Orange release UK E200 update

[Guest monty1]

Thanks Disco Stu , I think ill just download the update and keep it on my Pc I will probably need it to upgrade to the next version which orange must surely release after this debacle .

A couple of other questions to the people who have upgraded . Is there anybody out there who has run the update and is NOT having any problems with SD card sleeping , hanging issues , and their bluetooth handset loosing calls .

Finally i would like to offer my sympathy to those people who have in effect been the testers for this ROM , and have ended up with a less functional device than they started with

Roll on the next update

[Guest carlosp_uk]

Here is my theory on the SD Card problems - please discuss.

We all know there was a bug with SD Cards and Battery Life. Some clever soul (on this forum!) discovered that putting an SD Card into your E200 halved the battery life.

The problem was obviously that the phone was accessing the card frequently, and unnecessarily; using up valuable power.

This ROM update tries to address that problem - by reducing unnecessary read/writes to the SDC.

I propose that the programmers have NOT correctly unmounted/remounted the SD Card with their battery life fix. This explains why users are seeing the cards 'disappear' and have to be re-inserted. (or the phone/activesync locks up trying to look for ths card)

It seems to me VERY likely that this is the cause of these problems that we are seeing.

What do you think?

Carlos

PS: I've been waiting for MONTHS for this update, mainly cos of battery life but also in the hope that all the minor little bugs would have been cleared up. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case, which is a major disappoinment. Just look at the E200 "issues list" in the forums and ask yourself - how long would it have taken somebody to go through this list and bugfix the minor stuff? Profile changes that ruin the volume setting, no option to have SMS delivery reports, limited bluetooth headset compatibility, so on, so on, etc, etc...

Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest Disco Stu]

Thanks Disco Stu , I think ill just download the update and keep it on my Pc I will probably need it to upgrade to the next version which orange must surely release after this debacle .

Good tip :idea:

[Guest londonlad]

at least T9 remembers words now :)

the reason i feel let down is because i see the busy timer much more often. :cry:

come to think of it, do you think they reduced the processing power in a bid to extend the battery life?

actually it makes a lot of sense, cos that would increase standby times. A lot of ppl are explaining listening to music or watching videos is worse.

OH NO ORANGE PLEASE TELL ME YOU DIDNT! :roll:

[Guest fog]

just wondering if anyone knows if the uk rom update is suppose to include packet video player? the french version apparently adds this to the phone....anyone?

pAd

[Guest rockinlobster]

Posted from my SmartPhone... The Update stops you from using the orange folding keyboard as the driver is out of date! worst of all I can no longer sync contacts with my PC... Orange are as usual totally useless!

[Guest kalantz]

Among others (sd issue, earphone volume, battery life, bluetooth, etc), after the update I noticed that my phone turns off while I'm talking. It did it at least 4 times yesterday!!!

Anyone noticed that?

Costas

Greece

[Guest sgannon]

can the Danish update be installed on an updated UK E200? If so, is it any better than our update? I'm willing to try anything at this point, my phone locks up at least half a dozen times a day and loses the SD card more than that.

Is the old ROM available anywhere and is it possible to downgrade back to this?

[Guest Baddass]

ok, on the most part the update is good imo

1. ppl complained about crap battery - my batteyr is now VERY good, been on for 12 hrs and still on 4 bars! never did this b4 even with SD card out. I know some ppl have battery probs still, btu most ppl it seems to ahve helped

2. ppl complained about speaker issue, they fix that, now all my callas are really clear, and no buzzing. Still sounds good, not tinny like some ppl have found.

these 2 imo are the 2 most important features of a phone, and they have fixed them both, in my case anyway. My phone, being only a month old, was never THAT bad before anywa, maybe phones which were really bad before are still not right?? maybe it improves the handset, but only in proportion to how bad it was b4.

i know there's some more bugs with SD card etc, but some features are def improved.....if they give us another update ot solve a few of the other bugs then that will be even better. T9 seems better now, phone seems a little slower though.....

