Pocket PC and skipping SD Cards

[Jkalka]

While checking out the boards over at Pocketnow.com I found the following post interesting for two reasons..

1. I also have experienced music skipping on the Smart Digital card. I figured it was due to a bad copy or something.

2. I also see value in compiling a list of "known" problems and urge people to add to this list.

I still love my iPAQ, but am honestly having more problems every day with defending its quality.

Hi Compaq,

Could you point me to a web resource (other than the product support web site) where I can ACTUALLY see all of the known product issues with the 3800 series.

More importantly I'd like to know what to do about some of the issues, wait for a softpac, send the unit back or just get a refund from the point of sale.

I'm talking about issues like;

1 - Backlight problems
2 - SD card speed & lockup issues
3 - Speaker popping issues
4 - ViaVoice reading message body error
5 - Cleartype incompatability
6 - GAPI issues
7 - Low power alert at 40%, seems a tad low?
8 - Contrast issues, Video Playback
9 - Music playback from SD card skips regularly


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Steve Mac

[marlof]

All I have experienced so far is three things:

* the bluetooth stack in my 3870 requires a very frequent soft reset before it will work
* the MMC card I have skips songs
* cleartype doesn't look too good ( but I come from the king of cleartype, Jornada)

Somehow I still have a good feeling about the 3870 quality, but it is not as good as in building quality as a Jornada 54* or Casio E125/EM500 series device.

[Jkalka]

Marlof,

I am sure you meant SD card.. right? Out of curiosity what card are you using that skips? I am using a Sandisk 128 MB.

Might as well eliminate the skipping problem as being the media's fault.

take care.

[albsilva]

About problems with SD cards, according with Compaq site there are some 64MB SD cards from Compaq with problems. You can check the serial number to see if it matches.

Regards,
Alberto Silva
Leiria - Portugal

[Janak Parekh]

* the bluetooth stack in my 3870 requires a very frequent soft reset before it will work
Everyone has had this. Known problem, this is really poor QA.

* the MMC card I have skips songs
Partly the iPaq's fault (slow SD read), but mostly WMP's fault. If you're using MP3, try Pocket DivX - I've had no skips playing back 160Kbps VBR MP3's. None. WMA skipped and got confused and everything.

* cleartype doesn't look too good ( but I come from the king of cleartype, Jornada)
Not a QA/quality issue, but rather a design issue: it has to do with the orientation of the screen.

Somehow I still have a good feeling about the 3870 quality, but it is not as good as in building quality as a Jornada 54* or Casio E125/EM500 series device.

It's interesting you mention no PPC2002's there :D

--bdj

[fbosch]

Folks, regarding the media player that is correct that there was a bug which when MP3 tracks were played, the player was going from one track to another before reaching the end of the song,
This is now solved and ther is a patch on the Ipaq web site.

Regarding the SD card, be aware that some of them are deffective and therefore you must be careful with the series you buy.
Look at the 2 last Letter on the reference number of the SD card to make sure that it is compitible with your device.

My 128MB SD is referenced 0203LM/0201LM (LM is the importante ref