Another BlackJack Mystery: SMS messages in Europe

I’m often puzzled by aspects of my Windows Mobile device (a Cingular Blackjack / Samsung i607).

One is its occasional glimpses into the future (see here and here). Another is its refusal to expose my location to Google Maps.

One I haven’t ever figured out is the fact that whenever I travel in Europe (usually Switzerland and Germany) I get tons of SMS messages. They seem to be “Cell Broadcast” messages, meaning they aren’t sent directly to me but to everyone - but my phone seems to pick those CB messages out of the stream only while in Europe.
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Where am I? What day is it?

My Cingular Blackjack (Samsung i607) seems determined to keep me in the dark.

First, it never works with the Google Maps “My Location” feature. Here’s all I get:

On top of that, I’m still getting the occasional moment where my cellphone decides it is the future.

This morning my phone briefly thought it was 2009:

Seems to be related to a cell tower somewhere in the vicinity of Chelsea / Everett - just North of the Tobin bridge.

Am I the only one seeing this?

Windows Mobile From the Future

My Cingular BlackJack, which runs Windows Mobile, occasionally resets itself to dates in the future. Here’s a screenshot from this morning, which should be October of 2007, but thinks it is November of 2008:

Anyone else see this happening on their Windows Mobile device?

One theory is that I’m hitting a rogue cell tower somewhere in my commute which tells the device it is a later date. But I’ve got “auto update” of date/time disabled, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had this happen even while travelling in other cities and states, so it isn’t specific to one cell tower.

It causes all the event notifications to fire, since they are now overdue, and causes all kinds of other general weirdness, like emails coming from the future.

If only Windows Mobile were open source . . . Guess my next phone will be an OpenMoko.

No More Talkin’ Blackjack Bluetooth Blues

Thanks to Jay’s Technical Talk I’ve finally got my Cingular Blackjack working with my laptop (Kubuntu) via Bluetooth.

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities - I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices - note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.