Subject: Re: Mobilepro 780 and 790; battery warnings
To: None <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: Miles Nordin <carton@Ivy.NET>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 02/15/2003 11:14:31
>>>>> "jb" == JJ Bonilla <jjbinfor@tiscali.es> writes:

Before we start sucking each others' dicks I have a few things to add.

    jb> In NetBSD the program hpcapm gives messages by console of
    jb> bateria 50%, 30% and very low battery

It does.  However the battery life reports are wildly inaccurate,
annoyingly force-suspending the machine when almost half the battery
is left.  AFAIK Wince also has this problem.  As I have said on this
list before, the hardware is not capable of battery measurement like a
real laptop or an Ericsson handset.  It's more like a crappy Motorola
celfone.

The touchscreen does not always notice pen-up events and isn't
accurate enough to do double-clicking very well.  Wince's solution to
this may involve ``cheating''---ex hiding the pointer, large
doubleclick radius.  If I remember the month or two I used Pocketword
before it crashed and lost all my journals, the wince menus and
doubleclicking work okay, but it was really difficult to select text,
and Inkwriter was useless compared to, say, the Newton's notepad.
It's probably just a low-quality touchscreen.

The suspend does not turn off the biggest consumer of power---the
screenbacklight---making it basically useless, or worse.

Suspend does power down my wi card.  Ra.  But sometimes the Microdrive
spins constantly if the machine suspends at the wrong moment, meaning
the system could actually consume MORE power as a result of randomly
force-suspending while in my backpack.


I've had this MC-R700A for like three years now.  It's very old, yet
yuppie scum are constantly flirting with me and asking where they can
get a tiny fashionable laptop like this one.  But frankly the thing is
an annoying piece of shit that you'd have to be insane to buy at full
price.

One thing tremendously in its favour is incredible durability---screen
clips fall off, plastic trim cracks, but the thing is still
structurally sound and works fine.  I do not treat it kindly.  Maybe
it's easier to make things indestructible when they don't weigh much.

and yes, hpcmips is among the best ports, and seem to suffer less
bit-rot than one might expect (strange TX-mips brokenness reports
aside).  the important thing is, IPsec, IPv6, hostap,...  My biggest
featurefussing is not the pointer or the backlight or any of
that---you get over it when the rest is so polished and stable and you
don't have to use nasty XFree86---but that I wish it were mipseb so I
had a shot at CMU Lisp, and Irix rather than Ultrix binaries.  I think
the declaration of endyness allegiance was a mistake.

-- 
I made the mistake of glancing at the linux drivers but my eyes
started bleeding.
		-- Herb Peyerl