[Guest sgannon]

Just a thought - is the ROM that the mods tested any better than the official one? It doesn't seem like the beta ROM locked up the phone or lost the memory card. Perhaps they make a final tweak pre-release and screwed up the functionality. Is it possible to install this one instead, should we "stumble" across it somewhere? :wink:

[Guest smith2001]

not impressed with the volume in calls, its very low on mine even tho i have made it full volume, very annoyed as my landlord speaks very quitely !!

[Guest nato]

Update - got a call back from a lady from the Executive office at Orange today. This was after emailing the Vice President of Technical (Mr Didier Lebrat) at Orange . (well start at the Top, thats what I always say :) )

Anyway - they have offered me another E200, which I will gladly accept.This was after being told NO to a replacement yesturday !

Amazing wot happens when you point out that the handset is faulty and according to my Orange Care Insurance ....blah,blah

Anyway New handset coming tomorrow on Old ROM (I have been told)

Needless to say - I will NOT be applying the ROM update again.

I did however, happen to mention that the Battery life is not what was advertised when I purchased the upgrade, and as a consequence may not be satisfactory, even with the ROM applied...She is ringing me back on Monday to see if the replacement is any good. !!!

She has also given me a number to ring to ask if I should apply the update on my replacement handset (or course im not going to - but might be worth ringing and asking !)

[Guest drblow]

em... has anybody had any improvement on lockups by hard reset? & if i do 'clear storage' do i need to reapply the update? Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest Trancemaster]

I think I'm sorted now. I ran the update again from my Windows 2000 workstation at work and although it screwed up at first, causing a Hard Reset, the second time I ran it it worked fine. My bluetooth is now working again. I think my XP PC at home must have some USB issues as the update didn't seem to be finishing correctly. Thanks for the advice everybody!

Looks like I'll have to reinstall everything again, lost all my levels on Toki Tori, and I was so close to the end!

[Guest tooney]

Some people seem to be claiming that T9 remembers words after the update. Mine doesn't...

[Guest nato]

Well nothing to report yet - still waiting on the call from Tech Support (so called!)

Can I ask Paul and the other Mods who Beta Tested the ROM, why the hell weren't these problems picked up at testing stage ?

I work in IT on IBM midrange systems, and I can say without a doubt that every functionality of applications are tested, when IBM release an OS upgrade. I know things are relatively new within the smartphone platform, but there is just no excuse for this.

Today I thought I would test playing an MPEG which I have ripped and re-encoded AND which played perfectly before the update. NOW I find the video jerky and after 5 mins of play, the handset locked up again.

I just cannot understand how the hell this update has been released AND is still available.

If it were MS or IBM it would have been pulled the first sign of trouble.

Can someone recommend the next best thing to an E200 ? - I've had enough !

Any reply from the Mods on the above mentioned point. Why was this major bug not recognised on testing ?

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

We did of course raise some issues with the update prior to release, but it should be noted that although we were helping test the update, we did no have a say in the decision as to whether the update should be released.

P

[Guest mhm]

Woah, have been on this same thread 2nd day in a row now and have finally completed 25 pages.

The following is my opinion on the update.

Although the battery life on the E200 pre-update is appauling I think I will stick with it and wait and see how the next update is going to trun out. (Dont mind charging it every night! )

Cause the only advantage that I have deduced from this thread is the extension of battery life to almost double (i am guessing here, from 24 hrs to 48 hrs.) but at a price of having the SD card to swtich off and even hang the phone at times and also I read it somewhere (i think on this page 25 or a couple before this) that the processor speed might have been tweaked to lower it so as to extend the battery life thus causing the egg timer to appear more and also have mp3 and videos to skip and jerk.

Other than the battery life. The BT reamains the same, I don't really have an issue with the speaker as most of the time I use my headphones.

[Guest Pondrew]

Cause the only advantage that I have deduced from this thread is the extension of battery life to almost double (i am guessing here, from 24 hrs to 48 hrs.) but at a price of having the SD card to swtich off and even hang the phone at times and also I read it somewhere (i think on this page 25 or a couple before this) that the processor speed might have been tweaked to lower it so as to extend the battery life thus causing the egg timer to appear more and also have mp3 and videos to skip and jerk.

