Posts by Richard Halkyard 5 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jun 2007
...in the late '90s with their Mavica?
I've got an old Mavica which has a window at the top of the casing, meant to capture sunlight and illuminate the LCD with it when the backlight was off. It was of about as much use as a chocolate teapot, but that's not stopped anyone before, has it?
In the UK and Europe there's a system called RDS (Radio Data System) that broadcasts low-bandwidth data along with the audio, and can transmit data such as the station name and program information. One of the features that it has is that a station's RDS feed can be monitored while the radio is playing through another source. You can then select what you want to listen to and then those come up, it will interrupt whatever it is doing and switch over to the desired radio program, then change back once its finished. This is commonly used for news bulletins and traffic announcements.
Old Alcatel phones were built like tanks. They may have been horrendously bad (The menu item labelled "Do you want to deactivate the alarm telephone off" is a good example), but you just couldn't kill them. I left mine in my pocket while out in a storm, getting absolutely soaked. I then went out into the sea to bring a boat in. The phone was soaked through. A high-pressure hose-out and hairdryer later, and it started ringing with a job offer. I took the job and the phone lasted me another three months until the battery conked out.
My Nokia 1100 that I replaced it with went through the washing machine once. It appeared dead, so I left it to gather dust and bought the 6630 that I'd been promising myself. On the off chance, I put the 6630's battery in the old phone, and lo and behold, IT WORKED!
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