Friday night I became aware that my phone, a Motorola V180, was able to send SMS messages (text messages), but I couldn’t receive them. An hour on the phone with Cingular got me to the Motorola help desk where I found out that there’s a known issue with the V180 software. They discovered this in December, but somehow they didn’t notify anyone and I don’t see it anywhere on their web site.

To determine if you have the affected software, dial *#9999# on your phone. That will show you the version number (look for “S/W Version”). The version on my phone right now is R365_G_0B.D2.2ER. The important bit there is the 0B.D2.2ER part - that’s the version. If you have 0B.D3.06R or better, you’re not affected by this problem. If you have less than that, you will have issues with SMS messages (both text and multimedia) as well as “other problems” that the service person didn’t bother listing off.

How do you fix it? Well, in this day and age, with a phone that has a USB link to it, you’d think you could just download the ROM from the web site, hook the phone up, and update the software yourself. Not so. You can either send your phone in and have them update the software for you and send it back; or you can have them send you a replacement, you can transfer your information over to the new one yourself, and then send in your affected phone. Either way, they have to do the update at the factory.

That’s one of the benefits of having this thing through work - I go talk to our telecomm guy and the problem solves itself.