For some reason my N95 started acting really strangely last week, after I copied some ebooks to the phone it became really really slow. On an average it started taking upto 8 seconds to perform any operation on the phone. So if I got an SMS and wanted to read it it would take about 8 – 16 seconds for the SMS to open. If I restarted the phone it would work ok for about 30 seconds or so and then become really slow again. Plus the battery life also got quite bad. I was getting about 2-3 hours on a full charge without any use, plus the phone was heating up a lot.
Since the last thing I did on the phone was copy some text/html files to it I tried deleting them and other files from the phone but that didn’t fix anything. So I decided to do a hard reset on the phone.
But before I could do that I had to backup the data on the phone. The files on the internal file system and the Mass storage device were quite easy to backup. The problem was backing up the Contact list and the SMS’s. I did a little research and found that the Contact list can be backed up to the Mass Storage by following these steps:
1. Open Contacts
2. Options -> Mark/Unmark -> Mark All
That will mark all the contacts in your address book. Once you do that Go to
3. Options -> Copy -> To Mass Memory.
This creates a directory called Contacts on the Mass Memory under the folder Others and stores all the contacts as .vcf files. Which you can copy to your computer using the USB cable. To restore all you have to do is open Contacts and then Options -> Copy -> From Mass Memory.
Backing up the SMS’s was a bit more involved. To do that you need to have Python for the Nokia phones installed. I used a Python script to loop through my Inbox and write the contents of the SMS into a text file that I then backed up.
The code incase you need it is listed below:
from time import ctime
import codecs
import inbox, appuifw
box = inbox.Inbox()
msg = box.sms_messages()
f = codecs.open('E:/Others/listSMS.txt', 'w', 'utf8') # open file in UTF8
for i in msg:
f.write(box.address(i))
f.write('\n')
f.write(ctime(box.time(i))) # convert seconds in a string
f.write('\n')
f.write(box.content(i))
f.write('\n----------')
f.close()
appuifw.note(u'All SMS are backed up!', "info")
f = codecs.open('E:/Others/listSMS.txt', 'r', 'utf8')
print f.read()
f.close()
Once I backed up all the data, I did a hard reset on the phone. The Built in function to Restore Factory defaults didn’t seem to accomplish anything so I had to resort to a search on Google again.
Use the following codes to do a Hard Reset on a Nokia N95 8GB. (Warning: This removes all data from the phone except the data stored on the Mass Memory)
Reset code: *#7370# or *#7780#
The page I got this information from listed *#7780# as the hard reset code but it didn’t do anything on my phone while *#7370# did the job.
Once I reset the device it started functioning properly again which was good. So I had to restore all the applications on it. About 1/2 way through I installed ‘FlipSilent-RDA-v2.00’ which allows you to silence your phone by flipping it. As soon as I tried installing it the phone went nuts again. Which sucks because I really love this app 🙁 I think the version I downloaded was infected. I don’t have the original .sis file that I used to install it the first time and now I really don’t feel like experimenting again by installing various versions to my phone to get a working version. I guess I could try contacting the author directly. Lets see.
But still, I have a working phone once again and all is well.
Well this is all for now. Will write more later.
– Suramya
