421 replies to this topic

[Shuflie]

stanchion, on Oct 8 2007, 02:43, said:

ummm, this is really bad advice to be giving people.  DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE.  one full charge is sufficient to provide your battery with full life..   lithium-ion batteries HATE being discharged fully... you are FAR BETTER OFF to let your battery charge every night even if it only needed 10 minutes of charging than to let it run down "once a month".  letting it run down once a month is a sure way to shorten the lifespan and total run time of your battery.  check your facts before handing out this kind of advice to people.

The advice given was fine. Lithium-ion batteries do need an initial conditioning before reaching their full capacity, between two to four full cycles is generally agreed to be the best practice. Removing and reinserting the battery several times during the first charge is also recommended as the circuitry controlling the battery charging can sometimes miscalculate the amount of charge stored in the battery. The "once a month" total run down is perhaps a bit excessive but the battery charger does occasionally need "re-calibration" which is performed by a full discharge- charge cycle, this should be performed every 30 charges, so if you've conditioned your battery properly at the start and get 2-3 days out of a single partial charge (I try to charge up fully when the low battery indicator first appears), then a full discharge-recharge should be performed every two to three months. Constantly discharging and recharging  will shorten the battery life, doing it occasionally to recalibrate the charger will still shorten the battery life a bit, but the benefits of the recalibration outweigh the shortened life. Try goggling "Lithium ion battery care" and reading some of the links that appear.

[chezchas9]

Erem, on Sep 24 2007, 11:00, said:

May I ask for some help here?  I've had my Kaiser for a week or two and have tweaked it to just about where I left off with my Hermes running the "Black" WM6 Roms.

Anyhow, the unit has been really solid, the last tweak that I really miss from Hermes was the toggle key to brighten the display.  There was an app, Vijay Lumos III that intercepted the Camera Apps ability to make the screen super-brite, it doesn't work on Kaiser and Vijay's doesn't seem to be around.  

I don't use the HTC Home screen, prefer Journal Bar for news and weather, but I was playing with HTC Home and found an application in the "Launch Programs" tab called "Adjust Backlight" and it steps the brightness from Dim to High which is great.

Here is my quest, I can't find this app!  If I press and hold a blank key in the HTC's Launcher tab, I get a pull down box with all the programs that can be set as a quick launch, Adjust Backlight is there.  In the normal programs folder, "adjust backlight" is not there.  What I want to do is find this app and creat a shortcut to it in the programs folder so that I can then assign a hardkey to toggle the screen brightness, outside of the HTC Home application.

With the Kaiser not having a transreflective screen, this would be a very usefull capability.

I would very much appreciate any help with this, I've spent a few fruitless hours.  I found the icon in \Windows "HH_Launcher Backlight.png but that's all so far.

Erem -

I am on the same quest!!! If only I could find out what program it is in the TyTN II Today screen (Launch area) that loops through various levels of backlight brightness. Then I could use a program called "AE button" to program that to a hard button. Then when I walk outside and can't see a thing on my TyTN II screen, I could just repeatedly press the programmed backlight button until the screen becomes bright enough to view.

At the very brightest setting the TyTN II screen is just visible in direct sunlight. But right now, if that's the situation, I am totally flying blind -- I can't do anything with the device until I brighten the screen but I have no way of doing that because I can't find the necessary icon in the HTC Today screen. (And it's very difficult to shade the screen with your hand -- then you can't see it because your hand is in the way, plus you need your hand to tap the sreen.)

This is a *very* frustrating Catch 22 and I'm suprised that every TyTN II owner isn't experiencing it and making some noise about it. Or am I just missing something basic?  Is there an easy way to brighten your screen when you can't see a thing on it?

Erem, have you discovered any workarounds?

Any help from anyone out there regarding easy control of the screen backlight would be greatly appreciated! :-)

Edited by chezchas9, 08 October 2007 - 10:28 PM.

[stanchion]

Nick Le Lievre, on Oct 8 2007, 06:46, said:

Yeah I found the Kaiser likes a soft reset every now and then regardless of whether you had/have SOD issues. The longest I`ve gone so far was just under 8 days without soft reset. I`m now soft resetting after every charge (roughly every 4-5 days) I don't know if this is often enough, if I still get problems which require a soft reset within this time frame then I`ll bring it down a bit. If you go more then 8 days without soft reset then I guess its luck which may not be repeated time and time again. I know one guy on here said he went 11 days without soft reset but I guess he just got lucky that time. If it doesn't go 11 days everytime then going 11 days once is nothing to boast about. This device will definetely not go forever without soft resets thats a fact, to say you only need to do it once or twice a year is bullshit.

whatever works for you man :-)  i havent had this SOD thing but i turned off the owner information after the first day with the device because it does seem a little wonky.  for example i couldn't it to work right with slide2unlock.  i like having slide2unlock as an icon on the htc screen and i only lock it when its in my pocket .. like at a poker table or something.. holding the hangup button to lock the device is a neato tip someone posted in here

Edited by stanchion, 08 October 2007 - 11:16 PM.

