Fix coming for HTC's drivergate, sort of

When CEO Peter Chou himself declares that there's a fix en route for the video problems plaguing several of his company's devices, that's a pretty good sign -- there are a couple of catches, though. One, we still don't know which devices will be patched, and two, it turns out that the fix to improve video acceleration performance still won't involve an actual driver for the ATI silicon within the Qualcomm chipsets. Our mommies always told us never to look a gift horse in the mouth, so we're going to stay cautiously optimistic here until we get the actual patch out in the wild (in March, if we're lucky) for some testing.

[matt @ Feb 18th 2008 8:40PM]

that picture is awesome

[E71 @ Feb 18th 2008 9:13PM]

Wait, the fix for the missing drivers issue is to NOT create a driver? ... How does that work?

[low tech @ Feb 18th 2008 10:48PM]

What a snobby piece of hardware. I'll bet it only hangs out with the nVidia jocks sits with the Euro kids at the 3G table during lunch.

[Derek @ Feb 18th 2008 8:43PM]

Will there be a fix for the HTC Touch?

[Jindo @ Feb 18th 2008 9:24PM]

Will there be a fix for your reading disorder?

From post above :"One, we still don't know which devices will be patched"

[Skullfighter @ Feb 18th 2008 10:25PM]

In other acronyms, RTFA!

[Abuzar @ Feb 18th 2008 10:52PM]

I hate your avatar. Since there are plenty of Apple fans on here, I thought I would even the odds.


FYI, they don't know if the HTC Touch will get it's patch or not.

[boe @ Feb 18th 2008 8:51PM]

HTC won't fix things until you hit them with a 2 x 4. I had to campaing for 5 months to get them to look at the BT issues with the mogul. The "fix" they came out with after they got a few thousand e-mails and calls helped the BT, but it still sounds like crap compared to the BT on free phones you get for signing up for a 2 year account. Sucks that HTC makes a buttload of money on their phones and their BT sucks. Hopefully this will encourage carriers to look at other brands as HTC isn't winning any awards for customer satisfaction.

[Dave @ Feb 18th 2008 10:14PM]

HTC : Customer Satisfaction as Ford Pinto : Safe Car

[LordFarkward @ Feb 18th 2008 8:56PM]

Well hopefully HTC can finally persuade me to hand them my hard earned $$$ for their Touch Cruise in March then...

[Genjinaro @ Feb 18th 2008 9:04PM]

Hmph, again its not only the video performance, HTC. The missing driver affects device performance.

Argh, what the heck? Whatever, this "fix" better cover every affected device...

[3rdsun @ Feb 18th 2008 9:08PM]

I never understood what 'never look a gift horse in the mouth' means. Anybody want to fill me in

[DJZeratul @ Feb 18th 2008 9:12PM]

it basically means dont complain about little things you dont like about something when you got it as a gift. if you got a horse with bad teeth, you shouldn't say to the person who gave you the horse "this horse has bad teeth", instead you should say "thank you for the gift"

its an old saying lol

[~~Tito~~ @ Feb 18th 2008 9:12PM]

I think that it will ram your head or something IDK. . .

[insertAlias @ Feb 18th 2008 9:34PM]

You can tell a lot about a horse by its teeth. Age and health problems, namely. To look a gift horse in the mouth is bad form. If someone gives you a computer as a gift, would you open the case and complain that it has a slow CPU?

[Chebwa @ Feb 18th 2008 10:41PM]

We can modernize it.

Don't look a gift whitebox in the CPU socket.

Not as catchy, but more relevant, right?

[frodo @ Mar 9th 2008 2:58PM]

never look a gift hoss in da mouth.comes from the trojan horse thing. maybe? i dumped my satellite company, and i got the boxs an dish. can i replace that card ? an get free tv? or what i gotta do?

[~~Tito~~ @ Feb 18th 2008 9:11PM]

If you read xda-developers.com then you would have known this by now. You guys need to get on the ball and really look for things. Its been a week since this was news, The email was directed to the kaiser so you know whats getting it first. go here engadget.. . .: htcclassaction.org

[Andrew @ Feb 18th 2008 9:36PM]

Hahahahaha, did you say March? You guys don't know HTC very well do you? You'll be lucky if they promise it now and you get it by NEXT March.

[NuShrike @ Feb 18th 2008 9:43PM]

or ANY March, as it turns out.

[E71 @ Feb 19th 2008 6:52AM]

Coming soon to a march you least expect it.

[pimpzilla @ Feb 18th 2008 10:15PM]

I think the best outcome we can hope for at this point is that HTC will think twice about under-utilizing hardware in the future. I'm so sick of the monopolistic lowest bid hardware manufacturer (HTC) selling mediocre products to us through anti competitive cell phone companies that grudgingly give us a choice between a whopping two mediocre smartphones every two years.

A lot of the reason Windows Mobile gets a bad rap isn't the software. The software's good, in fact, it's been groundbreaking in many areas. The problem's hardware. In 2005 I bought a smartphone that had a 240x320 screen, 520 mhz processor & 64 megs of ram. According to Moore's law, by now my phone should be running close to a 2 GHZ processor with at least 256 megs of RAM, and you would hope at least a VGA screen. The phone I bought two years later (Sprints top of the line) has... a 240x320 screen, 64 megs of RAM, and a 400 MHZ processor! Why? No freaking competition!

