I’ve now used the Akono HBH-300 bluetooth headset for several months, time for an update. You may recall that I was not undividedly happy about it.

Recently I have paired the headset with my iPAQ and with my G4 Powerbook – both connections were made without a problem. Listening to a Donna Summer mp3 is entirely possible, should you want to, but the quality piped into your ear is not very great. Still, you have to remember the headset was made for phone conversations, not high-fidelity music.
I’m just happy that it works, this means that if and when I buy and install TomTom5+GPS in my car I can listen to the directions via the headset. Should save me some trouble when Dolores and Tom are singing songs in the car .

Another thing that bugged me was the fact that I could not turn the headset off. It’s probably me not RTFM, but you just have to press (and hold!) the ‘accept’ button for a couple of seconds and it will beep once and turn itself off. Same thing turns it on again. Duh, really.

While I previously thought it could not be done, I’ve found out that when I initiate the call, I can choose wether I want to send it to the headset or not. However, when calls are made to my phone, they go directly to my headset, even when I press ‘accept’ on my phone.

As to the connection losses I’ve experienced before, I’ve not used it a lot outside anymore. In buildings or vehicles everything works fine, quality is fine.

Update : I found the setting on my phone that asks me each time how I want the call set up. Finally !

I just noticed that my iPaq has two dead pixels. They are left of the screen, not really centered and not really visible unless you open up media player with it’s black background – then you see them. One is colored red, the other one is colored blue.

As this is a newly bought handheld, I first went to the shop to see if I could exchange it. No luck, they stated (correctly, from reading the docs) that I would need to contact HP support as they handle al after-sales support.

No, I didn’t buy it in the Fnac, or else I would have been able to exchange it for another due to their standard exchange policy. Bweuh.

So I went to the HP support webpages, and selected the online chat support system, which first collects information from your pc (only those parts that you want help with, in this case Active Sync and the model and serial number of my iPaq).

I then had 3 support people (all with Indian names, but that doesn’t really matter, just that I am not used to seeing people with names longer than mine) ‘analysing my situation’, asking me to wait while they did this.

I think this is a standard message they have in the copy/paste buffer, as all I asked was ‘What are your support policies regarding the return of a handheld with 2 dead pixels ?’.

The first support person asked me how ‘big’ the dead pixels were – uuuumm, 1 pixel big ? Duh.
The second didn’t add anything, and the third person referred me to my HP local after-sales telephone support.
So I’ll give them a call come Monday, see what they have to say.

Update :
I called HP Support Belgium on Monday – in the end, they told me that they could not take it in for replacement. They only do iPaq replacements if there is more than 1 dead pixel (I am not sure how many dead pixels you need to qualify, more than 2 I think), and the pixels are totally dead (aka they show up as white-colored).

He explained to me that each pixel is made up out of 3 sub-pixels : red, green and blue, like a RGB-monitor, same principle, and that the fact that I had 2 dead subpixels did not qualify me for an iPaq replacement.

It is only really viewable on a black background, so I am not too bothered about it. Still, it’ll teach me for not checking the screen out before buying it. Kudos for the guy in HP Phone Support – he at least knew what he was talking about.

I finally succumbed to my craving and bought myself the HP iPaq handheld.

It’s the hx2410, which has an Intel PXA270 processor (520Mhz) with integrated wi-fi (802.11b) and bluetooth connectivity. I had been planning to buy the rx3715 with a built-in camera and slightly more memory, but in the end I opted for the faster processor, since I already have a digital photo camera, and I hope that with the faster CPU it will last much longer with more demanding applications in the future.

It will be a part of a gps solution with TomTom 5 – which is coming out in May 2005.

After using the iPod earbuds for a time, perhaps half an hour, my right ear hurts. I’ve now switched to some Sony earbuds, (MDR-ED21LP for the connaisseurs) as I heard some good stuff about them, but I think I prefer my old Philips ones more – however, they are attached to my previous 128Mb mp3 player.

No complaining about the iPod Shuffle itself though, it works very well, and controlling it is intuitive. Most of the time, it is set to Shuffle mode.

Today I finally bought myself a LinkSys WRT54G router (the company is now owned by Cisco), to replace my aging Belkin wirelles router, which could only do 802.11b (which means 11Mbps). This new router can do wireless speeds up to 54 Mbps using 802.11g.

I’ve heard great things about the router, especially in combination with 3rd party firmware upgrades. I’ll be checking that out in the near future.

