TamsPPC - the PocketPC Blog

Stylus loss is a common problem for many in the mobile industry - while I have been mostly unaffected so far(lost none but the original stylus of my rx4240), other members of the TamsPPC team can sing a song about that dreaded phenomenon. Using rather expensive 3-in-1 styli as replacement is a very bad idea under such circumstances - can Brando’s 3$ a pop styli stack up?

Brando’s 3-pack ships in their classic envelopes - no need to mention anything here. The styli themselves are packed up in a simple blister:

The styluses are milled out of black plastic in a single piece - this is great, as there are no end caps that can stay stuck in the silo or fall off after some use:

The styluses fit into the rx4240 well, the tip can be used to reset the handheld:

In the end, the Digital Express Styli feel a bit worse than quality 3-in-1’s, but are significantly cheaper and still usable. People looking for a cheap stylus will be very happy with the Digital Express ones - Brando’s price of 9$ for 3 is unbeatable. Additionally, the monolithic nature of the stylus(no pen that can leak, caps that go off,…) can go a far way for people who have ever experienced 3-in.-1 stylus fall-apart horror…

Some owners of the HTC Kaiser found out that this smartphone has an ATI Radeon graphics chip which supports hardware acceleration for graphics and camera. However, the manufacturer, HTC, does not use feature and so there is no support for this chip in the operating system.

At the moment, 7693 Kaiser owners signed this petition, and this number is still growing. So if you think that HTC should release a driver, or at least an SDK so that developers could write a driver, please sign this petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/tytn2vid/petition.html

Currently the HTC Kaiser is one of the best smartphones. Among others, it has Wireless LAN, GPS, a 3 MP camera and a UMTS/HSDPA radio. So it is interesting for many business users which also want a built-in keyboard. But many users of this smartphone are disappointed because they sometimes cannot receive or make phone calls. When you dial a number, the device stops the call again. And if someone wants to call you, your phone is not availible.

When you have a closer look at this problem, you may notice that this problem only occurs when you are in a 3G/UMTS network. Then your smartphone displays a “3G” or “H” in the top line. If you are in a GPRS / EDGE network (it displays a “G” or an “E”), the phone works perfectly. As this issue appears at all the different brands of the HTC Kaiser with different networks in different countries (and different ROM versions), this is likely a software problem caused by the phone ROM of this phone. It is also being discussed on xda-developers.com.

There seems to be no solution yet. HTC knows this problem, but there is no update yet. The only workaround is to deactivate the high-speed data connections. This can be done in Settings, Personal, Phone. In this settings dialogue, there is one tab where you can change a setting from “Auto” to “GSM” - unfortunately, these labels are different on my German phone. If you change this setting, your radio will only connect to GPRS / EDGE networks, but your phone should work correctly again.