- Re: Revo Battery Poll

- Older machines still in use

- Re. SE p910 Keyboard, multitasking

- Revo Battery Problem -- Probably not the battery or software

- Comms on Revo?

- P910 & UIQ

- Good time manager for ER5

- Re: New (to me) backup machine

- Re: battery problem of the Revo

- Watching your own videos on a P910

Date: 19 Feb 2005 15:55:52 +0100
From: Keith Giles <address truncated>
Subject: Re: Revo Battery Poll

My Mako has had 3 batteries, the original, and 2 replacements (plus a pcb replacement). It has *never* worked properly - and I've tried all the tricks suggested in the Digest. It's at the point now where it sits on a shelf for about a month, I push in the hard reset holes, plug in power, and let it charge overnight. I then find I'm back to the same thing - it turns itself off at about 80%. I don't even bother to do a restore, just test it out.

No one will ever convince me that built-in, non replaceable by Mr Joe Average, rechargeable batteries are the way to go.

Well......., I must admit I like my iPod - but it runs almost always on AC through either my home or car stereo.

Happy Cycling,
Keith
Sunnyvale, CA
http://ohsix827.home.comcast.net

Thought For The Day: One of the pleasures of age is looking back at the girls you didn't marry.

All my outgoing e-mails have been checked by Norton Anti-virus.

Date: 19 Feb 2005 16:20:05 +0100
From: Kevin Thorne <address truncated>
Subject: Older machines still in use

Itamar wrote:

<The typical Nokia user will be a businessman (or woman) in need of word processing etc. and therefore interested in the larger rectangular scsreen, the keyboard, and prepared to "shlep" a larger phone with him. The folding keyboards somewhat bridge this difference, but that was probably not planned for by the designers / programmers. As a "proof", I still have not touched my word processor and hardly used the spreadsheet on my P910. You can't compare my mBook with the P910 for these tasks.>

Me too!  Much as I am enjoying my new Nokia 9500 I have no intention of selling my beloved S7 for this very reason - try as I might I cannot get used to the smaller form factor and small keyboard and screen when editing large spreadsheets and Word files.  I cannot see the day yet when my S7 will get retired as it's just such a useful machine.

To all:

I was very surpised how easy the 9500 was to set up for GPRS on Orange - just go the website and put in a few details and they send you back a configuration text which you just open on the machine and voila - it's configured!  That got me thinking....is it possible to get my S7 to use my GPRS service via a connection between the IR ports between S7 and 9500?  If so, does anyone have the settings?

Regards
Kevin Thorne

Date: 19 Feb 2005 19:30:40 +0100
From: Ian Chapple <address truncated>
Subject: Re. SE p910 Keyboard, multitasking

Mike,

>>is the keyboard on the SE p910 actually any good ?<<

To be brutally honest, no. It does make entering longish bits of text slightly easier, but it is definitely nothing more than a thumboard. I suspect that I shall not use it at all when I have got to grips with the pen-entry system. Mind you, the built in stylus is incredibly small; I've resorted to carrying my wife's spare Palm stylus in my wallet...

The exchange of posts on the (lack of) multitasking on the P910 has been illuminating. I must admit that I find the fact that most applications revert to a base-state when sent to the background extremely tedious; this is definitely the Palm way of handling multiple tasks, and comes as a bit of a shock after using Psions for the last 8 years. What's interesting is that some 3rd party applications do *not* adopt this approach, ie. jText, which makes them far more useful and easy to use than the built-in applications.

Something that would be very handy would be a simple way of cycling through the open applications, a la Fileswitch; at the moment, I'm using SMan, but I'm sure there must be a more elegant way of doing things...

Cheers, Ian.

