As I mentioned yesterday, I finally got my new Sony Ericsson K750i from O2 yesterday. After having tried it out during the evening, it certainly does take great pictures, however I couldn’t get it to connect to the internet at all, whether via my PDA, or directly. Whenever I did so, it produced errors saying that the settings were invalid. A search around Google showed that I was not alone.

I tried resending the GPRS settings from the Sony Ericsson site, the O2 site doesn’t include the phone in their automated service currently, however someone had recieved the settings by hand in an e-mail from O2. However reading through I discovered that at least one of the recent firmware revisions had caused problems with some phones, primarily on O2, giving the symptons described.

Since Sony Ericsson helpfully provide a suitable cable, drivers and instructions to allow you to update the firmware (usually a go back to the shop operation) I thought I’d give that a go. However that proved futile, as once I’d loaded all the software on, and run the updater it came back and said that “Your operator does not allow you to update the phone using this service”, basically O2 had customised the firmware on the phone, and as such, the only way I could update it was to send the phone back to them. Since I’d already waited several weeks for O2 to get one with fixed firmware I wasn’t best pleased. The simple question of whether anybody has bothered to test the O2 firmware springs to mind. On the evidence today, I doubt it.

Corporate branding is a disease that affects both the mobile phone industry, and the computer industry, and in my experience has always been problematic. I always remember when we got Toshiba laptops at a previous job, the first thing we’d do is remove the Toshiba branded install of Windows 3.11, as it was significantly more unstable due to the ‘extras’ they’d added – none of which we actually used. The same is true of the O2 branding on my K750i. The O2 branding adds an O2 theme to the phone, which probably will be replaced by something else almost immediately by most users, and also configures the internet to access O2’s site. However since I never use O2’s site and use the PDA to go straight to what I need, that is pretty pointless too. So effectively the branding gives me stuff I don’t really use, and removes my ability to use the standard firmware, leaving me with firmware that doesn’t work.

Anyway, further browsing came up with this thread about unbranding K750i’s using a tool from DaVinci Team. After reading through the thread and the tool documentation I figured that installing the latest firmware using the tool seemed to be the only way to get the internet connection going, and enable my phone to use the official automated update service. It was a bit of a crash course, as the tool is pretty technical, but thanks to some help further down the thread I found the settings for a basic UK phone, paid my €10 and ran the process.

It took about thirty minutes processing, and of course blanked down all my calendar and contact settings on the phone, however at the end of the process all the O2 branding had gone. The first thing I did was set up the internet settings using the online service, and copied the mobile web settings from my old phone – and both worked perfectly.

The bottom line is that the firmware that O2 put on the phone is fundamentally broken. From what I’ve heard, the O2 support guys are unhelpful, and will ultimately have you fiddling, and then offer you another type of phone. If you are on O2, and want the excellent K750i, it seems the only option is to remove the branding on the phone.

One final point, it should be mentioned that updating the firmware as I have done is not something of which the networks approve, so if you do it and break the phone, it isn’t covered by the warranty. However, as far as I am aware, this is the only way to get an O2 branded K750i working properly – O2 will just ship you a phone with the same firmware, which as I have discovered, is the source of the whole problem.