New: i600 power-saving mode causes errors when reading SD

[Guest The PocketTV Team]

i600 / power-saving mode causes i/o errors when reading from SD card.

The credit for this problem should go to http://pocketeer.info which helped us pinpointing the issue...

Scenario:

- Set the i600 Display Power Saving timeout to 1 min.

- The active application has mapped the Left softkey on a function that causes it to immediately read data from an already opened file located on the SD card. (Example: PocketTV, the Play button causes it to play an MPEG file from the SD Card).

- Wait for 1 minute, until the display goes blank.

- Then hit the Left softkey.

At that points, the application calls ReadFile to read the already-opened file located on the SD Card, and ReadFile returns Error 5 (Access denied)!

So it looks like when the i600 screen goes blank, the "display power saving" not only shuts off the display, but it also shuts off other parts of the i600 hardware, including the SD Card.

So when a key is pressed, the hardware is powered up again, but not fast enough, and the SD Card cannot be read right away. It would not be a problem if this was properly handled internally (i.e. in the File driver)... ReadFile should just take a bit longer and wait until the SD Card is powered up. The problem is that it returns an error.

It's not too good... basically on the i600, every application that reads on the SD Card should test if ReadFile returns Error 5 (Access denied), and if it does, it should try again a couple of time - probably after a small delay - to make sure that the error is real, and not just caused by this power-up problem on the i600.

Comments from Microsoft or Samsung would be welcome!