Last night, I was having trouble with my Smart postpaid line. I was on the bus when I took a peep at my Sony Ericsson P1i. At the status bar, an icon appeared. So I tapped on it, and a window appeared. It said that “Incoming calls not allowed” and a Settings button appeared. Tapping on the button led me to the Internet accounts settings page. I ignored it and went on with the trip home. BTW, I sent a text message, and at first the sending failed, but on the second attempt, the message was sent. It was 10 minutes before 6PM.

I got home by 7PM, and after dinner, I checked the phone again. The icon remained, and out of curiousity I made a call to our landline. So I keyed in the number and tapped Call. After two seconds the phone returned to standby mode. So I turned off the phone, took off the SIM, and inserted the SIM into a Nokia 3660. I made a call to the same number, and our landline phone made its usual ringing sound. So I inserted the SIM back into P1i, powered it on, and the icon was still there. Making the same call, and the same result – nada.

What I did was to set the phone so that it would connect to GSM network only. The setting before was 3G only. (To do this on P1i, go to Main Menu>Control Panel>Connections>Mobile Networks. On the Mobile Networks window, tap More and then tap on GSM/3G networks.) The phone disconnected and reconnected. The 3G icon was gone. I then made a call to our landline, and the landline sounded. At this point, I received a reply to the message that I had sent earlier; the message was time-stamped 6:10PM.

I set the mode back to 3G only, and after disconnection/reconnection, the suspect icon appeared again. So I set it back to GSM only, and then played Warcraft III: Frozen Throne for an hour. After playing, I set the mode back to 3G, and the suspect icon was gone. Content, I went to sleep.

End of story? Nope. Woke up at around 12 midnight and took a look at the phone. “Emergency calls only,” the phone display said. Set the mode to GSM only, and the operator name appeared. Went back to sleep.

So at 8AM, I set the mode back to 3G, and no problems so far. Must be a problem in Smart’s 3G network yesterday. Or my phone’s getting old.