Slow Sony Ericsson P910i

I bought a Sony Ericsson P910i a couple of years back in 2006. I was in desperate need of a smart phone as my PDA at the time had been stolen after my car got broken into. The phone runs a Symbian OS.

After several years of abuse, the keypad gave up (buttons had to be really pressed in to function), and it finally slowed down to a crawl. Rebooting the phone took a couple of minutes at least. It was literally impossible to perform backups, etc. Even a master reset did not fix the problem, I formatted the phone and still no luck, I finally gave up and discarded the phone to the pile of clutter on my desk in the study, and quickly forgot about it. This was around April of this year 2009.

Yesterday, I saw the phone again, and Googled for a solutions. Basically I needed to get into Service mode and format the phone from there. To get into the Service mode (you can do this both with and without the keyboard) you needed to, enter the following sequence of key events;

1. Jog dial up
2. "*" key press
3. Jog dial down
4. Jog dial down
5. "*" key press
6. Jog dial down

The service menu will then be displayed, with three options;

1. Information
2. Service tests
3. Service functions

The Information menu gives you information on various aspects of the phone and GSM network. The Service tests menu allows you to select phone functions, and finally the Service functions menu allows you to Format the internal disk.

After formatting the disk, the phone will reboot, but this time it was much after than the previous snail pace performance. Thus once again the P910i is back in service and now I just need to get all the old software and contact details back on it.

Acquire - The Board Game

I decided to kick my blog off with a basic review of Acquire, the board game by Avonhill. More comprehensive reviews may be found on hard core board-gamer blogs and sites. http://www.boardgamegeek.com being a good one.



The game itself is an old one. Apparently it was first published in 1962. So basically it has been around for some time and may have enjoyed some popularity. The primary objective of the game is to become the wealthiest player by founding and/or investing in hotel chains.

The game comes with the game board, cardboard tiles for hotel chains, cardboard tiles for hotels, cardboard stand, hotel stock certificates, credit notes to buy hotel stock. Some of the older versions of the game appear to have three dimensional tiles and hotels. The current version that I have appears to be more of a budget edition. It has cardboard tiles, that need to be placed on a cardboard stand that needs to be made from punched out pieces. A scrabble type plastic stand would have been nicer.

During a turn, I player must perform the following (in order), place a chain tile on the board, buy up to three(3) stock, pick up tiles to replace the tiles used. The "randomness" is implemented via the selection of tiles by the players from the draw pile.

In my opiniuon, a number of strategies need to be employed during the game. During the start of the game there is larger variance in, unknown factors, however as play progresses, players need to guess the tiles that other players may be holding, based on the tiles that they currently possess as well as the tiles already played.

Therefore, in middle game, tactical placement of tiles is essential to realise the strategy employed, i.e. either acquire other hotel chains or setup your chain(s) to be acquired by others. Again, in my opinion, the key strategy at all stages of play, seems to be to maintain majority ownership in a chain.

The final, tactical point to note when developing a strategy is that during a normal player turn, you are limited to the purchase of only three(3) stock, however if your chain is acquired you can convert your existing stock into the new chains, i.e. more than (3).