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HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion Review

I was recently given a HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion as a gift so I thought I would explain my experience with the device. I wanted the device because one of our HP representatives bought one and I was very impressed with what I was able to do in the few minutes I played with the device. It also happened to be on sale because HP was clearing out their remaining stock. I didn’t do any navigation, but I assumed the device is designed for navigation so I thought it would have no problems dishing up turn by turn directions for me and Beth. But we all know what happens when you assume…

I am going to start with what I really liked about the device. The iPaq looked great! Internal antenna, 10.9 cm screen, 800×480 resolution, slick looking 3D maps, and 3D building renderings were all the things that just blew me away. The processor was a 600 Mhz dual-core Titan that could render 3D maps faster than I can spot a Ferrari in a four car parking lot. The device even came with a car mount, car charger, wall charger, 2 usb cables, and a carrying case. The buttons on screen were easy to use and the menu system was intuitive enough to never have to pick up the manual.

With built in bluetooth, mp3 playback, jpeg image viewer, and games what could possibly be wrong?

I think the first problem of the iPaq is the name. I know it isn’t a real “problem” but it is still a negative in my book. I know HP has used it for a long time but I think they really need to stop using it, especially because this iPaq, although running Windows CE, has no PDA functionality as the name suggests. I guess I got my wish on this though because this is the last dedicated GPS device that HP is going to be making. Although they will still be using the “i” prefix on their Paq’s, at least they will be sticking with PDA functionality.

The second thing that was really noticeable when using the device was the internal speakers were never loud enough.  This being my first GPS device I just thought it would be normal and I would get used to it. I made sure the “increase volume with speed” option was clicked and assumed I would hear it enough.

??????

The first weekend I got the device I wanted to put it through it’s paces. I took it to a few places to see how it would do and what routes it would choose. The first stop was my local Fry’s. I loaded up my SD card with some music, BTW it has a SD card reader which was a plus for music and pictures, started some driving music, and synced the iPaq with my LG VX9800 in hopes that I would get a phone call. On my way to Fry’s, about 3/4 of the way, I got a “memory execution” error on the screen. The device froze and I had to wait until I could stop the car to use the jaws of life to extract the device from its car mount to poke the soft reset button on the bottom. I was familiar with this kind of error because I have used Windows Mobile enough in the past to know when the OS runs out of memory. As soon as I got to Fry’s I pulled the device from the windshield and hit the soft reset. Not a big deal to me, seeing as the iPaq was still free. I waited the excruciating long time for the device to fully reboot and went into Fry’s to get what I came for.

The next stop was the hospital to pick up a prescription. On the way I decided to not sync my phone with the iPaq to hopefully free up some memory. While this seemed to work I instead had the music stop on me for no reason. In the middle of a song it just quit. Now I was starting to get concerned. After picking up the prescription I headed home and the device just lost all satellites about 5 miles south of the 210 freeway on the 605. If you have been on the 605 freeway, you will know there is nothing blocking the view of the sky. So I pulled off, restarted the device again, and finished driving home.

The next day I decided to drive somewhere I had never been, meeting someone at a movie theater, and I didn’t print any directions. I put in my address, got in the car and put the device in the holder. Five minutes into the drive the iPaq still did not have a lock on any satellites. Luckily I had Beth with me so I gave the device to her to restart. She restarted the device, it locked onto satellites, and she put in our address. Great, now we are 20 minutes into our trip but at least we know where we are going. I put the device back in the holder and *snap* the top piece breaks off.

The next week I took the iPaq out to go look at some homes. I printed directions this time just in case. It was a good thing I did because the device never got a lock on any satellites. At least not until I found our destination and put the car in park. Then all of a sudden the GPS said, “Oh Hey! You have arrived.”

So at this point I just didn’t trust the device. If I needed to go somewhere I still printed directions. Oh and I never once got the device to re-route me when I turned off course, which happened regularly. I gave the iPaq one more shot at not leaving me high and dry.  I went out to look at some more homes the next week but had the exact same problem as before. No satellite lock on until the device was restarted.

I called HP and told them I had a faulty GPS unit. They were more than happy to return the device and fully refund the purchase price to the person who bought it for me.

I also forgot to mention that someone else at my work got the same iPaq and they didn’t have nearly as many problems as I did. They did mention that the battery doesn’t last long at all (maybe 2 hours) and it takes a excruciating long time to charge.  They have had slow lock ons for satellites but nothing as bad as I was experiencing. They also mentioned that their iPaq was able to re-route them without any problems when they went off course.

