I have reason to believe that my mobile phone is dying, but I hope not. I bought my Nokia 6600 about 1.5 years ago and, up until 2.5 weeks ago, it has been a very dependable phone.

Symptoms

• The Message application crashes every time when trying to display the 'My Folders' area of Messages. I get the error "App. closed mce !".

• The phone won't boot up when I put in a freshly recharged battery, though the backlight will come on like it's trying. Sometimes it takes 20 attempts before the Nokia logo will appear (the logo signals that the phone is booting up). Also I've found that, when there are these startup problems, the phone won't charge when the power adapter is connected directly to it.

The interesting thing is that once I am able to get the phone to boot, it will continue to run like normal until the battery is drained. However, if the phone is switched off when the battery starts to drain, the phone will never boot back up with that battery. The phone will also charge the battery when in this situation.

Possible Causes

I think there are two things going on:

• Old batteries

I'm starting to think that my two batteries are getting old and don't have the maximum voltage that for which they are rated. I have the original and also bought a spare almost exactly one year ago from Malcomwireless.

I theory is that that the phone the circuitry can't power up unless there is sufficient voltage. Consequently it takes several tries to get the phone to turn on.

I wish that I had my voltmeter handy to test this.

• Memory issues

I initially thought that the crashing Messages application was due to the fact that I had saved too many messages in the 'My Folders' area on the external memory card. Even though I had over 300 messages in a single folder, this doesn't seem like a lot because the phone has a somewhat 'modern OS' on it - Symbian Series 60. I checked the manual for folder limits, but there was nothing written.

All this seemed to have happened all at once.

Conclusion

I will rebuild it - better, stronger, faster.