[The PocketTV Team]

The "Motorola Q" is not the only Windows Mobile device that sends spurious private messages (in the range [0x8000 to 0xBFFF] to applications.

See detailed description of the "spurious private messages bug" here: http://www.modaco.com/Motorola-Q-Spurious-...la-t242539.html

And see discussion in the newsgroup: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.p...c78007c7193d4f8

We just discovered a similar bug on the "Torq P100" aka "E-TEN M500" Pocket PC!

The device where the bug was observed is a E-TEN M500. On this device, apparently all running applications receive a message 0x8017 with lParam and wParam set to 0 each time the user opens the Contacts application.

Our latest version of PocketTV (1.2.14) catches those spurious messages and displays an error message in a pop-up, and the problem was reported today by a E-TEN M500 user in India.

So clearly this indicates that MSFT has no platform test to check that the platform does not send spurious messages to running applications. This is a pretty serious testing issue that MSFT should address, since at least two devices have that bug!

And again, all applications that use private messages in the range [0x8000 to 0xBFFF] for inter-thread communications should be aware of the issue, and work around it on the devices that have the bug.

Does anyone know who exactly develops and manufactures the "Torq P100" aka "E-TEN M500"?

This device was apparently developed by TORQ (?) in Taiwan for the Taiwanese company Eten ( http://www.etencorp.com ).

This post has been edited by The PocketTV Team: 24 July 2006 - 09:33 AM

[Sponsored Links]

[fluffcat1]

The PocketTV Team, on Jul 24 2006, 08:19, said:

Does anyone know who manufactures the "Torq P100" aka "E-TEN M500"?

This device was apparently developed in Taiwan (not by HTC, though), for Eten ( http://www.etencorp.com ), a Switzerland company.

Without ever having seen one, let alone seen inside one, it'd be difficult to say, and there are no clues on t'interweb, but how do you know it isn't HTC if you don't know what it is? Because it's not on their site? That isn't conclusive proof. They make all sorts of stuff that is not on there - Treo's, Sagem's, iPaq's etc etc

Edit - is the device with the bug wm2003se or wm5? AFAIK there is no official Torq wm5 rom, and the Eten rom will not install on the Torq device according to users at http://www.eten-user...opic298&hl=p100

Richard

This post has been edited by fluffcat1: 24 July 2006 - 08:06 AM

[The PocketTV Team]

fluffcat1, on Jul 24 2006, 08:02, said:

Without ever having seen one, let alone seen inside one, it'd be difficult to say, and there are no clues on t'interweb, but how do you know it isn't HTC if you don't know what it is?

I've seen that here: http://www.modaco.co...howtopic=229128 and in a few other forums (after doing a google search), where people say it is not a device made by HTC.

Apparently the device is developed and manufactured by TORQ in Taiwan for E-Ten ( http://www.eten.com ) , but I can find no information about the TORQ company.

This post has been edited by The PocketTV Team: 24 July 2006 - 08:12 AM

[fluffcat1]

The PocketTV Team, on Jul 24 2006, 09:06, said:

I've seen that here: http://www.modaco.co...howtopic=229128 and in a few other forums (after doing a google search), where people say it is not a device made by HTC.

If those people don't say who they think does make the device, do they work for HTC? What is their reasoning? Else how would they know conclusively unless they too had read it on the internet somewhere....

From the looks of pictures of the internals it doesn't seem HTC - esque, but previously no-one has referenced that as a reason for stating it's not a HTC device. (My Sagem 3050 doesn't 'look' HTC but it is BTW - so again, inconclusive..)

There are other OEM's of the device as well as the 2 mentioned. I believe somewhat confusingly it's also a 'Typhoon'.

Richard

[The PocketTV Team]

That's why I was asking.

But in any case that does not change the fact that the M500 has the bug, and it is possible that the new M600 has the name bug, too. We'll know soon.

This post has been edited by The PocketTV Team: 24 July 2006 - 08:34 AM

[fluffcat1]

The PocketTV Team, on Jul 24 2006, 09:33, said:

That's why I was asking.

But in any case that does not change the fact that the M500 has the bug, and it is possible that the new M600 has the name bug, too. We'll know soon.

No, you were asking what it was at the same time as stating what it wasn't ( ie made by HTC ) with no proof either way, which isn't the same as just asking who makes it.

I see you've edited the first post to state it's an m500 now. So *which version* m500, and if it's been upgraded to wm5, is it an official upgrade or a chinese rom? There aren't many authorised resellers of the upgrade so it may be an 'unofficial' one in which case you can't blame microsoft for any bugs. You might want to get more info for your fault finding rather than lumping it in with the Moto Q issue..

Richard

This post has been edited by fluffcat1: 24 July 2006 - 08:49 AM

[The PocketTV Team]

fluffcat1, on Jul 24 2006, 08:46, said:

I see you've edited the first post to state it's an m500 now. So *which version* m500, and if it's been upgraded to wm5, is it an official upgrade or a chinese rom? There aren't many authorised resellers of the upgrade so it may be an 'unofficial' one in which case you can't blame microsoft for any bugs. You might want to get more info for your fault finding rather than lumping it in with the Moto Q issue..

Richard

No, I did not change that in the first post. It was always mentioning an M500, and that's also what we posted on the newsgroups (and as you know we cannot edit newsgroup posting).

The problem was reported to us to happen on the M500. We don't have the detail of the M500 exact version, but we will soon. No, it was not upgraded to WM5, it was Pocket PC 2003 SE. I believe it is the "stock" version, i.e. no ROM upgrade. I'll know for sure soon.

I'm not blaming MSFT for the bug (the bug is to blame on the company who used PlatformBuilder to develop the platform, i.e. drivers etc). I am blaming MSFT for not having a platform test that catches this type of bug (especially since they are very easy to catch!). Motorola engineers are also quite pissed that the bug passed through the MSFT platform tests undetected and that the Q hit the street with this bug.

This post has been edited by The PocketTV Team: 24 July 2006 - 09:20 AM

[The PocketTV Team]

The person that observed the spurious message said that it was a Factory-ROM on a E-Ten M500 (Pocket PC 2003).

The WinCE OS version is 4.21.1088.

There are some interesting informations about this device:

The SPI_GETOEMINFO string is "S3C2440A", and the szProcessorName string is also "S3C2440A" (this ARM processot is apparently made by SAMSUNG). The ARM CPUID is 0x41129200 (StrongARM), so apparently this is not an X-Scale processor.

So apparently E-Ten dod not define SPI_GETOEMINFO correctly, and this could be a problem to identify the device.

However, they have set the registry value HKLM\Platform\Name = "M500 Platform" so this registry value can be used as a workaround.

We still don't know exactly what action causes the spurious message to be sent, but apparently they are sometimes (not always) sent when the Contacts application is started py pressing the hardware buttons assigned to Contacts.

This post has been edited by The PocketTV Team: 26 July 2006 - 09:13 AM

[Sponsored Links]