Steve's Blog

As an update to a few previous posts, I decided to give HTC some credit where it is due.

HTC organised Fedex to come and pick up my Touch Pro 2 (after some confusion about the actual pickup date) and ship it off to HTC Singapore. While I was still annoyed that it had to travel to Singapore, the fact that HTC was going to pick up the tab for shipping – as well as sending it international priority (26 hours doorstep to doorstep!) made up for it.

I was expecting that my phone would be out of action until 2011 – however to my surprise, less than a week later I had a delivery from Fedex with my repaired Touch Pro 2. Later that day I even got a phone call from HTC to confirm that I had received it! Most of the issues seem to be fixed – some weren’t but are minor enough to ignore.

I have to say thank you to Francis from the HTC Australia call centre (I think he is in the Philippines?) for organising a lot of this. If this level of service was standard from HTC then I would have been singing their praises instead of *almost* converting to an iPhone guy.

I’ve still been talking to HTC regarding my faulty Touch Pro 2. I even managed to get the case escalated to someone who says they do this all the time. He has agreed that HTC should cover the postage costs as per the Warranty Statement in my previous post and that he’d get back to me with more details within 24 hours. Sadly, this timeframe expired yesterday.

He did however inform me that the repairs may take up to 4 weeks plus shipping. I objected to that as this would mean that the phone has been off under warranty repair for 8 weeks in its lifetime. Apparently this has been raised with HTC management – I’ll wait and see what that actually means!

As a lot of you know, I got myself a HTC Touch Pro 2 a few months ago – and boy – am I starting to regret it. I bought the phone in March – it was returned under warranty in April, and now has to go back under warranty again. Read on for the full details of how HTC support is more than useless in looking after its customers.
Continue reading ‘HTC – When warranties go bad’ »

I’ve been tinkering a lot with Google Maps lately on my Windows Mobile based phone – and it just doesn’t quite have the edge to dislodge TomTom as a navigation platform. There are multiple problems with the way Google Maps is implemented that takes it from navigation solution to a mere playtoy.

1) Route planning. If you’ve ever had much of a play with the Get Directions part of Google Maps, then you know what I mean by this. Google Maps is known to not do this task very well. As an example of this, take a look at this screenshot of it’s awesome route planning skills

2) No adaptive route planning. Whenever you drive off the recommended route, the planning doesn’t keep up – this means if a road is closed, or you ignore a stupid plan like the one as an example to point #1 then you are out of luck in having Google Maps re-plan the route for you. Sure, you can manually get it to re-plot things from your current location and start the whole game again, but this is a trivial matter that should be handled automatically!

3) Stupid backlight handling! This is a major point for me. While Google have made a good point and made the software respect the backlight settings that Windows Mobile have been set with (via Start -> Settings -> System -> Backlight), the most useful purpose of Google Maps is rendered useless by having to keep tapping the screen or a button to stop the backlight turning off while attempting to use Google Maps as navigation software!

If these above issues can be fixed in newer versions of Google Maps then TomTom may have some very good competition – as the integration of searching for businesses etc within Google Maps would be VERY hard for TomTom to compete with – but at the moment, I won’t be switching my navigation software to Google Maps any time soon.

After initial testing, v2.1.2.0 of DeviceUpdate is now available for public testing. You can grab a copy from the DeviceUpdate site.