Nokia E90 Communicator Blog

The present of slightly modified Nokia E90 has been spotted at WMC. It looks like that Nokia will be releasing the new E90 in black color. The technical specifications remain practically the same. The changes are mainly in the build area and of course fixing some of the problems present in the current model. It can be said that the keyboard of the modified E90 is different.

Configuring VoIP on Nokia phones can be a real nightmare. Moreover, some VoIP services work just fine, with some you may get a partly working solution (i.e. one-way audio), yet with others you can't even register with the service. Registration Failed is a painfully known message for Nokia phone users.

Occasionally, on various forums, you can see messages posted by disappointed users and some posts are really rude. But I can understand these people. When you pay a grand for a phone and you can't even register with a service provider, that is not good. For some people, support of VoIP becomes a key feature when making decision which phone to buy. For example, when I first got Nokia E61, I must admit, I bought it because I hoped to use it as a VoIP phone. Nokia E90 Communicator is a great device and it is very pity when you are not able to use it with your VoIP services provider.

But I have good news! This post will help you to get ANY VoIP service working on your Nokia S60 phone. No kidding. Just read carefully and then follow the instructions and let the magic happen.

I mainly use two VoIP services: Stanaphone and SipGate. I was able to get SipGate working both on E61 and on E90 right away without any problems. However, no matter what I did, I could not get Stanaphone working. I created accounts with almost every VoIP provider on the Internet from GizmoProject to Voxalot to PBXES.org to test and troubleshoot this problem.

If you configure SIP Settings in your phone according to the provider's details, most of the services simply DON'T WORK! Frustrated users even say that the VoIP feature in Nokia phones is a beta product. However, that is not true. After you get your VoIP service working on your Nokia, it will work smoothly and your Nokia phone will turn into a truly Internet Phone.

What Causes Registration Failures?

Problem Number One - Incorrect REALM Value

When configuring SIP settings, specifying correct REALM is very important. If the REALM used by the service provider is different from what you specify in SIP Settings, registration will fail for sure. With Windows based softphones this is not a problem and because of this, the service providers sometimes may not even publish the REALM or publish incorrectly on their sites. For example, look at the settings that Stanaphone provides on the screen shot below.



As you can see, according to their site, you must specify sip.stanaphone.com as a Domain/Realm or Proxy Server value. Unfortunately, if you specify sip.stanaphone.com in the Realm field in your S60 phone, it won't work. Correct realm is sip.stanaphone.com.

I have tried stanaphone.com and many other values as well. For example, sometimes just "asterisk" works. Why? Because it is a default REALM value in Asterisk - a popular VOIP software that many VoIP providers use. But nothing worked.

The problem is that there are quite many SIP settings and there are so many possible combinations of different settings (like specifying TCP instead of UDP, switching the Security setting on or off, etc) that you cannot get it working by chance.

So, how did I manage to find out a correct realm for Stanaphone? It was not too difficult. I have been able to successfully use the service with X-Lite. So, I switched logging on and then looked up the log file. As you can see on the screen shot below (it's a part of the log), the correct realm is just stanaphone.com.



Problem Number Two - STUN

The problem with VoIP in Nokia phones is associated with how the phone used STUN. As you are well aware, you cannot specify a STUN server in the SIP Settings and that is the problem.

As far as I know, earlier version of the VoIP part in Nokia did not use STUN at all and because of that you could not use the VoIP-enabled Nokia phones with many providers. However, in the latest models STUN is incorporated, but the problem is how the phones uses the STUN server info.

One way that is used in softphones is to make a DNS lookup and that's how Windows softphones do and that is in my opinion how Nokia phones work. As you can see from another part of the log, the default STUN server setting did not work. Now this makes clear why Nokia phones work with some VoIP providers and don't work with others. If the STUN server coincides with the one that Nokia phones try to use, the service works.

Logically, a solution to this problem would be to be able to specify correct setting for STUN. However, as I have already mentioned you cannot configure STUN setting from the SIP Settings section. But, there is a tiny but extremely useful application from Nokia that allows you to change some very internal SIP settings. That is the application that does the magic. So, download it quickly from here http://sw.nokia.com/id/d2d27e6c-bd52-4534-9aa6-19e606b80709/SIP_VoIP_Settings_v1_0_en.zip and install on your phone.

In order to change the STUN settings, you must first create the SIP Settings. Stanaphone settings are shown below:







After you have created the SIP Settings, launch the application. The first screen presents you with 2 choices: VoIP Services and NAT Firewall Settings. Choose NAT Firewall Settings.



Then you will see two choices again: Domain Parameters and IAP parameters. Choose the first.



You should see your VoIP profile there. Choose it.



Finally, you can specify the STUN server there. If you don't know STUN server for your VoIP provider, you can specify this: stunserver.org. This is a publicly available free STUN server. You must also specify the default 3478 port.



On the final screen shot you can see that the Stanaphone profile got registered successfully.