No Message Alerts Problem on Nokia N95

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the alerts for text messages has mysteriously gone missing and completely stopped working.

The alert tone no longer sounded, the alert vibration no longer occurred, and worst of all there was no popup alert that says there’s a new text message.

However, if I went into the “Messages” area, my Inbox would clearly have a red “plus” symbol to indicate there is a new message, which I could go into it and read it as normal.

This is most annoying!

What I tried:

When the problem first occurred, my initial thought was to check the ringer, to ensure that wasn’t the problem. As it turns out, it wasn’t, and it was clearly far beyond that.

I backed up my data to my memory card, and re-flashed the phone to the latest possible update available to me which was v12.0.013, which was in fact the flash version I was already running.

I sent a test message to the phone, with all the default settings after the flash. It worked!

I restored my data from my memory card, but then it did not work…

There was a fix out there, there had to be. The phone was running a bit slow, so I figured it was down to the 2000+ text messages I had stored on there. I deleted them all. No fix.

What fixed it:

As it turns out, to fix this problem, that seems to occur when you have over 2000 text messages in your inbox, you need to first delete all the messages (by using the “mark all” option, then delete), and forcing a hard reset by removing the battery while the phone is switched on (and idle).

You MUST do both of these, else it doesn’t appear to fix the problem.

I hope that this problem is fixed in v20, and that T-Mobile UK will role it out soon!

Thanks to this post for the solution.