I have bought the very latest V3 of the WRT54G which also has the official V3 linksys firmware installed (3.03.1) – none of the 3rd party websites even mention V3 of the firmware or hardware !! So for now I’ll wait a bit and start reading up on the different firmwares and their capabilities and compare them to the factiry firmware installed.

So far, it seems that LinkSys has incorporated quite a few of the ‘hacks’ that were doing the rounds, like the ‘ping’ hack I read on the sveasoft support forum.

After a small struggle to follow the superduper friendly installation wizard, which assumes you are doing this for the very first time, I closed it. Kudos to the wizard for finding out I was cheating though – it correctly identified that I had already connected the router to the pc and the cable modem.

As I was not installing a router for the first time but rather replacing it, I figured I could handle it and went through the setup manually. This worked better than the wizard, in just a few minutes my net connection was back up.

Now I’m going to try for the difficult part – setting up the wireless network with encryption. Always fun with an apple computer which just has to have it’s wep keys entered differently than others …

Update : that was easy ! For the mac lovers out there, connect via a (wired) pc/mac to the router’s interface, activate wireless security, choose WPA Shared key (TKIP, and not AES) and type in your secret phrase. On the mac, you don’t get a choice, just WPA personal. Type in the exact same phrase, clicking ‘add to keychain’. That’s it, surf’s up !!

Since I’ve been buying songs from iTunes for a while now, I’ve started looking for a player that can directly play AAC protected songs, instead of writing them to cd’s and then re-ripping them (and in the process probably loosing some quality). I still write them to cd’s, but that’s only for backup.

My previous mp3 player, a Philips 128Mbyte one, can only play regular mp3′s, and the interaction with iTunes was not good – I had several crashes of iTunes and even my powerbook completely, so I did not update regularly.

Yesterday in the Fnac in Brussels I stumbled over the 1 Gigabyte iPod Shuffle – there were only a few left @ 149 euros. It is perfect for my needs. I don’t need a full iPod device, I carry my laptop around with me practically everywhere, but for those times without it, it would be nice to be able to play those songs that I’ve bought.
It’s a mite expensive for a player without a display, though. For the same price you could buy a similar 1 Gig mp3 player with lcd display, but that again won’t play aac tracks.

Filling it up as we speak – quality is quite good, except that I miss the extra bass that the Philips put in.

This game is quite good, but very hard to play with a keyboard and/or mouse. The developers recommend a dual action gamepad to play it. After being frustrated for the zillionth time in trying to do something simple like walking around a corner, I picked up a gamepad from Logitech – the Dual Action one, for 30 euros. It has an USB bus, is totally black, buttons are numbered from 1 to 12, and it was a doddle to install in Windows XP Home. All the other gamepads were either much more expensive or ridicilously cheap – to cheap to present any value. And since I already had a Logitech Wingcommander joystick, I chose the Logitech gamepad.

It is simply amazing what a difference it makes in playing this game !! All the commands become more or less second nature, there is no finger twisting to get to the right keyboad combination (and then pressing the wrong key), it simply works. Momving the camera about while running at the same time is soooooo easy

It’s like it becomes an extension of your mind,you need to think less about the key combinations (except for the combos). Now I only have the camera views that are sometimes not optimal to blame for my bad jumps..

I recently bought an Akono Sony Ericsson bluetooth headset, the HBH-300, to go with my Sony Ericsson T630 phone. The headset is quite nice, stylish design, the only one left in the MultiMedia Market in Brussels.
Inside building it provides very good quality, with a claimed 10 hours talk time and 300 hours standby time.Since I don’t use it that much, it’s good to go for at least about 5 or 6 days, then I need to recharge it.

However, using it outside is a problem : anything more than a breeze is enough to kill my end of the conversation. The only thing the caller hears is the wind howling it’s melodious tune. Cupping my hand around the microphone and headset does not help : in extreme cases, it cuts the bluetooth connection between headset and phone !

I also find it an extreme hassle to fit the headset in my ear when the phone rings. You see, when the headset is in range, it automatically picks up on the headset. There is no option on the phone, as far as I can tell, that you do NOT want to accept the call on the headset, but want to take it on the phone itself. I am going to look in the manual, but so far haven’t found it yet.
So in the end I am a bit unhappy with it – it’ll only really be useful in the car or in buildings, not outdoors, which is why I wanted it in the first place.

Oh, and the incredibly useful WinSCP utility was updated to version 3.7.2 – check it out.