Windows Mobile users are facing an unexpected New Year’s surprise. A software bug has struck smartphones running the Microsoft operating system so all messages received starting January 1 are dated 2016.
Phones running versions 6.1 or 6.5 of Windows Mobile are reportedly affected. Microsoft and the handset makers haven’t responded yet with a fix for the bug. We are still waiting for a comment from the company.
The Windows Mobile bug is similar to the once-feared Y2K problem where computer programs had to be rewritten to ensure they interpreted the “00″ date tag as year 2000, instead of 1900. Windows Mobile had 11 percent share of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008. But it has been losing ground to competitors such as Apple with the iPhone OS and the Google-designed Android operating system. In the fourth quarter, Windows Mobile’s market share declined to 7.9 percent.
The latest Win Mobile bug is an annoyance to its users. Because messages are incorrectly dated, they get lost in the inbox and conversation threads don’t show up appropriately. Outgoing messages, though, are dated correctly.
There is a temporary solution. An unofficial patch tries to use the phone’s clock rather than the one used by the SMS gateway to date the messages correctly. Meanwhile, users of Windows Mobile based smartphones on T-Mobile’s network say they haven’t faced the problem.
Photo: (Tim Dorr/Flickr)
We at Crave love robots, especially wacky ones built for little or no practical reason. As 2009 closed, we took a quick look back at a few of these tributes to the spirit of innovation, dedication, and sheer silliness. Not surprisingly, most are from Japan. To which we say, Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto. And here’s hoping 2010 brings as many weird robots as the year gone by.
Seven wacky robots from 2009 (photos)
It’s a sad time for Ubuntu users. Canonical has announced that it is removing the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP, from the default Ubuntu installation routine.
Canonical hosted its biannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) last week in Dallas, Texas. I was one of many open source software developers who attended the event and participated in the collaborative process of planning Ubuntu 10.04, the next version of the popular Linux distribution. An important part of the 10.04 roadmap that emerged during UDS is a tentative plan to remove the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Tool, from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision is viewed by some as controversial, the reasoning behind it is valid. The removal of a niche professional graphics editing tool reflects Ubuntu’s growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users.
There is good and bad in this decision. I was quite irate when I first heard about it. It seemed like a stupid idea to remove GIMP simply to save space or avoid confusing newbies with an app that was too powerful. But the more I thought about it, the less angry I became.
GIMP will still be available, but users will have to find it in the Ubuntu software management tool and install it themselves. This won’t matter much to experienced Linux users who know what the GIMP is and how to install it. And it probably won’t matter much to newbies who have no use for such an advanced tool.
But it may make it more difficult for those who are experienced with other image editors but new to Linux to find this one. A few people might even mistakenly conclude that Linux has nothing available to compete with better-known apps like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
When I write Linux reviews for my blog, I always harp on distros that don’t include GIMP as part of the default install routine. Without it, there usually isn’t much included in the way of image editing tools, and I consider that category of application to be very important to most desktop Linux users.
I use the GIMP mostly for editing screenshots, but occasionally for other things as well. Whenever it’s not available and I have to install it manually, I get extremely annoyed.
What is the GIMP? GIMP, if you aren’t familiar with it, is one of the best image editing applications available and, unlike its commercial competition, it’s totally free for anybody to download. Its name isn’t exactly poetic, but the software itself works, and works well.
The GIMP easily lets you edit, resize, or convert graphics or photos. You can fix perspective distortions in photos or save files in JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, or PSD formats. And if you need to save disk space, you can even save a file with an archive extension like ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and the GIMP will compress the file for you automatically.
You can get it for Linux, Mac OS X (the Mac version requires X11), Sun OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, or of course Windows. Most Linux distros either have it as part of their default setups or at least have it available in their package repositories.
While Marvell is pushing its new Armada 610 chipset with 3D and HD graphics capabilities, the company is also showing off products this week based on its existing Armada 510 technology. Somehow I missed this one last night, but the folks at Engadget spotted an unnamed smartbook prototype with a 12.1 inch display, a full sized keyboard, and an Armada 510 CPU. Engadget described the notebook as one of the thinnest they’ve seen, and I’ll keep an eye out for it on the CES show floor this week.
The ODM behind the prototype is looking for a partner that could bundle it with 3G mobile broadband and sell it, likely at a subsidized price of around $200. Apparently the smartbook gets about 4 hours of battery life, which is kind of shabby compared with the 10+ hours we’re seeing from other ARM-based smartbooks and even netbooks with Intel Atom N450 processors. But the difference is that you can use a very thin and small battery in an ARM-based machine like this to keep weight and price down while still providing decent, if not spectacular run time.
The prototype runs Ubuntu Linux and can handle 720p HD video playback.
In other news, Marvell has taped Marvel comics visionary Stan Lee to hang out at the company’s booth on the show floor for a little while this week. I can’t decide: funny or sad?