jb, 28y

HTC Touch Diamond

Thanks to a friend (Céline, you are amazing), I have now a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

I know it is a bit old-fashioned with WM7 getting out soon, but I am not a .Net/Silverlight guy...

Hands on the device

The HTC device is quite classy on the outside as you can see.

Reset and Start-up wizard

First things first, I had reset all the data and reformat the drive, which was simple to find.

Then, the wizard for new installation pops-up, it is quite OK to use, and straight-forward. My memories tells me it was much worse at the time of WM5.

The first start is quite long, but not impossible to bear.

TouchFlo 3D

But at the second start, there is a horrible TouchFLO 3D SFR/Vodafone screens that opens. It is slow, badly designed, and doesn't even remove the start button...

Oh poor me... After finally removing this mess (Settings->Today screen, then go under the items tab and uncheck the TouchFLO 3D box), all is back to normal.

Update ROM

The ROM on the machine was quite old, early 2008, I believe, so, I thought it would be a good idea to update it.

Going to the HTC support website was a great experience. I found the new ROM in a minute or two (1.97.163.4 instead of 1.37.xxx).

Downloading the ROM

Downloading the ROM was a bit more difficult, because it required my phone S/N to allow me to take only the "Vodafone FR" version. Which I don't want...

It proved impossible to download the normal version, without the Vodafone crap on it.

The download took 102MB. I believe this is a big too much for just a ROM, but not that much either, compared to the iPhones updates.

And, of course, the update didn't want to run, because it couldn't find my phone. The connection was not OK.

Connection to PC

I need to correctly link my phone to my computer, running Windows 7. Some red cross tells me it couldn't install the driver...

Downloading WMDC is a mess

My phone tells me to use ActiveSync, but it doesn't exist for Windows 7. After a bit of searching, I find that this has been renamed to Windows Mobile Device Center. And of course, the MicroSoft ActiveSync website doesn't link correctly to this new WMDC... How are normal people suppose to find that out?

Searching a bit more gave me the download link to WMDC for Vista, no mention of 7. Ok, let's try anyway...

And this requires the WGA Validation tool. WTF!! Not in 2010, please... Come on, people just want to install their phones, not install a new cool feature or program.

I had to try 3 browsers to finally be able to get it, and only in French, not in English... And while the download started, it redirected to an error page...

Microsoft download website is probably the worse experience I have seen, with some AOL websites in 1995...

Installing WMDC

Installing WMDC is as simple as downloading it was difficult. Except the name (drvupdate-am64.exe, WTF?), everything was very straight-forward and the interface is actually simple, beautiful and nice!

Is it really Microsoft? </joke>

Updating the ROM

Synchronizing, updating the ROM and re-enabling the device was then uneventful, working and great. It took me a bit over 15minutes including the reboots and the removal of TouchFlo 3D.

Conclusion

I give HTC a B+ (I want the normal ROM) I give Microsoft a C (for the downloading experience, you deserved an E, but WMDC is nice...)

This is the follow-up to the part 1.

Update to the part 1

In the first part, I was wrong when I said that there were 4 programs scheduled to start with Windows... There are 5 of them...

Oh, and one of them (the LG fwupdate.exe) requires UAC to launch, and asks for permission at each start... Oh, why?!?

Initial success over HDCP

Whatever, I've spent some time to fight the HDCP problem... I will not detail all the steps I went through here, but the solution.

Funnily, the only way I could play the BD, was to replace by DVI cable with a VGA cable, since my Monitor is able to get input from VGA. My GPU only has a DVI, so a VGA/DVI convertor was used.

Initial success

Going the VGA way helped me to have a playback with PowerDVD of more than 3 seconds. Yay!

A few questions though:

• Is it full resolution? No idea!
• So, using VGA is ok, but not DVI? Don't you think I can copy the same?
• Why is PowerDVD deactivating Aero? It is 2010, and Vista has been out since more than 3 years...
• Why is the taskbar still on top when I play with PowerDVD? Very nice to playback a Video with it above...
• Why can't I navigate in the menus with the mouse?

Anyway, I can play one disc, so let's say that I won almost a point on it:
Blu-Ray: 1 - 1 :JB

Initial failure

Let's be a bit less optimistic though, out of the 4 BD-Video, 2 of them play, 2 don't...

No error messages, updated drive, software, player, nothing to do...

Maybe I'll install another player, like WinDVD...

Improvements

Being faster is cool, but let’s not forget that multimedia moves fast.

So here are a few improvements that you can expect in VLC 1.1.0.

Codecs, demuxers and protocols

In addition to than GPU/DSP decoding (see my previous post), VLC 1.1.0 will bring:

• DVB HD subtitles
• PGS Subtitles from Blu-Ray dumps
• sftp protocol
• Atrac1 audio codec
• Indeo5 video codec
• AMR (Narrow Band) audio codec
• Windows Media Voice/Speech audio codec
• Improved Flac support (7.1 and 88.2/176.4/192 kHz support)
• 7.1 Vorbis audio support
• ADPCM in flv files
• DVD-Audio files .aob, so you can play your DVD-Audio files on your computer
• vqf, amv, wpl and zpl file support
• Midi files on Windows port!

And more features…

• CDDB support on Windows
• Podcast images
• Enhancements to our Ambilight support
• Extensions in lua script
• Services in lua script
• Chorus and Flanger audio filter
• Visualisation using scripted .milk files
• Windows 7 taskbar integration

That’s all for the major features, that are visible to the users…

What is important, is that VLC isn’t getting bloated by all this, and I’ll explain that in my next article.