[stanchion]

Shuflie, on Oct 8 2007, 07:56, said:

The advice given was fine. Lithium-ion batteries do need an initial conditioning before reaching their full capacity, between two to four full cycles is generally agreed to be the best practice. Removing and reinserting the battery several times during the first charge is also recommended as the circuitry controlling the battery charging can sometimes miscalculate the amount of charge stored in the battery. The "once a month" total run down is perhaps a bit excessive but the battery charger does occasionally need "re-calibration" which is performed by a full discharge- charge cycle, this should be performed every 30 charges, so if you've conditioned your battery properly at the start and get 2-3 days out of a single partial charge (I try to charge up fully when the low battery indicator first appears), then a full discharge-recharge should be performed every two to three months. Constantly discharging and recharging  will shorten the battery life, doing it occasionally to recalibrate the charger will still shorten the battery life a bit, but the benefits of the recalibration outweigh the shortened life. Try goggling "Lithium ion battery care" and reading some of the links that appear.

errr like this one?  http://en.wikipedia....ium_ion_battery

you might want to note under "guidelines" where point #1 is lithium-ion batteries should never be "deep-cycled" or point #2 which says lithium-ion batteries should never be depleted?

the advice is bad, and sends people down a bad road, and i stand by that even without advanced knowledge of such things as battery chemistry or electronics.

Edited by stanchion, 08 October 2007 - 11:25 PM.

[lozzd]

So basically what you're saying is you're getting all you're information from Wikipedia? Don't get me wrong, I have no idea if you're right or wrong or not (i seem to get longer charges when I go down to around 30% and then charge fully, and my battery has been fine for 2 years on my Wizard) and I love Wikipedia, but remember not everything you read on there is completely true. Unless they have excellent citations/references of course...

[chilledatthebottom]

It's a common misconception Li-Ion cells suffer "memory effect", or need "conditioning"....Li-Ion cells have their own protection circuitry (unless you bought an ultra cheap 3rd party cell from china where these can be omitted to save some pennies!) that make it impossible to "deplete" or "deep discharge" the cell.  When the cell is sufficiently low, the fets (field effect transistors) on the protection circuit board effectively terminates the power to the battery contacts, thereby limiting any further discharge.  Li-Ion cells to not suffer memory effect, they do not need "conditioning", though the charging circuitry or more importantly, the fuel gauge circuitry does need proper calibration so it understands what a full charge looks like and what a discharged cell looks like, hence the misconception about multiple charges better the battery.  Full discharge/recharge cycles help educating the fuel gauge circutry about the condition of the cell, not improve the actual cell itself.

Edited by chilledatthebottom, 09 October 2007 - 09:58 AM.

[Kagenryu]

chilledatthebottom, on Oct 9 2007, 05:56, said:

It's a common misconception Li-Ion cells suffer "memory effect", or need "conditioning"....Li-Ion cells have their own protection circuitry (unless you bought an ultra cheap 3rd party cell from china where these can be omitted to save some pennies!) that make it impossible to "deplete" or "deep discharge" the cell.  When the cell is sufficiently low, the fets (field effect transistors) on the protection circuit board effectively terminates the power to the battery contacts, thereby limiting any further discharge.  Li-Ion cells to not suffer memory effect, they do not need "conditioning", though the charging circuitry or more importantly, the fuel gauge circuitry does need proper calibration so it understands what a full charge looks like and what a discharged cell looks like, hence the misconception about multiple charges better the battery.  Full discharge/recharge cycles help educating the fuel gauge circutry about the condition of the cell, not improve the actual cell itself.

Not to jump on the bandwagon here, but hey, why does Dell have a process in their BIOS that drains and recharges the lithium-ion battery in their laptops?

