Checksum Arcanius

A few months ago I picked up a Motorola RAZR V3xx phone along with a new 2-year contract from AT&T Cingular AT&T. I have been quite happy with the phone, and I have even managed to treat it considerably better than my old T720. The phone’s slim profile lets me keep in in the pocket with my wallet; the T720 had to live with my keys, which were not the nicest to its shiny finish.

At any rate, back on Thanksgiving day, my phone started sending MMS (aka “Multimedia”) messages instead of the regular SMS (“Text”) messages. This was confusing to recipients because they thought I was sending them blank slide shows, and it was distressing to me because I’m sure MMS messages are at the very least as expensive as SMS messages. So today, I finally stumbled across the solution to this vexing problem, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Apparently, this bug shows up when there are too many messages in the phone memory. By deleting every message in my inbox after giving the same treatment to my outbox, the problem simply went away. And this occurred despite the memory being nowhere near full — I had over 450 messages in my inbox, and that rated only a 4/7 on the memory usage meter. Nevertheless, clearing my messages promptly did the trick. I guess this world could use a good test engineer. Of course, I’m sure it could use a good developer as well. <g>

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