Choosing a Kindle for travel

Posted on November 14th, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I finally bought a Kindle!

I’ve been thinking about getting one for a while now.  My sister has one and I’ve been borrowing hers when I go hiking as my Dell Streak‘s screen is just not readable in bright sunlight due to glare.  I always question myself before I buy anything nowadays to make sure it’s something I will really be using.

I’ll be traveling long term out of the country in January and I’m expecting my new Kindle to get a lot of use from it.  I know I will be outside quite a bit and I’ll be doing a lot of reading, so the Kindle’s E Ink display is perfect for this.  I’m also planning on doing multi-day treks, long bus/train/plane/boat rides, and possibly end up in places with no electricity for days at a time.  The Kindle’s long battery life (up to 1 month for the model I have) will come very handy in these types of situations.

When I heard about the price drop after the Kindle Fire tablet was announced, that was really the time when I seriously considered getting one.  I actually thought they just dropped the price of the older Kindle model (now called Kindle Keyboard).  But it turned out they actually made 2 additional models.  Smaller, lighter models without the keyboard which I never really used to begin with.  This is just perfect as I try to pack as light as possible!

Read the rest of this entry »

How to recalibrate your Dell Streak’s touchscreen

Posted on February 21st, 2011 webmaster 15 comments          Print

A few days ago I was trying to unlock the screen on my Dell Streak and I was having a hard time dragging the lock icon, it wouldn’t go all the way through and not responding well.  I thought my Dell Streak was busy at first, maybe a process was using up a lot of resources in the background, but when I was finally able to drag it all the way and at the screen where to type in the password, I noticed that some sections of the touchscreen weren’t responding to my touch.  I figured I probably need to recalibrate.

A quick Google search led me to this post: http://www.streaksmart.com/2010/10/how-to-calibrate-dell-streak-touchscreen.html

I’m just gonna repost it here so I can just search my website next time I need to do this :

1. Power off your Dell Streak.
2. While holding both Volume Up and Volume Down buttons, press the Power button.  This will take you to the recovery mode screen.
3. Press the Volume Down button a couple of times to highlight option 3, Screen calibration, then press the Camera button to select it.
4. You will be prompted Are you sure you want to start calibration? Press the Volume Up button, then press the Volume Up button again on the next screen to start the calibration.  The screen will shut off temporarily, don’t touch the screen.
5. After a few seconds, you should see a message that it’s done, then press Volume Up again to start the calibration data check.  Screen will shut off temporarily again, don’t touch the screen.
6. After a few seconds, you should see another message message that it’s fully done and you’ll be brought back to the menu screen. You can then either power off your device and power it back on the normal way or just don’t do anything and wait for the device to reboot itself.

The screen calibration made a big difference, my Dell Streak now feels a lot more responsive .

Note: I tried this on my Dell Streak running Android 2.2 Froyo, I’m assuming it’s the same for Android 1.6 since the calibration happens before the OS loads.

How to upgrade your AT&T locked Dell Streak (Baseband GAUSB1A111231 Build 6601) to Android 2.2 Froyo

Posted on January 23rd, 2011 webmaster 64 comments          Print

I’ve been patiently waiting for Dell to release the 2.2 version of the Android OS for my AT&T locked Dell Streak but they just keep pushing it back and there’s currently no specific release date.  They’ve already released it for the non-AT&T locked versions but it seems like AT&T is preventing them from releasing it to the AT&T-locked ones.  The Dell update package seems to check the baseband version of the device so even if you were able to get an unlock code from AT&T the update won’t work unless you have the specific baseband version that the package was created for.

I was reading the Dell forums and there are a lot of people who are pretty upset about this too.  So a lot of them decided just to do it themselves and were able to upgrade their Streaks to 2.2 by using the QDLTool and following this guide from streakdroid.com.  It was actually very easy to do and I wish I had done this months ago!

The QDLTool will change your baseband version to GAUSB1A130500 which is the unlocked version.  The QDLTool will also install the pre-release version of 2.2, so you may want to upgrade to the official release after that (which should now work since the baseband version of the device has changed, you can download the official release here: http://mobileupdate.dell.com/PackageProductionLocations/Streak_318_12821_00.pkg)

Here are the steps I took, note that I ran the QDLTool on a Windows XP Pro 32-bit machine.  Use this guide if you have a 64-bit Windows: http://streakdroid.com/?page_id=87.
Read the rest of this entry »