Date: 19 Feb 2005 22:03:39 +0100
From: Stephen Stone <address truncated>
Subject: Revo Battery Problem -- Probably not the battery or software

Dear Revo owners on the Digest,

We've spent so much digital ink on the Revo battery problem.  I'd like to add my observations, and hopefully save fellow digesters from going crazy trying to to find the magic bullet of battery recharging for their Revos. One of the curious aspects of this matter is that people keep offering surmise about why the Revo power system misbehaves -- the problems do not really make sense to people who are knowledgeable about batteries or software.  Despite the instructions about battery charging for the Revo: NiMH batteries don't take a "set".  They do have a recharging lifetime which translates into the number of times that they can be fully discharged and recharged.  [Even the "memory set" factor of NiCAD batteries is overstated -- the loss of capacity is just a few percent of capacity.]

So topping off the NiMH batteries of your REVO when you can find wall power is a good idea.  Largely draining and recharging your batteries will lead to a shorter battery life as you are using up charge cycles.  If the soft calibration of the charging circuit is off, you can do a reset to the factory default by holding the reset pins down for about 4 minutes.

The owners of D&G Upgrades --
http://www.pda-upgrade.20m.com/
offered the explanation (not on their website, might have been in an email to a user forum) that the battery cable to the mainboard of the Revo becomes damaged with the opening and closing of the case.  The damaged cable can't pass the full charging or battery current -- the software cannot compensate for the added resistance; neither can the user with any type of charging practices.

The owner of the EpocCity (now SymbianCity" website used to sell a battery and improved charger board for the Revo -- I wonder if this had better wear characteristics than the original.

Search for Revo battery replacement on EBay and you will find a listing for a third party replacement service. I wonder if the fellow who runs this service can tell us more about the Revo battery cable problem.

In sum, I doubt that the Revo's problems have anything to do with charging practices -- and if so, these can be fixed with a super hard reset.  Persistent problems are probably only remedied with a new battery cable and, if depleted, battery replacement.

Meanwhile, my Mako sits in my desk drawer, along with two Series 5s with broken screen cables.  I'm still hopefully that I can find fixes for them all at reasonable prices.  My 3c continues to function as the 3rd hemisphere of my brain.

/Stephen Stone

Date: 19 Feb 2005 23:51:24 +0100
From: Jakfish <address truncated>
Subject: Comms on Revo?

I have a comms.sis file that will install on my Mako.  But when I click on the icon, I get the uninformative error "File not found."  Can I pull off this installation at all?  Or am I simply missing a file?

Jake

Date: 20 Feb 2005 00:07:20 +0100
From: Arabbitte <address truncated>
Subject: P910 & UIQ

To: Mike Dyer
Subject: SE p910 Keyboard

Any good? Considering it's size & layout, it's excellent! Having said that, I find the screen-input easier. It's what I wrote this response on ...

To: Martin Maxwell
RE: UIQ Responses

Hi Martin,
Thanks for your posting - it was was very informative. It looks like there is a lot of history here and it's interesting to hear you say that some of the reasons for UIQ being the way it is might be for "just because" reasons!

All the best from Cork Ireland  (still)
Alan Rabbitte

Date: 20 Feb 2005 10:53:11 +0100
From: Peter Rand
Subject: Good time manager for ER5

Thanks for all the recommendations for time manager apps for EPOC. I tried both Noteplan and RMRTask, and think I prefer the latter due to its ease of use and speed.

However, there are two nice features in Noteplan that seem to be missing in RMRTask - an independent alarm management system (if there are more than 10 alarms, RMRTask requires separate links to an Agenda file), and the ability to link to files which are not generated by built-in apps like Data, Word and Sheet (e.g., 'TestMe' files). Other than that, RMRTask is very well thought-out and flexible. If there is a way to link items in RMRTask to other file types, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

I find I am averaging about 26 hours of use (including emailing and web-browsing) on my Ericsson MC218 with 2 AA Sankyo 2500 mAh rechargeable batteries. That means I could literally work for weeks with just a pocketful of AA's, which is absolutely phenomenal. In comparison, my Palm Tungsten T operates about 4 hours on a single charge.

