Interesting Doc, I did not know that...

I do have to say though I was mentally setting myself up to be extremely dissapointed with the Palm, but have been pleasantly surprised. After installing the HSDPA tweak, it's actually a great Pocket PC. The phone quality is actually much better than the Hermes and much more comfortable in the hand.

My only real complaints are:
-They really could have done better than the 240x240, this is very aggrevating.
-Did they really need to use a custom connector to hook it up to a computer? If they were going to use a custom connector, couldn't they at least make it charge the phone?

My brother has a Blackjack and the Palm is actually nicer to hold than the Blackjack. If they just dropped the price a little, I think they would really have a winner. Also the free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 doesn't hurt. :-)

I use it as a USB modem because of the battery life. Anyway, this is now my third Hermes through the warranty program where the battery fried some internal component. The first the radio, the next two the touch screen, and yes, i tried a different battery.

Anyway, on the bright side, Cingular warranty is very good. I called up again and the lady apologized and said they could send me a Blackberry 8700c, I scoffed at that of course...then said she could give me a Treo 680, I again laughed and said I want Windows Moblie and 3G...she put me on hold again and came back with the new Treo 750 that has 3G and Windows Mobile.

After having the Wizard and the Hermes, I'm going to miss the form factor, but at least the Treo will tide me over until Cingular offers the next HTC variant... :-)

You can also you a pencil eraser, they work very good.

Not sure about the other Hermes variants, but the 8525 has modem software built in.

Anyway, when the modem software is turned on and I'm streaming video from my Slingbox to my laptop, the 8525 gets hot to the point where you could probably fry an egg on it after about 10 minutes. I've tried everything to turn off or dim the screen after x number of minutes, but with the modem software running, it never shuts off.

What's even worse is after about 10 minutes of streaming, the phone gets so hot that the touch screen stops working until I pop the battery off and let the phone cool back down.

Does anyone have any suggestions to get the phone to run MUCH cooler when the modem is in use short of putting it on ice?

Thanks.

Well, I just got the new handset...so far seems flawless (keeping fingers crossed)...

I think the one with the bad touchscreen was definately a refurb, because the new one I just got has a much tighter keyboard and extra stickers...

And yes, I'm very lucky that Cingular has been so easy to deal with regarding their warranty exchange program...my wife actually had a RAZR when they first came out for about 8 months and started complaining about call quality...Cingular easily swapped it out for a replacement phone under the warranty program.

I've had the 8525 since it launched in November and absolutely love the phone.

Unfortunately, about two weeks ago, the radio in it just stopped working. Cingular sent me a new one as it's still under warranty.

I got my replacement last week and two days later the touch screen stopped working. The only way I could get the screen to start working was to pop the battery for about 5 minutes and let the phone sit. Then magically it would start working for another half hour or so before dying...

Once again, Cingular is in the process of sending me another replacement...

Has anyone had similar issues with the Hermes with the sheer number of hardware failures or am I just having extremely bad luck?

Cingular has already announced that they will be releasing a ROM to enable the Push to Talk feature. Has anyone heard if this will contain Windows Mobile 6?

The two major enhancements over the 1.8 I had before was improvements to the connection manager and a problem I would run into where I would have to reboot the phone every 24 hours or the web would stop working. The switching between the wireless LAN and GPRS is much more seamless and seems to work much better.

Just want to say thanks, I have an SMT5600 and the dust was driving me absolutely crazy. This procedure worked fantastic...don't know why HTC didn't put a rubber gasket around the outer edge, I was in awe at the amount of dust built up in the entire phone...Now that I know how easy it is to get all the black pieces off, I may get some high gloss white spray paint and give it that white and silver "iPod" look...

I'll post mine later on...I also own both the PSP and DS and Mario Kart is definately up there as one of the best...it's starting to cramp up my hands...

Well, for what it's worth, I did a hard reset 2 days ago and haven't had the problem since...

Haven't tried locking/unlocking, but every time I'm done with an app, I make sure to go and kill all processes. I don't think that's it, but next time it happens, I'll make sure to check and see if there is anything running...Thanks...

