Saturday 21 June 2008

P990i USB issues

Recently I got a new cell phone, my old one being 9 years old it was quite a change. I wanted one that played music, had WiFi (since I spend most of my time at school and then I could check things up without using my laptop) etc. I found a used Sony Ericsson P990i for 1000 SEK which was quite reasonable.

It all worked fine until I transfered some music to it and the sound was all choppy and made my ears bleed. I phoned SE and they said that they never had heard of such an error. I was puzzled, what could cause this?

I tried analyzing the encoding of the files, nothing strange about it. But when I transfered a song that I considered to be more likely not to contain errors it played flawlessly. How come? It was encoded in the same way. I even checked using SE encoding and transfer tool.

Then I got it, when I played the song transfered from the phone to the computer it was still choppy. What must have happened is that SE tries to make the P990i act like a USB utility but somehow does not do it accurately (I find this likely, the phone needs a bundle of drivers), or that FreeBSD has some sort of bug in the USB handling (I find this unlikely). The first file was transfered using FreeBSD, ending up corrupted, and the second one using Windows, working just fine. This is not a pleasant surprise but now I can finally use my SE head phones.