hardware

I had a Samsung SGH-720 or some such. It's been nothing but a pain in the butt... very buggy, especially the bluetooth, which required a power cycle to work correctly 75% of the time. So I got a Sony Ericsson K800i. It seems to be a lovely phone, lovely crisp graphics, good menus and user interface generally. It also has an excellent built-in camera, a 3.2 mega pixel affair. It has bluetooth that ... shock horror, actually works. I was particularly pleased to discover a feature for over-the-wire software upgrades - though none is currently available at present. However, I've had a few problems, which is the really the reason for this comment: 1) very minor, the key tone simply doesn't work all the time. No real problem... 2) much more seriously, the phone fails to tracks calls some times - i.e. it doesn't track made calls, and when someone phones you, it tells you there are 0 missed calls - very irritating. I've read a few others with the same problem... for me it worked to delete the whole call history and power cycle the phone... so far... it'll be interesting to see if the problem re-emerges.

So yesterday my Palm TX wouldn't switch on. After a lot of frustration I eventually hit the reset button on the back. Then it kept crashed on the "Palm Powered" logo and entered into an infinite loop - well infinite until the battery ran out. I managed a warm reset and can get a lot of stuff working in that environment, but lots of stuff is unavailable - wifi for example, and blazer crashes the machine everytime. I bought the TX with a mixture of the usual new gadget glee and reluctance. The reluctance was because I loved my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, not least since it ran a rock solid GNU/Linux. My TX is nothing like as reliable, but is smaller, with built-in wifi and bluetooth and (unbelievably) better sync support with GNU/Linux desktops. Looks like I need to hard reset my palm and restore, but I'm very tempted to play with Opie distributions I've just found for palm at hackndev. Of course, the real problem is I have a Palm because I haven't that much free time...