Pocket Pro battery issue?

[SDRebel]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Without a battery is likely the equivalent of a dead battery. How would it know which it was?

Dale

not necessarily a dead battery is the same as no battery specially if there is a conflict with the battery. A dead battery might still close a circuit.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by SDRebel

not necessarily a dead battery is the same as no battery specially if there is a conflict with the battery. A dead battery might still close a circuit.

Yes a dead battery might short circuit the whole supply and cause the charger to fail but if that happened you are likely not to get any beeps at all. A dead battery or bad charging circuit is more likely to read 0 volts with or without the battery present.

Dale

[Robertb]

Dear All:

I know my own is working fine and all those given to key people are working fine and all the reviewers have had no problem. All this means, of course, is that we do not know about yours and are sorry if it is not working right. It seems very isolated.

We are ordering numerous additional batteries and we can make any exchanges needed quickly.

WHEN you charge you should connect it, the Pocket PRO should then turn itself on, and after it goes to the main menu page it will ask you if you want to connect or not. You then hit ANY other button besides the "OK" button and it will start charging. The battery icon should show a picture of a battery with a lightning bolt on it in the bottom right.

IF you do not see the lightning bolt, it is not charging. Check your connections. If still no lightning bolt email: support@astak.com and let them eliminate the problem.

I am surprised that a very few are ready to ask for a refund. Bad batteries do happen and we are ready here to assist you. I realize it is frustrating... but let us get you up and running.

[SDRebel]

Originally Posted by Robertb

Dear All:

I know my own is working fine and all those given to key people are working fine and all the reviewers have had no problem. All this means, of course, is that we do not know about yours and are sorry if it is not working right. It seems very isolated.

We are ordering numerous additional batteries and we can make any exchanges needed quickly.

WHEN you charge you should connect it, the Pocket PRO should then turn itself on, and after it goes to the main menu page it will ask you if you want to connect or not. You then hit ANY other button besides the "OK" button and it will start charging. The battery icon should show a picture of a battery with a lightning bolt on it in the bottom right.

IF you do not see the lightning bolt, it is not charging. Check your connections. If still no lightning bolt email: support@astak.com and let them eliminate the problem.

I am surprised that a very few are ready to ask for a refund. Bad batteries do happen and we are ready here to assist you. I realize it is frustrating... but let us get you up and running.

Mine is one the way back. Barely within the 14-day refund period...if after an exchange or repair, the problem is not successfully applied, would you guys still offer a refund? I am willing to give you a chance to fix the problem, but I don't want to be sending it back several times.

[93terp]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

That would mean that it is working as it should then.
If they are still using the 4 segment bar like the V3, it can take quite a bit of use to drop to 75%. I am using OpenInkpot on my V3, which has a percent meter instead of the bars. It sometimes takes me nearly a week to drop down to 90% using a Nokia BL-5C battery.

Yep, I have the 4 segment battery bar.

[93terp]

Originally Posted by Chiron

Maybe your battery is the new one (that holds the charge for around the 8000 page turns )

I sure hope so!

[Var]

Hello All.
Sorry, I started this topic yesterday, but I was extremely busy with some other things and I couldn't reply. So here is an update:

After charging again, PP5 seems fine. Again, I still don't have time to actually use it for some time, but I will try to find time for a real test because I need to make sure it's working properly.
By the way, someone (sorry, don't remember the name) had issue after taking the SD card out and many people decided not to try that. I would recommend exactly the opposite: do it while you can return if necessary - believe me, it will happen at some point so it's better to do it now! I tried taking out the card myself a few times using two scenarios: after locking and while reading a book from it. In both cases PP5 was going to the main menu and NO issues! So again, try it right now because it will eventually happen regardless how carefully you try not to do that!

Answering to a few questions:
- I am using the latest firmware (I have updated the original one a few days ago)
- I took out the SD card while the device was off right before the issue happened. To be honest, I don't think that had anything to do with the battery issue. I did repeat the steps, but nothing bad happened.


Let me add a few more things not directly related to the topic:
- in general, I like the device. I have no prior experience with such devices. But the real field test is ahead.
- I mostly need it for PDF files. I understand that because of the size of the screen, I can't expect too much. But I still think that there is a lot of room for improvement there: I DO expect to have more zoom options and finer control over it - because of the small size, we DO need more options for formatting the text. Some PDFs look fine, but some others do not and there is not enough flexibility there to fine-tune how the text gets displayed.
-TTS is just Ok. I was expecting a little more. The voice is not that robot-like. I'm not sure if this is something that could be fixed by a new firmware.
- Important: someone said that sometimes you press a button and nothing happens so you need to press it again: I observed the same behavior by myself! I agree that it's very frustrating. Does anyone else experience the issue? Is this a hardware issue (like the contacts inside)? Probably not because I DO see that the light flashes which means the device tries to do something but then nothing happens until you press it second time.

