What didn't work:

I was surprised to find out that it didn't load the date and time from the cellular network. Instead, I was prompted  to enter the time and date. Even more surprising, the phone doesn't remember the date and time if it is turned off. Every time you turn on the phone, you have to re-enter the date and time.  Additionally, the phone did not receive AT&T's standard voicemail indicator messages (sent as a special SMS), so it never indicated that I had voicemail waiting. As long as I had missed a call when the phone had coverage this was fine, because the phone did display a "missed call" indicator that looks like a phone with an arrow pointing at it. However, if I ever missed a call while in a tunnel, or if AT&T didn't ring through to the phone (which happens relatively frequently on the 3G network with my other phone durring peak times) I would have no indication that I missed a call and had a voicemail waiting.

What works:

Voice quality is fine (as good as any other GSM phone I've had), and the built in speakerphone works very well. The e-ink display is very readable, and I like the fact that it displays the clock all the time. The phone gets very good reception, I have been very happy with the performance of the internal antennas.  Battery life is good. I charged it up on a saturday afternoon, and it lasted (with light use) until Thursday morning before the power indicator went down to one bar. I only made a few minutes worth of phone calls on Thursday, and then on Thursday night I called someone and talked to them for 15 minutes before the battery completely died. It beeped warning messages at me and flashed the battery indicator for the last 10 minutes of the call. So, I would say that the phone would easily goes for 3 to 4 days between recharges with light usage.

Quirks:

The phone book editing is very basic. You can add numbers, and delete numbers. To edit a number, you have to delete it, and then re-add it. (Luckily, the recently dialed/received calls list will store the number even if you delete it from the phonebook, so you don't have to remember the number if you have called it or received a call from it within the last 15 calls.) Positioning entries in the phonebook (which are stored on the SIM card) is done in the same way. (To move a number to position 4, delete the number that is currently in position 4, and add the number you want to be in position 4.) The phone book displays entries in alphabetical order so the only thing that the numerical position matters for is the speed-dial setting. Pressing and holding the numbers 2 through 9 will dial the associated phone book entry. The number 1 however does NOT dial the first item in the phone book, instead it dials the voicemail number.

In your pocket:

The Motofone F3 weighs less than my Motorola V3xx, and is slightly thinner and narrower. It is however a half inch taller, due to the candy-bar form factor. This extra half inch is surprizingly noticable when carried in a front pants pocket. In fact, the extra narowness combined with the extra height (and general candybar form factor) make it less comfortable in my front pocket than my V3xx. Perhaps this is just because I've gotten used to the flip phone factor over the last four years… My main complaint was that the phone would rotate so that the long-side was parallel to the ground, instead of staying upright.This made it feel extra wide in the pocket and it would tap my leg when walking or sitting until I rotated the phone so that the long side was pointed down again.

In your hand:

As candy-bar phones go, the F3 is very small and light. It initally feels toy-like due to the light weight, but after a few days of use I was perfectly happy carrying it around with me and using it.

username: 3day136

password: 6856670

However, the internet was turned on for everybody when I was there, so I didn't need to use it.  If you find yourself at the Gamboa resort, feel free to use this code if needed, but please post a comment telling me that it's been used up so I can delete the post.

However, anybody who has listened to compressed audio, (such as MP3 or ACC files) knows that we can safely throw out any samples that do not contribute to the information in the signal. Lossy compression algorithms such as MP3, MPEG4, and JPEG typically throw out a large percentage of the (unnecessary) information in a signal, and leave behind only the information that humans think is important.  Many signals (audio, music, speech, images, movies) are very compressible, which means that they contain redundant data, or data that is not necessary for a human to reconstruct the original meaning.
However, our current recording technology still performs a full sampling of such data. Audio recorders sample at 48kHz (typically to WAV files) and then encode the signal to a (lossy) MP3 to save space.  Cameras capture a full grid/array of pixel data (expensive cameras can save this as a RAW image) and only after the capture use JPEG compression algorithms to shrink the image before storing it to flash memory.

The magic of Compressive Sampling is that it allows the sensing and compression steps to be combined. Using compressive sampling, a physical capture device can record less information by only sampling the signal as many times as is needed to re-construct a lossy (compressed) version of the signal. In fact, for many signals, it is possible to sample randomly and reconstruct a lossy representation of the original signal.  For example, if you wanted to generate a compressed 100×100 pixel image, you could sense only 5,000 random pixels instead of collecting the fully array of 10,000 pixels.

Details and more information can be found at this website at rice university on compressive sampling.

<volume user="summetj" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/sda6" mountpoint="/home/summetj"         options="cipher=aes" fskeycipher="aes-256-ecb"         fskeypath="/home/summetj.key" />

After I installed 8.04 from scratch I had to mount the directory and chown the files to the new user.

On many of the movies, the first 95% of the movie (e.g. 1:13 min of a 1:26 movie) plays flawlessly. However, near the end of the movie, the audio and video starts to speed up and get jerky. (Audio/video sync is also thrown off.)