--

Kage

[stanchion]

well, i have found a new annoyance with my TyTN II... i was doing a lot of tweaking with it on the weekend, and somehow i managed to rig mine up to *rapidly* deplete the battery... no idea how i did it.. but it was hilarious ... even though the CPU was seemingly idle (no more than a few % CPU usage) the battery was draining right down.. from full charge to 10% in perhaps 8 or 9 hours... needless to say i had to do a hard reset and restore from a previous sprite backup.... problem seems fixed but... what the hell kind of tweak did this?

during the course of tweaking i had changed the soft keys and set \HKLM\Drivers\BuiltIn\RIL\EnableFastDormantDisplayDuringCall to 0.  nothing else that i could think of that could do something like this.. has anyone else had this happen to them?  :-)

[PaulOBrien]

It comes very highly recommended (still) from me!

P

[PaulOBrien]

nybom, on Oct 1 2007, 10:54, said:

Batti is known for it's memory leaks. I had it, loved it, but had to uninstall since my TyTn I hunged up after a day or so usage with Batti. Anybody know if there is a new verion on the way that is fixed?

I use Batti, still no SODs!

P

[rmg]

Does anyone know the settings for TCPMP and the Kaiser so that it plays video correct when slide is open and flipped up?

At the moment it plays ok in portrait (tap the screen and it goes landscape full screen) but when I actually open and tilt I cant get it to rotate and play full screen. it stays in portrait???

any ideas?

[Alkali]

Paul (MVP), on Oct 11 2007, 13:13, said:

I use Batti, still no SODs!

P

I so like Batti.Problem is,it is permanently showing me " Notification" the type i see when i have a new message 2. It has now occupied soft button where i use to see my calender items on the main screen.Anyway of changing that.

[jw66]

I've had my TyTN II for just over aweek now, can't criticize it much. Not been having the SOD problems, but I haven't set the ID check to come on after standyby.

The most annoying thing I've found is that, it takes the phone a good 4-5 seconds to wake up from Standby when theres an incoming call. My phone doesn't start ringing until 1-2 after that. Sometimes by the time I pick it up, its to late and the person calling me has already been forwarded to voicemail. For the person ringing me, they are already hearing upto 7-8 rings before I know I have to pick up.

Anyone else have this problem...? Any clues on what the cause could be?

Edited by jw66, 14 October 2007 - 10:26 AM.

[Phil_UK]

Hi

jw66, on Oct 14 2007, 03:14, said:

I've had my TyTN II for just over aweek now, can't criticize it much. Not been having the SOD problems, but I haven't set the ID check to come on after standyby.

The most annoying thing I've found is that, it takes the phone a good 4-5 seconds to wake up from Standby when theres an incoming call. My phone doesn't start ringing until 1-2 after that. Sometimes by the time I pick it up, its to late and the person calling me has already been forwarded to voicemail. For the person ringing me, they are already hearing upto 7-8 rings before I know I have to pick up.

Anyone else have this problem...? Any clues on what the cause could be?

Waking from standby to ring the phone on the Kaiser for me is as quick as a normal mobile phone.

I've heard other people saying the same thing as you and it was due to them having a complicated ring tone playing from their flash card.  It takes several seconds to initialise the flash card and read in the ring tone and that was causing the delay.  If you have set a custom ring tone try changing it to one of the supplied standard ones and see if that is any better and that may provide the answer.

Regards

Phil

[jw66]

Phil_UK, on Oct 14 2007, 11:53, said:

Hi

Waking from standby to ring the phone on the Kaiser for me is as quick as a normal mobile phone.

I've heard other people saying the same thing as you and it was due to them having a complicated ring tone playing from their flash card. It takes several seconds to initialise the flash card and read in the ring tone and that was causing the delay. If you have set a custom ring tone try changing it to one of the supplied standard ones and see if that is any better and that may provide the answer.

Regards

Phil

Thanks for the tip Phil, I already had my ringtone set to ring from the device (not storage). But then I tried one of the standard tones, and that seems to have speeded it up, like you said (Only 1-2 second delay). Looks like I'll have to edit my mp3 ringtones (cut them shorter to reduce ther size?). Thanks again..

[vijavij]

Manni01, on Sep 8 2007, 07:39, said:

Did you try with TCPMP? This is one of the best players for pocket PCs... Please report results...

Hi The results are approximately 65-70 fps with raw frame buffer and all the settings for aspect ratio. Deblocking filters are used with a MP4 AVC SP1 320x240 550 Kbps stream. The direct draw is very slow not even real time and GDI is 10% slower than raw frame. I suspect the TCMP is not using the Hardware Accelerators for Video on HTC Kaiser.