Other than the battery life. The BT reamains the same, I don't really have an issue with the speaker as most of the time I use my headphones.

I'd list the advantages I've discovered so far as a 30% improvement in battery life (you might be right about it not being enough given the possible problems), improvements to the power management especially backlighting (included in this is the ability of Windows Media to automatically keep the backlight on for movies but NOT for mp3s REGARDLESS of the power settings), increased the usability of Bluetooth (I've heard the update improved compatibility with devices like GPS Mice (mouses?!), and apparently improved the T9 memory.

The only mentions I've heard of processor speed being reduced were throw away comments (suggestions with no evidence). For what it's worth my videos are running as well as before. It IS possible to improve battery life without fiddling with the mechanics of the system you know?! This update was to the Operator and Radio roms and surely these couldn't have messed with the processor settings. Think about it people, when you update an operating system it doesn't automatically have access to the bios does it!?!?!

BUT I too have had the locking up problem although only in the past day. It is a major failure and almost completely undermines the improvements.

Note I said almost, I personally prefer my E200 now that it has only one major bug (excluding the battery life issue) compared to all the little niggles that have been eliminated. I can however see that many of you won't like the updated but unstable E200 over the more stable but unrefined E200 we had before.

It's a judgement call! 8)

[Guest Rob.P]

Any reply from the Mods on the above mentioned point. Why was this major bug not recognised on testing ?

From what I've heard the environment at Orange for testers is useless hence they can't get the work done properly. Orange had a powercut down in Bristol yesterday and could only get half the power back so only half the computers worked, left a lot people twidling their thumbs.

They had a fire in a kitchen awhile back so they thought they'd better start doing fire drills, this is the kind of company we (although god knows why, now I come to think of it) have decided to buy products and services from.

Be nice if Orange, as a corporation, could stop and take a look at itself and see how stupid their business practices looks to us the consumer.

[Guest Baddass]

stupid orange for having a power cut and a fire!!

come on, thats hardly in their control is it?!?!

think it was a good point above, that some ppl are more happy with crap battery and buzzing , and some are more happy with a working SD card, seems we cant have both just yet, so up to every user to choose which they prefer

[Guest twister]

I think all those people asking how the update team could possibly have missed all the faults in this new ROM need to re-read this thread and take note of the responses from people who aren't affected, and then consider how many other people have applied the update, haven't had any problems, and so haven't felt the need to post about it here.

YES, there are clearly problems with the update.

BUT, they only seem to be affecting some phones.

As an embedded software developer, I know all too well how you can spend hundreds of hours testing and fixing a piece of firmware, but within a few days of releasing it to your customers you're getting reports back of faults that never showed up on the in-house test systems. The simple fact is, as systems get more complex and we give the end user more flexibility to reconfigure the system, the more likely it is for a fault to be missed during in-house testing (if we had to test every possible combination of settings before releasing some of our products, they'd never get released).

To add my personal experiences with the update...

Battery life: Pre-update I was seeing an average drop of 4%/hour. Immediately post-update I was seeing an average of 8%/hour, and I was using the phone LESS than I had been prior to the update... For the first time since I bought the phone, I was regularly seeing the low battery warning - I was not a happy bunny :-( However, after reading this thread and seeing the advice to run Clear Storage, I'm now back to 4%/hour with the same usage pattern as pre-update. So whilst the update hasn't improved battery life for me, it hasn't made it any worse either.

Video/audio playback: In PocketTV, MPEGs seem to play back as smoothly as they did pre-update, and AVIs captured with the phonecam also play back as smoothly (or not!) as they ever did with the old ROM. In Media Player, I occasionally get choppy MP3 playback, but if I go to Task Manager and stop all, then restart Media Player, the skipping stops completely. From the limited times this has happened to me, it seems as if it's related to the number of other apps in memory. Slightly more frequently I'll get Media Player deciding to skip to the next track in the playlist before the current one has finished - this is something I don't recall ever happening with the old ROM.