Don't know if anyone else has had this problem or has a fix, but this has now happened to me twice in the last week. My SMT5600 appears to be working normally until I go to make a phone call. When I go to dial out, the phone never will. I then reboot the phone and I can call normally and all of a sudden I get all my voice mails. People that have tried to call at that point have told me that the phone goes straight into voicemail.

Any help would be appreciated.

If you want a serious PSP protector, not just for the screen, but an entire case, the Logitech one is awesome. I've had one for a couple months now and never take my PSP out of the case when playing. The biggest downside is it's fairly heavy. It probably doubles the weight of the PSP, but having bigger hands, I've found that it makes the PSP more comfortable to hold when playing.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products...CONTENTID=10181

Awesome theme by the way, I had the same issue with my Cingular SMT5600. It appears the comma's are killing it...I've attached my XML which worked for me after some mods, I set it to use a 12 hour clock as well, if you want a 24 hour clock, just add the mode="24" attribute to the clock node.

Don't know if it's a problem with the European shipments, but I know about 8 people including myself with US versions and not a single dead pixel on any of the systems. Now the Nintendo DS, that's another story...

http://www.pspvideo9.com/

It's a cool little tool for converting videos to MPEG4 and putting them in the proper spot for you PSP to recognize it. You need your PSP connected to your computer via a USB cable.

Here's a little quick info on the PSP.

Sony games come on their proprietary UMD format, this is like a mini CD in a plastic case that goes in a slot in the back. The PSP also takes Memory Stick Pro Duo cards for saving game data, storing pictures, movies, etc. You can plug your PSP into a computer via a USB cable or you can connect to your wireless home network using the built in 802.11b wireless adapter.

Load times on many games tend to be slow, but I'm sure this will improve once the software developers get used to this hardware. The LCD screen for a portable system is superb and it is so enjoyable to look at that I don't really play console or computer games that much anymore, it's very nice to have the portability of the PSP.

Don't know what games are available in the UK, but I have:

- Ridge Racers - You guys already seem to love it, great graphics...
- MVP Baseball - Terrible, terrible port of the console versions
- Untold Legends - "Gauntlet" style game. Not a lot of fun with one person, but if you have multiple people to play wirelessly, it's a lot of fun in adventure mode with more than one person in your party
- Hot Shots Golf - Probably the best game out for the PSP. Good graphics, fast loading times, lot of unlockables. I'm pretty addicted to this game.

A good site for game/psp info is http://psp.ign.com

Whether you update or not depends on what you primarily use your PSP for. I've had mine since the day of the US release a couple months ago and upgraded to 2.0 last week. The web browser is great, it's so much cleaner than the Wipeout "hack". If you primarily use your PSP for games, movies and want to be able to surf the web than upgrade to 2. If you want to run homebrew stuff, keep it at 1.5. Either way, I wouldn't even attempt to downgrade if 2 is already on there, it's not worth the chance IMO.

I have an SMT5600 on the Cingular network. I have my SMT5600 to go out and retrieve my pop 3 mail every 15 minutes. If I'm using the phone and the phone tries to connect over GPRS to get the mail, I get the message "Unable to place data call with voice call in progress". I don't know why the phone would be having issues doing the two things at once, I can be connected over GPRS to the web and when a voice call comes in I have no problems answering while staying connected.

If anyone has run into this and found a solution or has suggestions, help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Just go modify the Headset profile. By default the ring volume is off, change it to whatever volume you'd like...

In your homescreen xml being used, you should see your clock tags that will look something like this:






Either change the mode attribute on the time node to 12 or remove the mode attribute entirely.

I've had an SMT 5600 for 2-3 weeks now and I'm getting two bubbles of dust coming in from the left side of the screen right in the middle. I'm probably going to give the Cingular warranty department a call, has anyone else tried this route?

I don't actually have an iPAQ, but I bought the adapter kit at a Circuit City here in the States to give it a shot and it worked...this one or one like it will probably work for you...

http://www.ipaqrepair.co.uk/ipaqpart493.html

What I've found is pretty much any of the 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm iPAQ converters work on the smartphones. Good luck...