It’s been several years since I got a new phone. My old Eten M700 was starting to look a bit dated and the battery would only last for several minutes of talk time. T-Mobile’s Touch Pro 2 looked like the perfect replacement since I was already a customer. The TP2 immediately felt like a huge upgrade with a large bright screen, a battery that lasted several days with casual usage, and a 3G Internet connection. Also, unlike with earlier Windows Mobile phones, not much tweaking was required to get started.

Trouble With Time
For me, the biggest annoyance on the phone is that the time constantly got reset (see forum thread). This happened occasionally when the phone would automatically connect to the Internet to check mail or weather etc… This problem appears to be local specific and is caused by the T-Mobile network. Turning the phone’s data connection off/on would reset the time properly but this wasn’t a good solution for me (if you are checking the phone to get the time, how do you know if it is wrong). What worked for me was disabling all automatic clock updates by going to phone settings–>time zones.

Google Sync
Around this time Google had just released Sync which simulated a Microsoft Exchange server and enabled push e-mail and synchronization of contacts between Gmail and Windows Mobile devices. I found that this service worked well for e-mail but was not usable to synchronization of contacts. Every time a changed contact entry was synchronized, the system incremented the contact’s birthday by one day. It appears that this issue has very recently been resolved.

Screen Protector
The screen protector that came with the phone got scratched up pretty quickly. I also didn’t install it carefully enough so I ended up with a few air pockets that did go away after several months. I got the ClearProtector as a replacement. At first, I didn’t like the replacement. This protector was much softer that the one that came with the phone so I wasn’t sure if it would last. Also, applying the protector required wetting the clear plastic to activate the adhesive (I thought that was a bit unorthodox since we are putting moisture on a electronic device). The worst part about it was the amount of bubbles (several large spots and many tiny dots) that resulted when I first applied the protector. However, after a few days of use, I started to appreciate this design. Because the protector was softer it gave the phone a better tactile feel. Also, the material was permeable, so after a few days, all the bubbles disappeared and the screen became crystal clear. The best part is that, after a month of use, there are no visible scratches on the protector either.

Car Navigation
There is some concern on web forums that the latest versions of TomTom don’t work on the TP2. All I can say is that it works for me just fine (and it would have been a deal breaker if it didn’t).

Useful Links
You may find the following links useful for setting up the phone:

• T-Mobile TP2 Forum
• XDA Developers TP2 Forum
• HTC TP2 Support Site
• HTC TP2 Forum

Update 1/25/2010: I just updated the phone to Windows Mobile 6.5. The update is available free from T-mobile.

• The biggest improvement for me was that the phone no longer forces locking the screen based on MS Exchange Server policy. The new eye-candy is nice but I appreciate WinMo 6.5’s added configuration options and back-end features for working with MS Exchange etc… much more.
• I did notice the same memory-leak/performance issue as a number of other users (memory usage jumps to over 80% after a few hours of usage. Setting the registry key HKLM/Software/HTC/ResProxy/ShareMemSize to 0 as discussed in this thread seems to have addressed the problem.
• I’m indifferent about WinMo 6.5’s honeycomb start menu; however, I don’t like the amount of junk application that T-mobile put there with this ROM. I deleted the extra application shortcuts from /Windows/StartMenu/Programs using Resco File Explorer. Note that most of these shortcuts were marked as system files and hidden by default so you have to enable viewing system files in the File Browser’s options to be able to do this.
• GPS still works (Google Maps, TomTom but not Bing) but the phone seems to have a weaker GPS reception than before the update.

Designing an entertainment center from scratch can be a daunting tasks, especially if you care about quality and aren’t looking to spend more than 5K. Here are some of the considerations that I’ve made when designing the media center in my new home.

Display
The TV is the heart of the entertainment center. There are many specifications that you can consider when choosing the display but the most important one is whether you like the image quality. At this point, most LCD’s look very similar on paper (1080p HDTV, HDMI, 120Hz etc…) and posted specifications such as contrast ratios can be questionable at best (especially when comparing different manufacturers). New technologies such as OLED displays exist but I don’t think they have matured yet for mass market consumption. Besides, being on the cutting edge can quickly put you over budget. I went with a Sharp Aquos LCD TV. Getting a projector was another consideration but the image quality just isn’t the same.

Mounting a flat screen on the wall is nice convenience. When choosing a wall mount, make sure that it can support the size/weight of your TV and that it has a solid construction (especially if it pivots). The mounts with dual-arm constructions tend to feel much more rigid so I think they are worth the extra price.
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I bought the MX860 printer because I knew it had Linux support but getting it setup was a bit harder than I had anticipated. The fist step was getting the proper drivers (since the CD that came with the printer only had Windows and MacOS drivers). Luckily the Linux drivers were available on the Canon Europe page at the following link.

The drivers are available in 3 formats: RPM package, Deb package, and the source code. After several failed attempts at getting the source code to compile, I tried installing the RPM package. Unfortunately, I run a 64-bit system and the packages were compiled for a 32-bit. The drivers essentially provide two CUPS backends: cnijnet and ncijusb. However, these files were placed in /usr/lib/cups/backend instead of in /usr/lib64/cups/backend where I needed them. Copying the files to the proper location allowed CUPS to see the drivers and I was pleasantly surprised that this actually worked. Similarly the RPM installed a CUPS filter pstocanonij into /usr/lib/cups/filter instead of into /usr/lib64/cups/filter so this file needs to be copied as well. Just make sure to restart the CUPS server using the following command before continuing to the next step: /etc/init.d/cups restart

Before playing with the CUPS configuration, I wanted to test that the drivers were installed properly and could find the printer on the network. To do this just run /usr/lib/cups/backend/cnijnet from the command prompt and it should return the device URI for the printer. If this works, just open to the CUPS config page in your browser of choice at http://localhost:631/ and add the new printer. The Canon MX860 series Ver.3.10 driver should be available in the pick-list. If the test page does not come out, check your firewall settings. You may also find other discussions on setting up the MX860 in Linux useful. Good luck.