One question can anyone let me know if there is any multimedia player which uses the Qualcomm MSM 7200 SOC hardware accelerators.
Vijeta

[vijavij]

evad, on Sep 8 2007, 23:16, said:

Benchmark results of Matrix trailer:

TCPMP Version 

Subtitle Edition

0.81RC1 Beta Benchmark Results



Average Speed				  95.78%

Video Frames				   3635

Audio Samples				  6678241

Amount of Data				 12020 KB



Bench. Time					2:38.135

Bench. Frame Rate			  22.99

Bench. Sample Rate			 42231

Bench. Data Rate			   623 kbit/s



Original Time				  2:31.459

Original Frame Rate			24.00

Original Sample Rate		   44100

Original Data Rate			 650 kbit/s



URL							\My Documents\RL_MQB_320x240_512_128.avi

Size						   12308480

Platform					   PocketPC

OS Version					 5.02

OEM Info					   Kaiser

Clock speed					393 Mhz

Video output				   DirectDraw 240x320 16bits Lookup

Video zoom					 320x240 -> 240x320

Audio output				   Wave Output 44100Hz 16Bits 2Ch.

I have never ever did such benchmark, so I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but guys on polish PDAclub.pl forum said these results are bad.

Use the raw frame buffer settings in TCPMP please and then again do the benchmarking for the AVI clip. I am sure it will run faster.

[vijavij]

Manni01, on Sep 10 2007, 07:25, said:

It is quite significant if you plan to watch HQ encoded DivX (ie VGA @ 1500kb/s) and/or if, like me, you have a collection of hundreds of such files and can't be asked to re-encode them to fit the device, especially because you plan to watch them on a device with a proper resolution/screen size (ie VGA PDA, laptop, etc)...

It is less of a problem if you plan to encode files to fit the resolution/power of the device, as you can make them in such a way that they will conform to the power of the Kaiser in order to deliver smooth playback (ie around 600kb/s in QVGA). This can still provide a decent quality, especially on a qvga 2,8" screen (which wouldn't use a VGA resolution anyway). But don't expect to watch them on a laptop!

To get back to the poor video perf of the Kaiser, it could be SD related, which is why I was cheekily asking in another thread for a benchmark of the microSD card (r/w). There could be a bottleneck in the way the device reads/write to the card, or the card itself could be slow (although I don't think a microSD could be THAT slow, as it has to be recent and less than 650bk/s for data would be appalling). More likely it is the CPU/GPU, which is too slow to decode the video stream fast enough to keep up.

I don't agree with the benchmark results. I have done my own benchmarking and the only concern is that DirectDraw is significantly slower. In past it has been a problem for HTC devices. The Direct Draw drivers get disabled by default. The CPU is fast enough to decode and resize to fit the screen for even a VGA file. On my TCMP benchmarks I get 1.5 - 1.8 Mbit decoding capability. The Qualcomm MSM 7200 SOC has video accelerators in built but none of the players as of now take advantage of this. You can refer to the specs of the chipset for further details.
Here is it: http://www.cdmatech....200_chipset.pdf
Sure it has plenty of horsepower to play all you need.

[vijavij]

puerrican718, on Sep 12 2007, 00:10, said:

Try switching to Raw Framebuffer instead, you should see a huge difference from GDI and DirectDraw. On a decent HQ QVGA I get close to 230%+

Whats most likely the case is that with the new co processor being the main heavyweight to decode graphics and videos tcpmp/coreplayer needs to support the qualcomm first for it to do so. It's like getting a brand new video card for your pc, you'd be able to install it and use it at first but without the drivers for it you won't be able to do any 3D games or video watching properly.

It's like when the tytn came out at first, the ATI Imageon chip wasnt supported and thus the player had major problems playing videos at first, the team released a new version a few months ago and has it all ironed but you won't see tcpmp supporting the Kaiser II in that way since it's deen discontinued to work on Coreplayer.

I agree your results are matching with mine and the same opinion I have about the new co-processors on the qualcomm MSM 7200 SOC. I was thinking of writing an application to use the video coprocessors but nothing seems to be availaible in literature about the coprocessors.
PHEW

[rmg]

rmg, on Oct 12 2007, 17:01, said:

Does anyone know the settings for TCPMP and the Kaiser so that it plays video correct when slide is open and flipped up?

At the moment it plays ok in portrait (tap the screen and it goes landscape full screen) but when I actually open and tilt I cant get it to rotate and play full screen. it stays in portrait???

any ideas?

Ahh, installed a new version and its fine now

Edited by rmg, 18 October 2007 - 03:19 PM.