So, I would steer clear of the iPaq 310 not because it doesn’t look nice and you probably will have better luck than I did, but because there are better devices out there. Speaking of which, my next review will be of my lovely tomtom 920.

Digsby and Pidgin

I have been using Digsby for my IM client for a few weeks now. This is after a long time using Pidgin (previously Gaim). I have switched back to Pidgin for a couple different reasons but I wanted to give a quick run down of what I thought of Digsby vs. Pidgin.

While Digsby is based on Pidgin (the back end at least) developed in house and pidgin is open source there are some additional things that stand out that really set it apart from what Pidgin can do. First of all is the fact that Digsby is a server based application.  What does that mean? It means you have a single login for Digsby and that is all you ever need to remember (once you are set up at least). Digsby will keep tract of what accounts you have set up, what the settings for each account are, and even your chat history. If you lose your computer and need to install Digsby on a completely different machine, or even a different OS, it doesn’t matter.  All of your settings, logs, and connections will carry with you to your next machine.  This also means that if there is a update to the software, you don’t have to track it down to find out what the latest version is or remember to download and install it.  All of the updates are server based so all you have to do is start the program to get all of the new features, and possibly the new bugs as well. The last big thing that Digsby incorporates that Pidgin does not have is social networking sites. While I don’t use any social networking sites I hear they are quite the place to be.

On the negative side, Digsby was missing a few things that I really enjoy in Pidgin. Although they are all plugins and could easily be incorporated into Digsby they are missing in Digsby’s current beta form (2858 I think). The main plugins I miss are text replacement and psychic mode. If you don’t know what either of those are you should really check them out for Pigin. The killer that made me switch back to Pidgin was email checking in Digsby.  Although the options you have with email are far superior to what Pidgin can do I had a problem with Digsby not checking my sub folders in Yahoo and using the non-beta version of Yahoo mail which is just plain ugly. While that may not seem to be a deal breaker for some, I realized a week late that I had some important ebay, amazon, and personal emails that I was relying on Digsby to alert me when they came. Because Digsby let me down for those things (and because there isn’t currently a Linux installer) I have switched back to Pidgin. As soon as Digsby is out of beta I will probably give it another try. But for now Pidgin allows me to chat and check my email to my hearts content. I must admit I will miss the “report spam”, archive, and chat popups of Digsby in the meantime.

I updated a few things thanks to the comments I was sent clarifying a few things that I was incorrect about in my original article.

Buying a Nas part II

The Linkstation was not satifying what I needed. So I turned to the internet to see what I could do about the problems I was having. I found a site called Nas-central which happened to have a ton of info about hacking the Buffalo NAS devices. The site had so much information it wasn’t well organized so I spent a good amount of time just figuring out what I could do with the Linkstation. I started my search by finding out more about what the Linkstation has out of the box, and then what I could do with it. It turns out the Linkstation runs a Buffalo modified version of Linux and because of that it is pretty easily hacked with a few utilities.

The first thing was to figure out what operating system I wanted to run on the Linkstation. I found a few main options. Most people would either hack the standard firmware, install a modified buffalo firmware called jtymod, install a more open version of the buffalo firmware called openlink, or install a full replacement with a build of debian linux called freelink. All three options had very good merits, but for my needs I tried to just wanted to get a better DLNA server installed so I decided to modify the current buffalo firmware using acp_commander.

The next thing I needed to decide was what DLNA server I was going to install. I had no idea there were so many DLNA servers out there. The main options I found were mediatomb, ushare, FUPPES, and twonky. I was already pretty familiar with mediatomb because I was using that on my desktop for sharing media. I was familiar enough with it to know I wanted to look for something else. While ushare and FUPPES seemed pretty limited in their options they had one big advantage over twonky.  They are free whereas twonky costs $30. I really liked the features of twonky 4.4.4 so I installed the 30 day trial and gave it a test drive with my PS3. I was very impressed. Not only did twonky have a great web interface to configure everything you could want, but it also worked right away in Windows Media player 11. As soon as twonky scanned all of my media I was able to play almost everything on my PS3 without problems.  I had a couple of problems with videos cutting out but quickly realized that the wireless network was not able to keep up with the high bit rates of some of my videos. It turns out that with twonky installed and the default DLNA server turned off a lot of the hard drive noise was gone as well.

So I got a replacement DLNA server installed and fixed the problem with the drive being loud. But I wasn’t finished. The default firmware still gave me very limited samba settings and required all of my folders to be ordered in a fassion that only my grandma would do if she had 200 GB of divx files. So next I need to installed Freelink.