I have been looking for an off-road navigation solution when I stumbled across GPS Tuner. While TomTom is great for car navigation, it lacks many features such as track recording and support for custom maps. We now have the option of using the newly released mobile Google Maps and mobile Virtual Earth, these programs require a constant Internet connection and can be slow to use (especially when hiking in remote locations with poor cell phone reception). Its often much more convenient to have the needed maps pre-loaded and configured on the hand-held.

When I gave GPS Tuner a try I quickly realized that I have to spend a lot of time making my own maps. Luckily, there are a number of free online mapping systems (tile servers) such as Google Earth and Virtual Earth that can provide the base images for maps. The problem now is downloading the maps (in fine resolution) and piecing them together. Since I’m too lazy to do this manually, it was time for a little scripting to automate the process.

Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth work by asynchronously downloading tiles of the map depending on the users desired map zoom level. With a little hacking, I figured that I could put together a script that will download any section of the map in any available zoom level and automatically put all the tiles together into one large image. The biggest challenge there is finding out the indexing scheme used for the tiles (i.e. given a lat/long coordinate and a zoom level deterministically determine the corresponding tile on the map and the URL to fetch that tile). The following articles on Via Virtual Earth gave me a great head start and even some sample code. All that was left to do is write a loop to download all the tiles between two lat/long coordinates and save them into one continuous image that can be loaded into GPS Tuner.

Here is the code and a sample image of Manhattan made from about 100 tiles.

Happy Navigating.

Just got a new M700 to replace my old phone (Motorola MPx220) and PDA (iPaq 3900). On first impression, this is a great convergence device but its takes some time getting used to. The Eten Users Forum was a big help in working out the kinks and getting everything setup.

Caveats

• Static Navigation: The GPS receiver has static navigation turned on by default. This limits position changes to about every 50 meters and makes the device unusable for navigating on foot. Use SirfTech to disable this option (be careful). Refer to the following thread for details.
• Battery Indicator: The battery seems to continue charging indefinitely (even when the indicator shows 100%). The charging light does turn off an hour later… this is “normal.”
• ETEN software: For lack of a better word, the ETEN software sucks. Replace it with another vendor’s version if you need that functionality. The device runs faster and with less “hick-ups” once the ETEN software is removed.

Key Applications

• TomTom Navigator – This is the best navigation software that I found. Just copy the maps to your SD card and you are ready to go. (make sure to get at least a 1GB card)
• GPS Tuner – Great for off road navigation and making custom maps.
• Tube II – Transit maps and city reference.
• Resco Explorer – Powerful file explorer, registry editor, network browser.
• Resco Photo Viewer
• SPB Pocket Plus, Diary, and Weather – Convenient today screen plug-in and task manager. Great for one handed navigation of PIM data. Note that the current version has a problem with the Glofiish which causes stray lines to be drawn on the today screen tabs.
• Pocket Informant – Comprehensive PIM manager.
• HiCalc – Comprehensive calculator
• Lexisgoo – Great dictionary.
• Windows Live Search (still in Beta)
• SK Tools – I didn’t believe the hype at first but it actually does make the device run faster.

After several years of using the MPIO FL100, my trusty old MP3 player was starting to show its age. It was time for a change and I decided to go with Samsung’s YP-T9. At first glance, this is a great player. Sleek design, 4GB of flash memory, great battery life, video, mic, and it has an FM-Tuner as well. The only kink in the armor is that the device only supports MTP file transfers. While this may not be an issue for most casual Windows users, it was a problem for me because I predominately use Linux. I was really starting to miss the FL100’s SD card slot.

First I tried libmtp which, at present, is the only library for MTP support in Linux. While this library already has support for dozens of MTP devices, support for my Yepp is still experimental. At least one user was able to successfully connect to his YP-T9 using this library but experienced problems with the last few bytes of each song being truncated. Since Amakor, my Linux audio player of choice, already had support for libmtp, I decided to give it a try. Being able to connect got my hopes up at first but I was soon greatly disappointed. The transfer crashed after each song, the songs were truncated by a few byte, and the songs did not appear in the player’s playlist (only in the file browser). Although I could live with some if these problems, transferring one song at a time is unacceptable. Updating the firmware didn’t help. I ended up having install the software that came with the device on my spare Windows laptop and reformat the drive because playing with libmtp left the filesystem in shambles.

My next attempt was to connect to the player from a Windows installation that I had under VMware on my desktop. I was able to browse the content of the device without any software or drivers (which some people online mistakenly though was UMS support) but as soon as I tried to copy a file to the device, Winblows crashed (no surprise there… thats why I use Linux). I think it was something to do with an address conflict between the host machine and VMware when connecting to the USB. I can connect to other UPS devices so I don’t know what made this one so special but, since the behavior occurred every time I tried to connect to the device, I decided to give up on the VMware approach. Powering up a virtual machine each time I wanted to connect to the MP3 player would have been a hassle anyway.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any solutions to my problem online. However, there were a couple claims online that people were in fact using the YP-T9 as a UMS device. So, before sending the player back, I tried one last thing… flashing the firmware with the Asian version. Miraculously it worked! Appearantly, only the US version (YP-T9JAB) uses MTP while the equivalent device overseas (YP-T9BAB) is UMS. Even better is that the menus are still in English. Note that if you are going to do this, make sure to get the right firmware version (Samsung has a number of these players with different capacity and with Bluetooth support).

Now my YP-T9 is behaving beautifully and I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a quality MP3 player. Hope this helps someone in a similar predicament.