Thursday 28 May - My N82 Arrived, Conkers, Donighton le heath, 4 terrible hours debranding and updating N82 firmware.

We were off to Conkers (the award winning attraction at The Heart of the National Forest, a unique mix of indoor and outdoor experiences to keep you and your family engaged for hours), this AM and I was desperately hoping that the postman would arrive before we left. Hurray he has and he's brought my N82! It's quickly unwrapped and admired by all, well I admired it. I swapped out the sim card from my N95 and powered up. Good and bad news, it's recognised the sim so the phones not locked but it's still carrying all the O2 branding and I can't establish a 3G connection. Grabbed it, the N95 and headed for the car. 20 miles later turned round and went back for the kids, not really, we didn't go back, texted them a tin opener and told them to get on with it. Opps, they're in the back, I'm concentrating on this phone too hard. I'm familiar with the menu structure that Nokia uses on the N series and during the journey i was able to go into the setting menu and establish an access point for the 3 mobile sim, got the GPS up and running and used it to navigate to Conkers. Gave Deb the simless N95 so she could use it to take photo's and geotag them.

Conkers was just as I remembered it from 7 yrs ago, when it opened, except that now the trees had started to grow. To be honest, there's not a lot to do there. Once you've ridden on the train, walked the paths climbed the obstacle course and had a look around the centre that's it. It took about 2 hours and I took a shed load of photos with the N82 (see below).
We left, I thought to go home, but Deb had other ideas and before we knew it we had arrived at Donnington le heath Manor house museum. The museum is based in a Medieval Manor House dating back to 1280. The house has a fascinating history and is now restored with fine oak furnishings.

We arrived home at about 5pm and I decided to get straight on with debranding the N82. I knew this was going to be a big job but i had no idea how long it was going to take and how fraught I would be at the end of it. I needed to do two things, first I needed to remove the O2 software and secondly I needed to update the Nokia firmware. I was astonished to find when I checked the firmware edition that the previous owner had never updated this and that the phone was still running the original 2007 firmware. To get rid of the O2 branding i needed to replace it's product code with the generic Nokia European code for this model. I got the generic code off of a Google search and then proceeded to change it using another piece of software. This software id the Nemesis Service Suite and details about it are at this link

The debranding wasn't too hard but updating was a nightmare. it always takes a long time and there's a message telling you, Don't disconnect, Don't use the phone, Don't run out of battery etc cos if you do you'll brick your phone (it becomes an inert block of plastic that needs special attention to get it working again). Time and again I updated only to have it fail right toward the end. This meant I had to cox the thing into picking up where it had failed and trying to get it to carry on from there. At 7.30 the kids went to judo, I continued trying, at 9:15 they came home, 5 minutes later I finished the job and finally had a debranded phone with the latest firmware installed. I felt like someone had battered me with a 2 by 4 by 4 by 4.

Downstairs for a play, re-established WLAN connection and made a list of what software to load, but, not tonight. Collapsed on sofa exhausted, nodded off to bed????