Palm quietly improving Pre build quality, tweaking hardware

It’s not the most comprehensive survey, nor is there any official confirmation, but the crew at PreThinking has checked in with a number of new Pre owners and discovered that Palm’s apparently building its webOS handset better lately — and what’s more, it’s even made some minor improvements. The biggest change appears to be a fix for that nasty bug that caused the Pre to reset or turn off when the keyboard was closed — that bit of grey foam pictured was added to the battery compartment to tighten up the battery connection. There’s a also word that the screen cracking and unintended rotation issues have been addressed, although time will tell on those, and the button color has changed from pearl to silver. As for improvements, well, there’s a new battery model, and the Palm logo is now embossed on the carrying case. Yep, just little stuff, but it’s good to see Palm addressing the build issues on the Pre, which are by far the most common complaint about the device. Let us know if you’ve spotted anything else, would you?

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Palm quietly improving Pre build quality, tweaking hardware originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 to get 2,000 bug fixes pointed out by testers

Microsoft has been a bit lax in communicating with beta testers of its Windows 7 operating system who have reported problems or bugs to the company — according to some of the testers, anyway. Well, apparently they’ve been really busy! Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group at Microsoft, has just directly addressed the issue of bugs in a blog post, noting some pretty astounding figures. First, he says that over 2,000 bugs will be fixed in the release version of Win 7 because of feedback from the over 10 million downloaders of the beta OS, which ended on February 10th. Sinofsky says that at peak times in January, Microsoft was receiving one feedback report every fifteen seconds for a week straight, and has, to date, gotten over 500,000 of them. He assures testers that the company reads and considers every email and comment received. Hit the read links to find his entire post, as well as an update detailing of some of the fixes that are on the way!

[Via Daily Tech]

Read – Some changes since beta for the RC
Read – Feedback and engineering Windows 7

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Windows 7 to get 2,000 bug fixes pointed out by testers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Quake gets ported to the BUG, controlled by Rock Band guitar

The folks from Bug Labs certainly represented themselves well enough at CES with a slew of new BUGModules, but we’re guessing they would have attracted even more attention if they would have had this perennial favorite on hand. If you can’t quite make it out, that’s Quake running (rather well, we might add) on the BUG and, yes, it is indeed being controlled by a Rock Band guitar thanks to the newly developed Xpad driver, which should work equally well with a standard Xbox 360 controller if you’re a little less ambitious. Head on past the break to check it out in action, and hit up the link below for all the necessary details.

Continue reading Quake gets ported to the BUG, controlled by Rock Band guitar

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Quake gets ported to the BUG, controlled by Rock Band guitar originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Y2K8 Zune quirk really a Freescale bug?

Well, here’s an interesting twist to this story. That mysterious and completely enraging “Zune bug” that cropped up on the final day of 2008 may not have been restricted to Microsoft PMPs. A much smaller cadre of Toshiba Gigabeat users reportedly experienced similar issues, and some even noted that the whole “discharge and re-date” rigmarole fixed their unit right up as well. Upon further investigation, it seems that the issue may actually reside in the Freescale MC13783 processor, which — coincidentally enough — is used in the Zune 30 and a few of Toshiba’s alternatives. We suppose it’s a little late to ask, but did any non-Zune owners experience similar issues just prior to the dawn of ’09? Or were you too busy, um, partying like it was 1999?

[Thanks nywytboy68]

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Y2K8 Zune quirk really a Freescale bug? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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