Thanks,

[wayamauro]

Originally Posted by UchihaNaru

seems like there are quite a few problems that people are facing with pocket pro. hope mine has no problem... international shipping is pretty expensive =X

aside, I would just like to confirm what battery can replace the generic one?

Well we are still waiting for an answer. The question was asked in this thread and we were told this

Originally Posted by Robertb

Dear All:

We are waiting for the factory to give us an accurate battery number and link. Shopping by the battery standard does little good. It is the three wires that throw us off. They have promised to respond immediately and I will post; but it sure does not look now to us like a simple cell phone battery as I thought it was. We will be exact.

(now that was at least more than a week ago)
I am not ordering mine till I find out about that, and if the promotional price expires without them having fixed the battery issue, then I will get myself a Sony. I am not rich to be shipping back and forward a device I paid 200 bucks for.

[griffonwing]

For letter-or-larger text-based PDFs, what I found to be the best thing is this.

1) Open the PDF, and export as text. The free Reader will do this.
2) Open the TXT file in Word
3) Change the Page Size to 3" x 4"
4) Change ALL the Margins (top, bottom, left, right) to .1 or .2 (your pref)
5) Now, go through and edit it how you wish. Change the title page, add images, add a ToC, perhaps have the first page be the Book Cover. Adjust the font size to reflect what you'd like to see on your 5" or 6" device. Add Page Breaks to make each chapter start on a new page. Whatever you want.
6) Save as PDF. Plug-in Link Here

And you have a custom formatted PDF specifically designed for your 5" or 6" device.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

For letter-or-larger text-based PDFs, what I found to be the best thing is this.

1) Open the PDF, and export as text. The free Reader will do this.
2) Open the TXT file in Word
3) Change the Page Size to 3" x 4"
4) Change ALL the Margins (top, bottom, left, right) to .1 or .2 (your pref)
5) Now, go through and edit it how you wish. Change the title page, add images, add a ToC, perhaps have the first page be the Book Cover. Adjust the font size to reflect what you'd like to see on your 5" or 6" device. Add Page Breaks to make each chapter start on a new page. Whatever you want.
6) Save as PDF. Plug-in Link Here

And you have a custom formatted PDF specifically designed for your 5" or 6" device.

While text output from the free reader does work it loses all formatting and in some cases I get one word per line. Not fun to convert. There are tools that will convert PDF directly to Word.

When you print to PDF you can specify the page size of the resultant page. This typically works better than change the font to some huge size. In your printer setup you can set the page size to something like 90 x 120 mm for output to the device.

Dale

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

For letter-or-larger text-based PDFs, what I found to be the best thing is this.

1) Open the PDF, and export as text. The free Reader will do this.
2) Open the TXT file in Word
3) Change the Page Size to 3" x 4"
4) Change ALL the Margins (top, bottom, left, right) to .1 or .2 (your pref)
5) Now, go through and edit it how you wish. Change the title page, add images, add a ToC, perhaps have the first page be the Book Cover. Adjust the font size to reflect what you'd like to see on your 5" or 6" device. Add Page Breaks to make each chapter start on a new page. Whatever you want.
6) Save as PDF. Plug-in Link Here

And you have a custom formatted PDF specifically designed for your 5" or 6" device.

The problem with that is text drops all the formatting (italics, em dashes, etc).

While not free the best method I've found so far is to export HTML with Acrobat Pro and edit it in Book Designer (or your choice of editor). There are still issues, PDF wasn't really meant to be exported from, but it's the best I've found so far.

[griffonwing]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

When you print to PDF you can specify the page size of the resultant page. This typically works better than change the font to some huge size. In your printer setup you can set the page size to something like 90 x 120 mm for output to the device.

Dale

Correct. But last time I simply did that, the formatting was off. I had no way to go through and look at what was going to be outputted until it was done. By doing it in Word like this, I can see each page, 15 pages at a time, and make sure tables look good, page-breaks are fine, delete any misc empty pages, etc, before the final output.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

Correct. But last time I simply did that, the formatting was off. I had no way to go through and look at what was going to be outputted until it was done. By doing it in Word like this, I can see each page, 15 pages at a time, and make sure tables look good, page-breaks are fine, delete any misc empty pages, etc, before the final output.

You can also specify the page size in word itself for tricky documents where you need to see the output a head of time. Just another way to do it. The important thing about PDF is to make sure the output is scaled to the device when layout is important. Otherwise the reflow works well enough.

Dale

[cvkemp]

Dale that is what I do all of the time. I makes reading the douments that I have go over very easy to read.
chuck
Ps with the latest firmware I do not even have to change the fonts scaling in my EZreader

[JSWolf]

If someone takes some photos of the battery, maybe someone else can figure out what battery it is.