped one in the K700 and tried to power it up. Nothing.

Then I tried putting it in my charging stand. Nothing.

Then I plugged it into the AC adapter directly. I noticed a red light blinking through the power-on button at the top right side of the K700. I vaguely remembered the red light blinking like that when the battery was very low. It didn't happen regularly, but it has happened at least once.

It occurred to me that the Nokia batteries were completely dead. That's why the phone wasn't powering up, and that's why I didn't see the "Charging" notifications on the K700's screen right away. After a few minutes the red light went away.

The K700 powered up with the partially charged Nokia battery and appeared to function correctly. I've had the AC adapter charging the phone for only a few minutes, but there's no heat build up on the battery itself or anywhere else on the K700i.

Perhaps this is going to work after all!

pece

Posted: Fri - August 5, 2005 at 02:30 PM          

©