[Sirius @ Feb 19th 2008 12:28AM]

I've always wondered why the iPaq hx4700 was *still* one of the most powerful PDAs around THREE & A HALF years after its launch... (in addition to the Axim v51, etc).. then FINALLY along comes the iPaq 210.. but it still doesn't have a phone function... wtf??

[Dillon @ Feb 19th 2008 1:19AM]

Ya, I'm really surprised that my x50v still owns pretty freakin badly compared to all the new crap. I got that thing over 2 years ago...

[DonatoM3 @ Feb 19th 2008 11:24AM]

If you check out the Wmexperts Q&A with an industry insider on this situation this actually turns out to be Qualcomm's fault more than HTC's. Apparently the Arm 11 architecture is quite a bit different than the Arm 9 architecture.

http://www.wmexperts.com/articles/editorials/qualcomm_htc_chipsets_and_feat.html

[brokenkeyboard @ Feb 19th 2008 10:48AM]

making the processors faster isn't viable past a certain point in a phone, because the amount of power that the cpu takes is proportional to its frequency. and Moore's law really applies to transistor count, not speed, so what would make sense in a phone is some kind of architectural improvements for better throughput, rather than just making faster versions of the same/similar chips (like desktop cpus did for a long time.)

But overall I agree: there doesn't seem to be a lot of improvement in the performance front. usability and features have improved some, and the tech is a lot more common among the general public, but actually BETTER? only marginally, i would say.

[Chris in CA @ Feb 19th 2008 12:43PM]

Screen Brightness my friend, radical new advancements in screen brightness. And tinier cards that hold the same amount of data.

[Chris in CA @ Feb 19th 2008 12:43PM]

Screen Brightness my friend, radical new advancements in screen brightness. And tinier cards that hold the same amount of data.

[Anonymous @ Feb 18th 2008 10:56PM]

In Russia Doom plays you!

[Dillon @ Feb 18th 2008 11:12PM]

That would be soviet Russia...

[~~Tito~~ @ Feb 19th 2008 12:00AM]

I guess you dont get the joke. . . You just killed it, not the joke you make, the joke the other dude made.

[Dillon @ Feb 19th 2008 1:16AM]

"I guess you dont get the joke. . . You just killed it, not the joke you make, the joke the other dude made."

Who is "you" in this sentence, and who is "the other dude"?

You can't convey body language in text through the internet...

[Anonymous @ Feb 19th 2008 1:40AM]

ZOMG!!

[PhysicalEd @ Feb 19th 2008 12:26AM]

I don't understand the hatred towards HTC about this. I say this as a Tilt owner (who is very happy with his phone).

Yes it would be nice if they utilized 3D features on the silicon, but I don't recall it being listed as a specification for the phone that turned out to be missing. Maybe the chip has some features that they don't use, but if they never said they did, where is the problem?

I happen to work on an embedded product. We use the chips for what we need them for, and no more. Should we be open to complaint/lawsuit because we don't use all the available registers, every bit of flash memory installed, every part of the silicon?

[PeterF @ Feb 19th 2008 12:32AM]

The problem isn't that it isn't using the hardware to its fullest, its that they DO NOT HAVE DRIVERS which is causing the devices to run like crap compared to devices even 2 generations old. Try uninstalling your PCs graphic drivers, and see how it preforms, that is what is happening here.

[w00t @ Feb 19th 2008 3:03AM]

I'd assume you'd be a bit pissed off if you were playing a game with software rendering at 3fps when there's a GeForce 8800 running idle in your system.... It's exactly the same here!

If it's there, use it!

[Chris in CA @ Feb 19th 2008 12:51PM]

After owning a Dell Axim x51v (Intel Video Acceleration), I purchased the ATT Tilt because the specs listed a video accelerator. It is true that the product literature never specifically claimed to include a driver for that feature, but in all fairness it also did not list a driver for the radios, or a driver for the GPS, or a driver for the WiFi, or a driver for the SDHC, or a driver for the Keyboard, or a driver for the camera, etc. At best, consumers were misled. I love my Tilt, and I'm not going to cry over spilt milk, but I will tip my hat to HTC and be very happy when (if) HTC releases a fix.

[GSL3 @ Feb 19th 2008 6:22PM]

Hey, must be your first device!! Either that or your name should be immediately changed to SpecialEd

[storino03 @ Feb 19th 2008 3:49AM]

Just think of playing Quake III on your phone. It runs very slowly on my HTC Touch right now. Hopefully this fix does more than simply improve system performance. (IE- adding video acceleration would be great)

--James

[snowglyder @ Feb 19th 2008 12:50PM]

What kind of graphics chip does this have in it? Is it anything like the Intel 16MB 3D chip in my Axim X50v?

[nixy @ Feb 19th 2008 11:59PM]

it will be a fix for the "Blue Angel" only. Apparently there are a little slow at catching up with current emails.

[Sgt. Kickass @ Mar 25th 2008 8:46PM]

Any updates on this?