Went to install a midlet on my Vario II after following a link printed in City AM this morning.

The midlet from www.mobizines.com which allows you to easily download newpapers/magazines for offline reading installed fine, and appears to run perfectly. Except for when it prompts you to do something with OK and Cancel buttons at the bottom of the screen. This I guess correspond to the soft keys on a smartphone or similar, BUT the soft keys on my Vario II have no effect. The touchscreen, navi-button etc. also are ignored.

Does anyone know of a way of "pressing" the buttons on these types of midlets under WM5 on a PPC, or am I flogging a dead horse from the off?

Rufus.

Had a slightly similar problem with mine last Saturday (7th) whilst visiting a farm near Leatherhead. Was getting a steady 2bars signal and made a few phone calls. 20 mins later tried to make a phone call and got network unavailable, thought it was my position (in a valley). Travelled to top of nearby hill and still unavailable. When back in the valley still no signal, switched phone off and back on again and instantly back to steady 2 bar signal. Just put it down to a network glitch!

Rufus.

Apologies in advance if this is stating the bleeding obvious, but I wish I'd thought about it earlier.

I have a large bowl at home in to which I tend to shove in all the detritus from my pockets at the end of the day (i.e. car keys, cash, wallet, mobile phone etc.) which has served me well for years.

However recently I've had some problems with cards. My train ticket stopped working in the barriers, my gym card no longer operates the turnstiles, my Sainsbury's reward card has stopped working etc. After all this seemingly random bad luck the coin suddenly dropped (literally) when I had to prise a 2p off my Vario II case this morning after it had become strangely attracted.

The case obviously contains strong magnets - fine for the phone, but not so good for anything of a delicate magnetic nature that comes near it.

So just a warning keep your train tickets, credit cards etc. away from that case!

HTH - Rufus (mostly waiting for ticket inspectors to let me through the station barriers).

Expansys sell the headsets:

http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=138246

There may of course be other cheaper suppliers.

HTH - Rufus.

From:

http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/terms?WT.svl=300#try



So you'll either get charged £4 / month or if you cancel that, you'll pay at [exhorbitant] PAYG data rates.

AFAIK you'll have difficulty getting data disabled on your SIM altogether, though you may be able to change your connection settings on the phone not to use it!

HTH - Rufus.

I very much doubt you'll get a direct port of Frontier FE because of all of the problems with the PPC version of Elite:

http://www.eliteppc.com/

I believe it may still be possible to become a beta tester though if it helps ;-)

Another option that may be worth trying out is installing an Atari ST emulator i.e. CaSTCE and then trying the Atari version of the game(s). I know that people have run them [slowly] on older devices, so may work on the all conquering Hermes!

Rufus.

It's a shame you have to turn off the phone, wifi, bluetooth etc. one at a time rather than having an all encompassing flight-mode.

Also the last few flights I've been on they've announced that phones, including smartphones and PDAs with a phone function even if they have a "flightmode" should remain switched off throughout the flight. "Blackberries" can be used in flight if set to flightmode WTF. This was with BMI FWIW.

Rufus.

IMHO the only thing in a HTC that could be affected by magnets is any inductors. For example the backlight for the LCD probably uses one, and with a sufficiently strong magnet in exactly the wrong place it may result in it overloading the circuit and buring out.

Though I suspect the magnets are not nearly powerful enough and are sufficiently far away from the backlight not to have this effect.

p.s. "four inch wide circular magnets" - the ones in my T-Mobile case are probably nearer 1cm diameter!

Rufus.

FWIW the screen you touch with the stylus on mine also sits slightly proud of the thicker screen below. I had (possibly wrongly) assumed this was a necessary characteristic of the touchscreen, though TBH I don't recall my old SE P800 needing this.

If you hold the Vario II a near right angles in front of the eye and catch a light reflection off the screen you can clearly see the screen dipping and flexing as you touch it. And it does feel spongy rather than positive as you scribe. Not too much of an issue for point and clicking, but can be annoying if dragging or drawing with the stylus.

Is this a fault or a characteristic?! Would [now] be interested if others have got this! Mine is an HT634 model, so perhaps they added the gap so alleviate the screen alignment issue?!

Rufus.

You don't have to have 2 phones but it may be worth getting 2 if you have an other half as calls between them are free (both Orange and T-Mobile), and you get 2 subsidised handsets (with only a slightly greater monthly outlay).

To get a business tariff, you phone up their relevant business sales telephone number - see their respective websites for details. I've got a Ltd company, so it's dead easy for me, but AFAIK you are still entitled to a business contract when self employed.

HTH - Rufus.

Also if switching operators IMHO it's worth picking up a PAYG card that uses that network to check *real* coverage for example in my office it makes a huge difference which desk you sit at as to which Operator works best.

On the offers basis I found T-Mobile best for me. I was able to get a T-Mobile Business-1 plan with 500 mins shared between 2 phones, a bundle of texts, Web n Walk pro (for 1 handset) a 5MB bundle (for other), a small text bundle for just under £58 / month (25% discount for 18 month contract when going via T-Mobile web). The best bit being the phones supplied (a Vario II and Nokia Series-60) were free, and they even chucked in 3 months free insurance.

Orange on the other hand offered to sell me a M3100 upgrade for well over £100 with no unlimited data being available, and would have worked out around £70/month for both phones *without* any data.

