Monday, October 31, 2005

Nokia Secret Code

In the Internet, there is a circulating forwarded email claiming that pressing *3370# on your Nokia mobile phone will activate your so-called spare battery which will give you 50% extra battery life.

Being the usual "inquisitive" guy, I decided to give it a try. So I pressed, *, 3, 3, 7, 0, #...

"Change active speech codec?"
What the heck?? Since when a battery is called "active speech codec"? Well, there are only two options there, "OK" and "Back".

Being the usual "inquisitive" guy again, I decided to press on OK. 一不做,二不休 marr... DONG! Off goes the light, and the whole mobile phone restarts and the same screen reappears. Nahh, no change in my battery bars also, it's still at its original position, no "increase in battery life" as claimed by the e-mail.

So I decided that this is a hoax, just like those claiming that you can elongate some part of your body with some daily exercise. Some googling on this issue proved my guess: This code indeed does *something*, but it doesn't give you some magical power boost. In fact, the activated "speech codec" mode actually consumes more power of your little battery!

At the end of my daily dawdling, a lesson is learnt: Never trust anything in the Internet so easily. If not, your some parts may suffer. :D

4 comments:

day-dreamer said...

*surprised* Har??? I thought with your expertise in these tech-gadgets you would have known better than to believe those emails circulating in the Internet... Anyway, sesal sebelum pendapatan, sesal kemudian tiada gunanya. Ha ha ha ha!

Alvin Ooi said...

still sick ah? eat those stuff summore la. neways, good luck in your exam.

Jellyfish said...

halo I'm jellyfish, creeping via day-dreamer's blog, hehehehe...

actually hor..
*3370# is to activate Enhanced Full Rate Codec (EFR) while #3370# is to deactivate it.
By activating EFR, nokia will use the BEST sound quality, thus using more bandwidth than normal on the provider (eg:maxis).

while *4720# activates Half Rate Codec, #4720# is to deactivate it.
By activating it, your phone uses lower quality sound than normal thus helping the provider (eg:maxis) to save bandwidth

for countries that the mobile provider charge voice usage base on bandwidth, users can save alot by using *4720#, but when they use EFR, they eat up more bandwidth, thus they will pay more for the same talk time.

for msia, i dun think this is applicable though, cos we are charged based on time duration, hehehehe...

lenghtly explanation :P

Chen said...

Most of the things that circulate in the internet are craps.

Jellyfish, what a long lecture u give over here *pening* :D