Month: January 2010

HTC Dream Gripes

HTC DreamI have had the HTC Dream from Rogers for a couple of months now and it is by far the best phone I’ve ever had. I love the way it works and it is fast and feature-packed!  But this is not a review, I just want to list the things I DON’T like about it that you would consider bugs that need to be addressed. Hopefully they are fixed in the future.

  • Pictures don’t seem to load in Gmail unless the person sent from a gmail account. I don’t know if this is by design or not, but there should be at least the option (“click here to show pictures”).
  • Crashes happen occassionally. Usually turning the phone off and on fixes things. But in one instance the google maps app crashed on startup every time and would never work. I had to do a factory reset and start from scratch.
  • Apparently there are different user profiles or something like that, and they seem to get mixed up. Let me try to explain.
    • on Friday morning I turned on my phone and it looked like my “profile” was gone; it looked like a factory reset had been done. But most of my settings were in place for wireless, etc. I turned it off and back on and it booted up to my regular “profile” like I expected. Whew.
    • Friday night I turned my phone off for a while. When I turned it back on, my profile was gone again and it looked like it had been reset. I tried turning it off and on, removing the battery for a while, etc. But it wouldn’t bring my stuff back. So I recreated my shortcuts and reinstalled all my apps. Boo.
    • The following Wednesday (today) I turn on my phone and it has my original profile back! What the heck?
    • UPDATE: I turned it off and on again, and it wouldn’t load up. It wouldn’t go past the initial Rogers screen. So I had to do another factory reset (and reinstall everything, again). We will see how it goes this time…

So it is a great phone but there are definitely some issues. I don’t know if there will be patches or anything to address these or if I just have to live with it until my contract expires. Rogers support always says you need to do a factory reset on the phone. Which of course does solve all the problems – temporarily.

UPDATE: Apparently there is a ROM update for the phone (I have version 1.85 and there is a 1.86 update from the Rogers website). I have installed that and maybe that will solve all my problems. Why Rogers Support didn’t tell me this, I don’t know.

UPDATE: Feb 24, 2010: The latest ROM update (there was another one forced by Rogers, just after my original post, to fix a 911 issue: version 1.89) seems to have fixed most of the bugs. I still have the one gripe about images not loading in gmail. But it seems to be stable now, at least.

“GodMode” for Windows 7 and Vista

“Although its name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.”

“To enter ‘GodMode,’ one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once that is done, the folder’s icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I’m not sure it’s my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.”

Source: CNET