replacement phone   ...   random thoughts
thu 2004-aug-05 01:46:11 pdt   ...   permalink

So I had been having problems with my Treo 600. Well, mostly just one problem: it wouldn't make calls -- or receive them (two! two problems) -- unless it was plugged into a charger. One nice thing is that it'll charge off USB, and my PowerBook provides power to the USB port even when the laptop is asleep. So, as long as I had my backpack with me, I could still make calls when I needed to. But still, not a good state for a phone to be in, unable to make calls.

It started out only happening intermittently, maybe initially only when the battery was low. But over a period of a few weeks, it gradually got worse to where it was all the time. Anyway, so finally, last Friday I went to a SprintPCS store and asked about it. The guy first did a soft reset (which of course I'd done to no avail), and when that didn't help, he went off through a door, and came back a minute later saying that the phone was bad and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately they didn't have any in the store, and so they would have to order it. He said it should be in by Tuesday. Fine.

Okay, so then yesterday (the Tuesday in question) I got the replacement. Seems to be all good, works great now, and no issues restoring from the backup on the SD card. Yay.

Now, on the old one, I'd noticed little spots on the screen (in the ChangeCard coin locations, naturally), and so I figured with this new one, maybe I should try to avoid that happening again, by using a screen protector kind of thing. I managed to find my old WriteRights that I'd bought a few PalmPilots ago. Of course they're too big for the Treo screen, so I trimmed one down to about the right size, close enough anyway.

So here's the (possibly) interesting part, which is why I'm bothering with this whole story. Well, presumably they now have screen protectors that are designed to be used with color screens. Because it turns out that this protector is not quite colorless -- it allows through the red, green, and blue sub-pixels in different amounts. So as a result, my screen now has these very distinct vertical stripes!

Turns out I don't actually mind the stripes, so far anyway. But I'm now a bit more ready to believe the claim I once heard that you could get 80 columns of legible text on the Treo's 160x160 screen by making use of the sub-pixels (each character being 6 sub-pixels wide). Still, I'll believe it when I see it...

tue 2004-aug-17 16:37:01 pdt
posted by Paul

I had that experience with my Treo 180. About 6 times. It would break, then they would send a replacement, which would tend to arrive DOA, then send another, repeat.

Kinda like the Castle in the Swamp in Holy Grail.

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