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Rebel yell

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:26

Paul Ockenden looks at an alternative to removing the SIM lock on expensive phones, and tweaks his Touch HD.

Touch HD revisited

Over the past month I've been using a Touch HD that the nice people at Orange loaned me, and the more I use it the more I like it. I still wish it had a slide-out keyboard, but as I spend more time on this phone I'm starting to get used to its onscreen keyboard. One way I found to improve its accuracy was to install a great bit of software called Touch Response. All Touch HD users know the phone offers haptic feedback, which is a posh way of saying it vibrates slightly when the main navigation buttons below the screen are pressed - but what Touch Response does is extend this feedback to the whole screen, or optionally to just the onscreen keyboard. The effect is actually not too dissimilar to that on the BlackBerry Storm (but please don't let that put you off!). You can download the free software from www.pcpro.co.uk/links/176mob1.

Another bit of software that I've found very useful is the Advanced Configuration Tool, which is another one from XDA Developers.You'll find it at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/176mob2. This utility lets you tweak the pressure settings for the touchscreen by adjusting two parameters, pressure threshold and finger pressure. Play with these until you find values that work for you: I found finger pressure set to Extremely Hard made my Touch HD far more usable.

Someone recently emailed me another tweak, but I'm not going to do this one since it involves minor surgery and my phone is on loan from Orange - and no doubt the company will want it back eventually, intact! The suggested idea was to drill a very small hole in the back cover just above the red Reset button, which lets you do a traditional paperclip poke to soft-reset the phone. Even though Windows Mobile devices do like fairly frequent resets, I'm not totally convinced by the need for this trick - how long does it take to whip off the back cover?

Slap DAB

I'm stretching the "Wireless" part of this column's brief to the limit here, but the press is currently full of stories that DAB radio has been a failed technology, and I have to disagree. Despite obvious flaws such as inefficient MP2 encoding, crappy bit-rate on some stations, horrible processing delays and the rest, I still love my DAB radios. Where DAB comes into its own is for pocketable devices with earphones: for the past three or four years, I've been using one that obviously had its guts built by Imagination Technologies (the people that make the Pure brand of DAB radios) because it had exactly the same display and button layout as Pure's own radios, although mine was actually badged with a Ministry of Sound logo. I'd been using it regularly until a couple of weeks ago when it finally gave up the ghost - its screen froze and nothing I could do would coax it back into action.

What surprised me when I went shopping for a replacement was how little the pocket DAB market has moved on over the past few years. The models you'll see in the shops mostly come from Pure, Roberts and Sony, but these models have all been on the market for years. There are brilliant new DAB chipsets available that reduce power consumption and offer features such as pausing or rewinding the programme feed, and these are used in several bigger battery-powered radios - the sort that have built-in speakers - but none of them seem to have found their way into the current pocketable products.