Re: a USB board

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

Tristan Mumford schrieb:
> heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:
> >
> > And yes, you have to open the case with a screwdriver to change
> > the battery. At least you *can* open the case...  ;-)
>
> Are they still the little torx head screws? I've opened my m500 more times
> that I would have liked.

Even better - but it's not totally riskless:
www.pspilot.de/ppptun3/ppptun3.html

> Yeah. I use my m500 a lot as an eBook reader for docs etc, but the screen
> always kills my eyes.


> One of the first things I do will be to chuck that big scanned pdf of that
> useful apple book with the name that escapes me on there. Don't feel like
> killing a forest to print it out.

Displaying documents is a natural for this little machine.
For PDFs the extendable screen and the screen tilting is
extremely nice (though this seems to slow things noticably down).

For "normal" texts (docs or ebooks) I like the normal screen
orientation
better because the lines are shorter and when not extended it fits
better in my hand.


> > As long as you don't put movies (the T3 isn't a movie player) 1GB
> > will suffice.
> > The size of the GPS data will vary with the product and the maps
> > of course but they are usually several hundred MB large.
>
> Yeah. I saw specialty SD cards with the maps on them but that seems like
> overkill.

I bought a complete GPS package with 256MB card three years ago.
The card was full even though I had only the German road map on it.
I could only install Austria and Switzerland when upgrading to a bigger
card. With the usual assortment of ebooks, documents, some demo
music files (for other people ;-) I still have around 500MB free.
A good emulator with some disk images wouldn't hurt me - that's for
sure...

> > Get a bluetooth GPS receiver with a SIRF3-chipset.
> > Ask in forums which product will work with the software and the T3.
> > I use an European product (Tom Tom 3) so I can't give you some
> > recommendations.
>
> Thanks for the tip. The range is confusing.

Nowadays most receivers seem to be SIRF3. There may be also
a low-power variant but I'm not that up-to-date.
Anything older than that takes ages (minutes) to find enough
satellites to get a position. This is completely annoying.


> Ah right. So it's just the beefy apps that drain it, like the others.

Yes. The more complicated and continuous the screen updates
- the more power it sucks.


> I suppose it doesn't work without backlight like the old mono screens?

Only in direct sunlight. It's a transflexive type display.
I had a IIIc before and it had simply a black screen when outdoors
- the T3 is far better.

bye
Marcus