Cingular internet not downloading properly

[Carla Bisby]

If anyone can help solve this problem I’d really appreciate it as I’m up a creek with regards to getting data on the road right now.

My cell phone has started screwing up graphics that it downloads (like SPC CVO and MD web pages) and neither I nor Cingular can figure out the problem. I have a 2 month old Nokia 6102 and it was downloading fine until just recently. It still downloads text on web pages ok, just not the graphics. It’s downloading them in such a low resolution that I can’t make anything out. This means no radar, CVOs, watches, or MD graphics, etc while I’m on the road.

I went to a local Cingular store who told me it was something broken with the phone and that I’d have to get another one. They won’t give me another new one, only a reconditioned one. I went to Radio Shack (where I bought the phone at) and they said it was a memory issue so I freed up memory but that didn’t work. I called Cingular and their level one technician told me to clear the cache. That didn’t work, and they said they’d give me a reconditioned phone instead. No. So they transferred me to a level two technician who changed something with provisioning (set MS capable to “yesâ€). That didn’t work.

Anyone have any solutions? I figured someone on ST would know.

 

[David Drummond]

Sprint does this on occassion. Not always, just here and there no reason to it. After some research I discovered that they actually "reprocess" images somewhere else before sending them on to you (much like AOL does if you don't turn that option off) meaning you get a much scaled down version of the image that looks like crap. The only work around we found on it was hitting CTRL+F5 which forces the image to come from it's original location and in full resolution.

As I understand the reason they were doing this was to make the service appear "faster" than it really is. Perhaps Cingular is doing something similar.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Can your phone view HTML pages, or just WAP/WML? Is this auto-resizing occuring when you view graphics embedded in webpages? Your phone just started to do this auto-resize? I know that some companies set their ports such that it the server automatically downsizes graphics to make it more WAP-friendly.

Try going to http://wap.tornadocentral.com/spc.wml , and clicking on any of the images there (the convective outlooks). I set up that page such that it was display the image/graphic inside the wap page. You can also go to http://wap.tornadocentral.com/current.wml and choosing what you want to see from there (the radar and soundings don't work last I checked, by sfc obs, profilers, 1km vis sat, etc, should work).

EDIT: John, I thought she was talking about downloading graphics using her phone / handset, not computer... :?:

 

[David Drummond]

I thought that at first, but she mentioned freeing up memory and clearing the cache....can you even do that on a cell phone?

 

[John Erwin]

I'm using it as phone only, not with a laptop. You can clear the cache and free up memory.
[/b]

Sorry Lisa, I thought you were using a laptop.. I deleted my earlier post.

I think you should try a few different scenarios to narrow things down a bit; in addition to the above suggestions (try wap as well as normal html pages) try going directly to an image file, for instance what happens when you use this url: http://www.stormtrack.org/forum/style_images/logo4.gif

Let us know the results of your faultfinding, and good luck!

 

[John Erwin]

The ST logo downloaded fine.
[/b]

aha... that might be significant, or it could just be that the logo file is pretty small. You might want to try doing the same technique with larger image files.. surf directly to the image file instead of the page it's imbedded on.

I'm not sure if your phone has a feature to "optimize" web pages or not (some do), that might the culprit.. although I would assume that would have been checked by now. I would suggest that you contact Nokia directly to see if they have any insight on this too.

 

[Adam Ball]

If it makes you feel any better I have a 3 week old Nokia 6102 and I have the same problem. Any graphics I download look terribly pixelated, and are far worse quality than even the images captured with the camera on the phone. I didn't try downloading images till earlier this week and it has always been this way for me.

I get the feeling that it is not the phone, but instead something within in Cingular that is compressing the images. Even when I try downloading an image that is the exact size of the display of the phone, I can tell that it has been altered. When it's that small it hard to tell, but it is there.

 

[Tyler Allison]

My verizon service installed some compression software on my laptop that I had to uninstall to get the full quality images back. Ventrino or something like that. From what you describe it sounds exactly like what I was experiencing...check for compression software or do a search on google for compression and cingular and maybe someone knows how to turn it off

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Did the graphics display correctly on the pages that I linked to in my earlier post?

 

[Warren Faidley]

I have a special wml site I designed for accessing SPC text and graphics on a Cingular (or any) celll phone. The site is www.stormchaser.com/spc.wml

I am not sure if this will help, but you (or anyone else) might give it a try. The SPC products are listed as a group menu. There are also some web browser graphic options on most of the phones that Cingluar uses, so you might try checking those options.

Cheers:

Warren