Using the Memory on your Nokia 2120

It's not just for quick-dialing your girlfriend anymore!

Program your phone to page somebody? Check your voicemail? Forward calls?

i know, i know, you're saying, "Whatchew talkin' 'bout, Willis?"

Well, let's start with something easy: Forwarding your calls. Now why would you want to forward calls to your cell phone? Well, say you're at a movie, but you're expecting a call...whatever. But you were too cheap to buy the Cellular One voicemail. Well, i bet you have an answering machine. Assuming that you're within the local calling area of your home phone, and that it's between 7 p.m. or 7 a.m. or a weekend, it'll get forwarded to your home free of charge.

There's a couple of different ways that Cell One lets you forward calls. One way is direct forwarding. Regardless of whether your phone is on or not, all calls get forwarded to a certain number. More useful to me is the No Answer option, where if you turn the phone off, or if you're out of range, or if you just ignore the ringing (or accidentally make it silent,) your calls will get forwarded to whatever number you choose.

This is great, cause if i want to go watch a movie, i just shut the phone off--boom, all calls get routed to my voicemail at home. i come out of the movie, turn the phone back on--i'm live again.

But say you want to switch the forwarding to say...your house in Alameda, because Cell One's coverage there really stinks? Why would you do this? Oh, because you'll get land line quality...for free!

Fine fine...so how do you program it? Easy, just do what the instructions say: For "No Answer" forwarding, *74<number to forward to>.

All you have to do to save this into memory now is hit Memory Save and then give it a name and a number. Oh, and you do know that you can get lowercase letters right? Hold down the letter you want until it turns into lowercase. It looks cooler, definitely.

So...that was easy...now how about paging?

Pagers like it when you wait until they pick up before you send your call-back number. No problemo. The Nokia has a special "wait" character that will pause dialing until you tell it to continue. So basically, if you wanted to program your phone to dial Joe's pager, and then enter your cell phone's number, you should enter: 6505551212w4085559999

650/555-1212 is Joe's number, and your number is 408/555-9999. To get that "w" character, hit the * key a couple of times. (And FYI, the "p" character that you see when you hit * will enter a pause, which you think might work in this situation as well. But you can never be sure that a satellite didn't go down and now it'll take 30 seconds instead 5 for the pager service to pick-up the phone, and by that time, your pause has expired and your number has already been sent, but nobody heard it.

Oh, when you dial a number with a "wait" in it, it'll stop and prompt you to continue dialing. On the screen, it'll say "Send DTMF." Once you hear the pager service pick up and prompt you to enter your callback number, hit the left soft-key, and off your number will go.

Now, if you've been following along up to now, you'll probably already know how this can work for voicemail. Yup, enter the number to check your voicemail, enter the PIN, and voila, easy to use voicemail. Just be aware that anybody who picks up your phone (if it isn't locked with a code), has access to that PIN by browsing through your stored numbers. Now, there are ways to hide those, but that's in your manual. >:-P

Prev: Introduction, a few general tips | Next: Messing with stuff you really shouldn't

Call forwarding is the easiest solution if you want to be reachable anywhere on the planet on one single number! Forward your calls to any phone in the world and let your family, friends and clients reach you from any country!


Last modified Back to Darryl's Home Page
Comments? <footer [at] darryl.com>