HTC S630 Cavalier with WCDMA Disabled
Posted February 29th, 2008 by Boris ShohatCategories: Cellular, Hardware
A few weeks ago I have received a brand new smartphone - the HTC S630 Cavalier. Despite actually having very little use for its Internet and 3G capabilities, I figured that this kind of hardware will have top-class camera, battery and speaker. The fact that it comes with WiFi and PC syncing capabitlities also meant that it will be handy on the road, especially with the 2 Gigabyte MicroSD storage card.
To make long story short: the Speaker is next to useless. The JOGGR touch interface is absolutely horrible - I had to disable it after a week, because it makes the phone nearly unusable. There is not a person in the world that would actually use the JOGGR scrolling bar on the right side of the S630.
But the device had two even bigger downsides : Reception and Battery life. The HTC S630’s battery hits 10%-30% after barely 18 hours, while barely being used. A good friend told me that switching from WCDMA to GSM would prolong battery life and improve reception. Of course then I would have to give up on all the features I don’t use anyway, so I gladly agreed.
And it worked. By disabling WCDMA, I got exactly what I needed - a great SMS machine with a good camera and a lot storage, decent battery life and great reception.
Several months ago, I had the pleasure of arguing with a young and gifted individual with a self-inflicted CEO position, a title that was claimed upon the launch of his small Web2.0 company. Being a low tech industry person with decent experience in operating commercial projects online, I stated that the Internet’s only real economy are merchants(sometimes of digital content) and services providers, and everything else is nothing but an advertising platform for these sites. So technically, no matter what kind of online company or project you lead, its complexity simply cannot compare to the challenges of managing the design and production of real product, even as simple as lets say, bottles.
I have recently purchased an amazing piece of hardware: Logitech’s MX1000 Laser mouse. Quite frankly, it’s the best mouse I’ve ever owned - for plenty reasons; it’s somewhat heavy and comfortable, is rechargeable, has perfectly engineered sliding pads, and most notably - it measures its own movement using a laser. I happen to program real-time thermal and chemical controllers for a living, and I can really appreciate this fine piece of hardware . It’s controller chip program was probably very well written , hundreds of engineering hours put into it’s hardware and software design, and it was optimized for minimum power consumption by some of the brightest electrical engineers in the field. These are merely my assumptions, based on the mouse’s performance, but who knows, maybe there is a team of 100,000,000 monkeys that just happened to put it all together.