General audio quality: Audio capture during video recording now includes the static hiss that others have mentioned, but pre-update the audio capture used to include random clicks, so I've never been that impressed with this aspect of the phone. If anything, the constant hissing makes the audio sound better than the clicking - at least now it's easier to "tune-out" the noise given it's consistent nature. Speaker quality during phone calls seems better, although I'm one of those people who wasn't terrribly concerned about the quality pre-update, and so far I've not had any problems with the mike capture level being too low for others to hear what I'm saying. Audio quality through the headphones when playing MP3s is as good as it was pre-update - I still have the same bass response and the volume can still be turned up to 11 :-)

SD lockups: If this problem ONLY affect SD cards, then I have no comment. If, however, it's a problem with memory cards in general (i.e. both SD and MMC), then I haven't noticed any problem here. At the moment I'm using the freebie Orange 32MB MMC card to store MP3s and mpegs, and it stays in the card slot all the time. No matter how long it's been since the last time the card was accessed, the phone has, so far, never locked-up when accessing the card again.

Bluetooth: Never used it pre or post-update, so no comments here.

SMS: I'm not convinced of T9's ability to remember user-defined words. At first it appears better than pre-update, but it still seems to forget some things, so at the moment I'd call this a partial improvement. Nice to see the character counter updating when you delete, although it sometimes seems to take a while for the count to be updated giving the impression that it's not being updated... Again, I'll call this a partial improvement.

Lockups: Haven't suffered from any so far. I've noticed, like others, that the phone sometimes seems less responsive than before and at times it appears to briefly lock up, but it always ends up completing whatever task I've asked it to do.

Cleartype: Took a short while to adjust, but now I wouldn't want to go back! My girlfriends SPV is still running the original ROM, and now when I look at the screen on hers I wonder how I ever managed to put up with the pixelly fonts... The SPV screen is the best I've seen on any mobile, and Cleartype just makes it look even better IMO. But without question, there SHOULD be the option to switch it off (just as there should have been the option to switch it on in the original ROM ;-) ).

In short, I've noticed a few minor glitches since installing the new ROM, but since it's also improved a few things I'm happier now than I was pre-update. However, as noted above, and several times elsewhere in this thread, running Clear Storage after installing the new ROM was a MUST.

I fully understand that some people are genuinely having problems with this update, but I don't think the update as such is entirely to blame - if it really were as bug-ridden as some posts suggest, we'd ALL be having problems. Would more testing have revealed these problems? I don't know. Until we understand why these problems are occurring on some peoples phones but not others, no-one can say whether the faults are something that would have been detected if the test team had been given another hour, another day, week, month, year...

Regards,

Chris

[Guest morpheus2702]

some ppl are more happy with crap battery and buzzing , and some are more happy with a working SD card, seems we cant have both just yet, so up to every user to choose which they prefer

I'd choose not to have a E200 franky, and I think that unless Motorola really pull out all the stops in producing a stable, working WM2003 for their MPx100/MPx220, Smartphone users will simple give WM2003 a very wide berth.

As much as I want to stay in the WM camp, I have to admit that the prospect of using a Symbian device, that by all accounts gets better with each release, seems a lot more attractive.

I wasn't around when the first update for the original SPV came out, but this seems to be a much bigger debacle! Yeah yeah yeah "new OS and all that" - heard all those excuses before...

By now Orange/HTC should be producing OSs that are stable in the first place and patches that actually solve more problems than they cause!

[Guest drblow]

I personally agree with Twister - there seems to be a great variety of issues, & some people have them, some don't. However, this fact leads me down another road of thought - how can an update cause so many different problems for some, and not for others??

I'm no expert ( :shock: ) but it seems strange to me that this update is affecting people differently. I imagine that if Orange are aware of these problems, they would treat them as 'glitches', and put it down to individual cases rather than a fault with the update itself. I'm not sying thats right, just thats how I believe Orange would view it. The chances of any fixes for these issues coming are slim to none I reckon.

Its frustrating for the user because, from experience, we can be pretty sure that we won't hear anything from Mr. Orange on this forum about these issues. Which really I believe is the biggest problem. How many people here would be that bit less annoyed if we got a statement form Orange saying that they were aware of the issues and were trying to fix them??

[Guest morpheus2702]

Mr Who?