New T-Mobile MDA Compact and faster SD Flash Memory

I bought my T-Mobile MDA Compact (I-mate Jam/Qtex S100) in November 2004.

3 weeks ago when I was making some photo’s in a museum, my screen suddenly totally frooze, nothing worked anymore. (For the nerds: It looked like the way your Commodore 64 screen would ‘crash’ when you hit the freeze button of your ).

Well, when this happened, i took out the battery pack and put it back (this is done by gently opening and closing the back cover of the device, which takes 2 seconds). Normally this action would result in a soft rest, but this time it resulted in a hard reset.
Hmm, no good, i had a fresh Operating System and a all my ‘local disk" data was gone…

Happely the device holds a 512MB SD Card, where i store all my documents, photo’s and other data. And also a backup of my ‘local disk’ (I do this kind of backup once a month).

Within minutes I restored a backup from my Flash card. This works pretty good using the backup program called “Xbackup” that is provided standard with this device. Doing a restore is pressing 2 buttons and waiting around 10 minutes.. Since I use Active sync over GPRS together with my Microsoft Exchange 2003 server, I just pressed the Sync button and al updates (mail, contacts, agenda items) since last backup where synchronised over the air. (I did all this restore while I was visiting the Esher museum in The Hague). Great…

But then exactly a week later this happened again! Only this time doing a hard reset or opening the battary pack didn’t bring a solution. The MDA Compact would only display the standard T-Mobile boot image! I tried a lot of things, like removing the battery, removing the SIM, recharging the battery, but nothing happened. So I called T-mobile and to my surprise they told me they would pick it up next day, and that I would probably get a new one…  Wow! Ok..Nice!

And yes, yesterday (2 weeks later)  a package was brought. The repair form said:  ‘motherboard changed or new device’.  I checked, and …i got a brand new device!

Well that’s service! Thanks guys!

Today I was installing my new machine. Instead of restoring a backup to the new device, i did a fresh install.  So I installed the Pocket PC apps I got and thing like the Bluetooth internet connection and other bluetooth connections. The reason i did this was because I bought myself a new 1GB High speed SD memory card.
The SD card I used before was ‘only’ 512MB and sometime I got weird effects when I recorded video’s. Sometimes when i recorded a movie the left part of the screen showed  before the right part of the screen,  so left and right frames where out of sync. I thing this has to do with the speed of writing the data to disk.

This new SD card should do 6MB/sec writing and 9MB/sec reading, this should be more then enough i guess.  

I will post updates when i heve new results with this new memory…