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.