In real world I find T-Mobile coverage for me (central London near embankment, Surrey and Edinburgh) has been as good, and most times better than Oranges!

Also Orange Business CS took over 10mins to answer the phone each time I called when asking for PACs, upgrade options etc. And T-Mobiles answered in under 1 min each time, they also had an experienced CS person who answered my questions, corrected a billing error, and phoned me back when promised.

On my 1.5 weeks experience with T-Mobile, I can't fault them!

HTH - Rufus.

Thanks Jeremy, that's saved me some fruitless experimentation.

I really must get myself registered on xda developers now I own a proper device.

Rufus.

I have a mono Bluetooth handsfree headset - Jabra BT200. Is there anyway in which I can use it to listen to audio on the phone?

Ideally I'd like to be able to listen to the soundtrack of a film being played using TCPMP on my headset with the speaker muted! I appreciate that the quality won't be up to much, but hopefully good enough for dialogue.

Is this possible - I've seen talk of utilities for the Wizard et al to achieve this, but nothing concrete for the Hermes!

TIA - Rufus.

Not sure if it's any help, but a few weeks ago I picked up an Orange branded accessory pack for my SPV C550 from an Orange shop. Cost £9.99 and had a car charger, 2.5mm jacked handsfree and an offer sticker for a free "Case" (which I forgot to redeem), and was shown as compatable with the C500 only.

Anyway the point of the post is the USB car charger works fine with my Vario II, so if nothing else for a tenner you can get a charger that works with some accessories you can fleabay.

YMMV etc. - Rufus.

Very pretty - I'm liking the landscape one!

Couple of questions:

1) Is there room to plug in an [in-car] charger whilst being held by the Brodit?

2) Can you use TomTom in landscape mode?

Rufus.

Looks like it's nearly on the UK site now:

http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/images/T-Mobile/..._dimensions.gif
http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/images/T-Mobile/...II_g_angled.gif

Rufus!

The "Orange World Unlimited Bundle", looks very similar to the old "Orange GPRS Access Pack" of yore (circa 2003?). Both offering "unlimited" browsing but restricted to their WAP gateway.

FWIW the old Access Pack was open to anyone with a GPRS enabled phone (rather than selected tariffs) and cost just £4 a month.

Good old Orange - restrict the service, double the price and sell it as something new/better.

Unless something miraculous happens in August I'll be ending my 11+ year relationship with Orange, and taking all my families/business contracts with me (prob to T-Mobile).

Rufus.

fluffcat1 AKA Richard is your man. Try PMing him or contacting him via his eBay profile:

http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...serid=fluffcat1

HTH - Rufus.

Wayne

I'm intrigued - do you find much difference between the QStarz and the Tomtom?

AFAIK there are only 29 satellites in ordit ATM, and probably less than half that number visible in the UK at any one moment. So apart from cold starts having travelled internationally I wouldn't imagine there is much difference between tracking 12, 24 or 32!

The only possible advantage I can see of the RFMD chipset over the Serf Star III, is the supposed quoted sensitivity, but it seems from reviews I've read in practice the Serf Star III is actually better, and RFMD may have been a little creative in their figures.

Personally I haven't experienced an obvious tracking inaccuracy (though have had the odd mapping one). Is this something that you were plagued with a lot which resulted in you feeling the need to pay £50+ for a replacement device? Has the Qstarz cured this??

Rufus.

Is this something you can use Mossywell's Copy Files for?

i.e. Create a new version of Short_POC, place in your Copy Files folder and have the file in the windows folder will be replaced each time you start the smartphone.

See Mossywell's downloads

HTH - Rufus.

I don't mean to be rude, but you have been posting on this subject for 3 days, and just about everyone has said - "phone Orange".

Have you phoned them yet? Whatever the problem, either network registration or handset, they are the best people to sort it out for you! IMHO you could have had a replacement phone by now and been using it for 2 days.

Rufus.

FWIW the last 2 phones I've bought direct from Orange that are less than 6 months old and faulty have been very quickly swapped out. Typically a replacement phone is couried to be within 24 hours, and I hand them my old faulty one (minus sim card, battery, SD etc.). Deliveries can even be booked for evening (6-10PM). Excellent service IMHO.

It may be worth trying an Orange shop if you suspect it's a network / registration problem as the store has a direct phone num for Orange CS which won't waste your time / phone bull. However if it's a handset issue then it's Orange CS and a visit from the couriers for you.

HTH - Rufus.

Might be worth while doing a hard reset, and then trying again (just in case you muellered something in the registry).

Did you test the phone *before* you made any modifications to it. It's always possible that the phone is simply faulty. Also worth while contacting Orange just in case they put a transit bar on the phone when they shipped it to you.

HTH - Rufus.

AFAIK this can only be done on a contact by contact basis.

When you edit a contact, there's a field called "File As", this gives various options on how to combine the firstname/lastname to display in the contact list. So by saving each contact with a File As "Fistname Lastname", contacts will be sorted that way.

If you have outlook and activesync running it *may* be possible to change the sort order in outlook and synch the changes with the phone - not played with it much thought TBH.

HTH - Rufus.

Not long-term usage, but overclocking for around 2 hrs per day for over a month and doesn't seem to have had any detremental effect on the phone or battery to date. No obvious overheating issues either.

Having said that I've now had to have the phone swapped by Orange (dodgy joystick problem), so no longer long-term, but still on original battery.

HTH - Rufus.