Category Archives: Mobile

Mobile geekery, phones, tablets, etc

Electronics, Geek, Mobile, Windows

I can’t fucking do it anymore

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Surface RT, I’m sick of your shit. I’m tired of your split personality. I’m tired of your bullshit limitations. I’m tired of your half-assed-half-broken implementation of fucking everything.

Hooray! You made it so Skydrive is available in windows explorer in the 8.1 update, instead of being relegated to only a metro app. But you couldn’t be fucking bothered to do the same for Skydrive Pro. Oh, and your metro file picker is an exercise in frustration every damn time it pops up.

Hooray! You have a full usb port. But the only thing worth plugging in to it is a flash drive. You’d be a perfect little network admin device if I could use a usb-serial adapter. But there’s no drivers for that anywhere that are compatible. I tried my Bluetooth serial adapter, same pile of shit. It’ll pair, but your Bluetooth stack doesn’t implement serial comms.

Hooray! You have “full blown” IE. Except it’s a pathetically slow pile of shit. It hangs every time I open youtube because of their giant flash-ad header that they’ve been doing lately. And it doesn’t allow for any add-ons. I can’t tie-in a password manager, I have to flip over to a modern-ui app to copy every single username and password I use fifty times a day.

Hooray! In 8.1 you added Outlook. You can barely run it. It hangs every time it refreshes my Office365 account, just like every time IE loads youtube. It also doesn’t support Caldav. So we’ll just ignore all those other calendars I give a shit about. Not like I need to see those appointments on your splashscreen login page thing. Speaking of…

Hooray! You have a fancy dashboard splashscreen thing! But you only support a handful of apps running “in the background” at any given point. You can’t just let apps dynamically feed you notifications as they generate them. So there can only be a few apps at any given point with active modern ui notifications. Your weather app manages to update it’s live tile, but that doesn’t mean that the data in the app is up to date when I launch it. Your appstore selection is mediocre at best, and too many of the apps simply display a website wrapped in someone else’s ads. You taunt me with your desktop, but won’t let me install desktop apps. You were MORE useful running 8.0 as at least there was a jailbreak then which allowed me to run PuTTY and Notepad++. At this point you’d be better off not having the desktop at all as the transition between it and metroland is so jarring, the uselessness of the desktop environment so anger inducing, I’d really just rather not see it at all.

The ONLY thing that has kept you in my bag this long is that you’re not a completely terrible Remote Desktop client. I spend more time RDPed into real computers than I do using you as a computer. But of course there has to be a rub here as well. Your VPN support is pretty fucking mediocre. PPTP in 2014?

My Nexus7 showed up today. It’s on my desk charging alongside a Bluetooth keyboard case. Your days are numbered, Surface. I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us, I really tried but you just couldn’t meet me halfway.

Geek, Mobile

This is the middle, the middle of our headset story

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I’ve recently picked up a Motorola H670 to use with my phone.  BT range is good, volume is decent, it fits snug against my head and it doesn’t look like ass.  So far so good.

The only problem? It auto-answers incoming calls, and I need to figure out how to change that.  I’m almost certain that it didn’t do that when I first paired it, so it must be something I did, but I haven’t as of yet figured out what that was. I’ve checked all the settings in my phone that I know of and none are set to auto-answer. This shall be the last piece of the puzzle.  I figured it was time for an update.  I really have nothing else to say about this.

Geek, Mobile

The Woefull tale of a Treo and a new headset

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I have a Treo 650 that I have accepted into my life as my personal lord and savior. It allows me greater mental freedom by offloading less important tasks like remembering anything.

For the last year, I’ve been using a Motorola HS850 with my Treo, and it’s been very well behaved. But over that year, the driver element has started to crackle, the over the ear hanger bit is loosening up and the unit is prone to falling off easily. So I decided it was time to look for a new headset. Originally I ebayed a Moto H700 which turned out to be a cheap knockoff. That said, it didn’t play nice with my Treo. So I gave it to a friend (it was only $30, good sign it was a knockoff) and yesterday I picked up a legit H700 at FutureShop.

I have a PalmOne Treo 650. Hardware revision A, Firmware 01.71, and Software Treo650-1.20-ENA. The legit H700 didn’t work with this phone. Disabled bluetooth, deleted the bluetooth device cache and trusted devices list, did a soft reset, turned bluetooth on then paired the H700 with my 650 and it still didn’t work. The H700 would pair with my phone and take itself out of discoverable mode, it would show up in my trusted devices list. It was non functional as a headset. Couldn’t answer a call, couldn’t transfer a call from the handset to the headset. Flipping open the boom didn’t “wake-up” the handset either. Every standard behavior I’m accustomed to with my HS850 didn’t work.

I tried the above in car-kit mode as well. Still no dice.

The only redeeming bit to the entire story is that there was no hassle returning the headset to FutureShop. And so, the search continues for a new headset to replace my trusty but dieing HS850.