Buying a NAS Part I

I have been looking for a network attached storage (NAS) device for some time because keeping everything on my desktop was not the best solution. Here is what I needed my NAS to do:

1. Connect to the wired network without adapters. Wireless would be nice but lets face it.  With media files you really want it on a wired network no matter what.
2. Be quiet and use low power.  Not silent desktop kinda quiet (see refrigerator), more like the wife will forget it is behind the couch kinda quiet. I have free computers that I could easly put FreeNAS on and just have it sit somewhere but that would not be quiet enough and would draw more power than a dedicated device.
3. Lots of storage! 400 gb of usable storage was my minimum and having expandability through USB would be a plus.  RAID 1 was also a desire but was out of the question for my price range.  Manual backups would have to suffice for now.
4. SAMBA server and DLNA server built in. I have used XBMC for about four years to stream my media to my TV and it uses samba to stream all of it’s content.  I have just recently started using my PS3 for these tasks because it plays all the codecs I need and it is easy!! I don’t have to explain to someone how to search the network or share a folder on their computer. This has been a life saver for my setup because I don’t need to worry when a folder changes.  The DLNA server just scans it and shares the media exactly the same as it was.
5. This was probably my biggest opsticle…I needed the solution to be under $300. I know that this may seem like a lot, and when I was first looking I thought I wouldn’t have any problems finding what I needed. It turns out there wern’t as many available options as I first thought.

I had been looking at the Buffalo Terrastation for a little while because it came with 4 drives and had everything I wanted, minus quietness, but the system started at $700 and quickly climbed in price from there. I had also been looking at the Terrastations lower priced cousin the Linkstation Pro‘s but they did not support DLNA and were quite expensive when I was looking.

I was at Fry’s one weekend and saw the Netgear Sc101 for $40. Wow, $40 for a two drive NAS enclosure how could I go wrong? The device only supported IDE drives but I wasn’t too worried because I had a few 200 GB IDE drives that I could use in this to get the storage I wanted.  I also figured that I could find some way to mod it, or follow directions online to mod it, to get some of the missing features to work. I brought the Netgear home and put in my two drives. I open up the manual to see how I can map the drive in Ubuntu and quickly find that the hard drive can only be used in Windows because it loads a proprietary driver into windows to mount the drive locally. So back in the box it goes and sits for another week until I am able to go back to Fry’s to return it.

I returned the Netgear and waited for the next weekend to see what new deals would spring up the following weekend. I went back the next Saturday and saw that they had the Linkstation Live 500 for $170. There was only 1 left on the shelf and I didn’t know much about it but I saw on the box that it supported DLNA so I bought it on the spot and brought it home with much anticipation of how awsome it was going to be. I open up the box and plug it into a local switch and start a disk format.  The drive already showed it was formatted but if this is going to be my main storage device I want to make sure everything is as clean as can be. The format seemed to be taking a little while (hours) so I just let it run through the night.  In the morning the format was still not done and I was getting worried. I let the format run while I was at work and when I got home I was greated with a nice “the drive is not formatted error” in the web interface.  I upgraded the firmware to the current one on Buffalo’s website, 2.10, and started another format.  This time it went much faster ~30 min. and I was ready to transfer everything over.  I started with everything on my desktop because my hard drive had 20mb left of free space and ubuntu was starting to complain.

Once I got most everything copied over from my desktop, 1 day of transfering, I enabled the DLNA sever and tested it with my PS3. I was very disapointed! I could see the server but couldn’t see/play any of the files. The drive also seemed pretty loud. So far this was not a good solution for what I wanted…

PS3 Pro Triggers

I first saw a glimpse of the pro triggers for the sixaxis controller about a month ago and immediately I was trying to figure out a way that I could add this much needed extension myself. I didn’t realize at the time that the extension was actually a product of gioteck. Thanks to a friend I was shown this thread over at the AVSforum that said the pro triggers were included in the December edition of the PSW magazine. Off to Borders I went to find the magazine. The one by me didn’t have it. The one by my friend didn’t have it. The next day I tried another Borders and they didn’t have it either. Finally I went to a Barns and Noble Bookstore and they had 1 copy. As soon as I got home I fired up my PS3, snapped on my new Pro Triggers, and started my favorite finger-slipping racing game Motorstorm.

Someone at Sony really should be fired or at the very least beat for making the triggers on the sixaxis controller so inward and slippery. The Pro Triggers get me one step closer to making the sixaxis controller feel less like two sticks duct taped together and more like a next generation console controller.  As soon as these triggers go on sale without needed to buy a $10 waste of tree I am all over it.

But seriously, I think everyone who has the slightest problem of their trigger/gas finger slipping off should invest in a pair of these.