Peter

Date: 20 Feb 2005 11:41:57 +0100
From: Marcus von Cube <address truncated>
Subject: Re: New (to me) backup machine

Hi Phil,

>It has Windoze 95 on it but I'd prefer to use DOS 6 and Windows 3.1.

>My question is whether the 5/5mx emulator will run under those as everything else I want will.

It won't! The reason is quite simple: Windows 3.1 runs the x86 processor in its 16 bit mode. Since the ARM processors in our Psions are 32 bit engines, EPOC is a 32 bit system. Thus, any emulator trying
to provide a similar environment to applications as EPOC does, needs to support 32 bit instructions. That makes Windows 3.1 the wrong environment.

I've never tried to run the emulator under Win32s, a 32bit environment by M$ running on top of
Windows 3.1, but I'm pretty confident that this environment is not sufficient.

I would suggest to you to upgrade to a more recent Windows version (Win98). W2K or XP is much
more stable but it will need more resources than your notebook can provide.

Marcus

http://www.mvcsys.de

Date: 20 Feb 2005 18:32:46 +0100
From: Chris S Handley
Subject: Re: battery problem of the Revo

On 17 Feb 2005, Jakfish wrote:
> I did know about the ensuing problems after the lack of a
> full charge, but I wasn't aware that "topping off" a battery
> might lead to the same dilemma.  To put some numbers on this,
> would you say that charging a Revo when its battery reads
> 92%, and giving it a full charge (the battery icon showing
> "full," not "filling") would bring on a false reading?

I wouldn't state anything definitively, but it has seemed to me that recharging the battery before it drops under (say) 30 percent is a bad idea, or can at least exacerbate the problem.

N.B.  As I have owned limited number of Revos, I haven't ever systematically tested that this is so!
---
Chris Handley

============

On 18 Feb 2005, Itamar Engelsman wrote:
> Rolf never said the problem does not exist, he said it is not
> a problem with the _batteries_.

If that is all Rolf B meant, then apologies for misunderstanding him.  But I thought I had (vague) recollections of him previously having said something like I thought he was saying...


> Sorry Chris, I don't think we can handle a polling of the users.

I never suggested the Digest should handle that!  I'd be quite happy for emails to be sent directly to me, should a poll be organised, and no other alternative (such as web voting) is available...
---
Chris Handley

Date: 20 Feb 2005 20:12:40 +0100
From: Ian Chapple <address truncated>
Subject: Watching your own videos on a P910

Dear all,
I thought that what I've recently discovered about making my own videos to view on my P910 might be of some interest. This may apply to the P800 and P900, but I'm not sure, as I'm not familar with them and their capabilities.

To watch your own videos, they first have to be converted to MPEG4 or 3GP format, as these are the only formats supported by the P910 Video application. I guess that it might be possible to create MPEG4 videos using any video-editing program, provided that you can find/download an MPEG4 codec, but I haven't tried this yet. What I did do was download the Nokia Multimedia Converter, which I read about on Steve Litchfield's website (http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/); it is free, though you do first have to register as a Nokia forum user. The url for this is http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/0,6566,034-63,00.html.

Using this (Windows) program, it is possible to convert videos (AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2 etc.) to 3GP format, though there are one or two issues. The main one is that AVIs can cause problems if too big; this effectively rules out converting AVIs which are longer than a few seconds. MPEG videos can be converted, but again, there seem to be problems if the file is too big; it appears that the conversion has succeeded, but when you try to play the video, there is a soundtrack but no video. This was solved by producing MPEGs tailored for ie. video in email, which reduces the dimensions of the video frames to something like 160 x 120; I did this using Videowave, which is the video editing program that came with my Sony video camera, but I expect most video editing applications have similar capabilities. These MPEGs did convert successfully, and the end result is not too bad.

If anyone would like to see a sample video produced using this method, see http://home.planet.nl/~ian.chapple/videos/savage.3gp.

Cheers, Ian.