I have copied the files to a different box and played them with totem and mplayer and was happy to find that the files appear to be just fine. (or maybe mplayer/totem deal with them better?)
 
It seems that the problem is with the mythv internal video player.

After a random sample of movies, I'd say that at least 50-70% (but not all!) of the movies have this problem. The problem survives reboots of the mythtv box.

I am using Xvmc for HDTV playback (with no problems), (OSD is B&W) but not for the internal video player. (OSD is in full color)

Even if I ESC from the movie and then go back into it (the internal player resumes at the same spot) the problems continue as before. If I rewind the movie, it works correctly before the "problem starting spot" but when it hits that spot, the problems resume.

I suspect it may be a problem that is caused by the MythTV ripping system, as I have re-encoded movies using mencoder that then play back correctly in the internal video player.

I was able to solve this problem (which appears to be a problem in the index of the avi files generated by MythDVD) by using mencoder to re-create the index for all of my video files.

  mencoder -idx MOVIE_TO_FIX.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o FIXED_OUTPUT.avi

I created the following script to go through my video files and re-create the index (it takes about a minute per movie). The script will only process a movie one time (keeping track by creating a marker file in the hidden .fixed_list directory) so it's safe to run every time you rip new DVD's without repeating work needlessly:

Movies with a problem generated the following message when re-creating the index:

 ODML: Starting new RIFF chunk at 1023MB.m:

I'm not sure what a new RIFF chunk is, but apparently the built in MythDVD encoder is not producing them correctly. 

I found that reloading the ipw2200 module before attempting to connect to the network fixed my problems (but only if I put a pause between the unload/load/connect sequence).  I use wifi-radar to manage my wireless connections, and was able to call my unload/reload script using its "before" connection command.

The script is simply:

sudo rmmod ipw2200

sleep 1

sudo modprobe ipw2200

sleep 1 

This does add two seconds to the connection time, but this is not a terrible penalty to pay as without the above pause the connection would usually only work about 25% of the time. 

Instructions for setting this up with MythTV are here , but I found that I had to make a few changes to get things to work correctly. I modified one line of the shell script  as follows:

STATUS=$( xset -q | grep "Monitor is" | awk '{print $3}' )

I also had to modify my startup script to run irexec in daemon mode. Now my TV_POWER button toggles the power state of the monitor! 

For the last week my battery indicator and bluetooth icons had been missing from my top panel in Ubuntu. When I did Bluetooth stuff the pop-up "speaker balloons" from the bluetooth applet would still appear at the corner of my screen, but the Bluetooth applet itself was "invisible". I finally figured out that what I was missing was a "Notification Area" for these applets to "live". Right-Clicking on the Panel, Selecting "Add to Panel" and then adding the "Notifcation Area" (from the Utilities category) fixed my problems. Indeed, I then found out that the Software Update notification icon had been trying to tell me about software updates, but I hadn't seen it, so I had to install several software updates!

Pros:

• Very nice high resolution screen. (480×320 at 163dpi)
• User interface is very slick and easy to use after a minimal learning period.
• Built in WiFi (802.11b/g) with very good mobile browser (Safari).
• Methods to hack (jailbreak) it and install 3rd party software are widely available, and many 3rd party applications are already developed for it.
• Base model has a generous 8GB of storage, 16GB and 32GB models are available.
• Design: Aesthetically, it's solid. Hardware, software, feel and aesthetics, everything is great!
• Battery life is good (5 hours of video, 22 hours of music, use of WiFi reduces this significantly).

Cons:

•  It's expensive. Almost $300 for the base model. (I won mine in a raffle, otherwise I wouldn't be reviewing it!)
• Funky machine readable file-system format for storing music: Why is F03/KLJE.m4a my Spin Doctors - Cleopatra's Cat? What's wrong with a human readable filename, Artist/album/song storage paths, etc…) 
• Doesn't support music encoded with Ogg Vorbis.
• Doesn't mount as a standard USB file-system.  (You need iTunes, or a iTunes clone to move music/photos to it, and can't use it as a USB drive.)
• Uses a non-standard (not a mini-USB) connector. (Yet another cable to carry around.)
• Integrated battery prevents easy customer replacements.
• Lacks many features of the full iPhone (Bluetooth, camera, cellular data/radio, speaker, microphone).
• Chrome on the back scuffs MUCH to easily. I've carried mine in dedicated hip pockets and after only a week I still have visible scuffs and scrapes on the "chrome" back.  Hopefully the glass on the front will resist scratches better than the "chrome" on the back. I still have the plastic protective cover that it shipped with over the glass screen, and am considering buying a static stick screen protector after my experiences with scuffs on the back.

Although a shorter list, the positives are very compelling. Despite the long list of negatives  I am reluctant to put mine up on Ebay despite the many shortcomings I've mentioned above. Most importantly, it's got a wonderful screen. Much better than watching movies on my Motorola v3xx phone! The screen is big and sharp enough to read e-books, something else I certainly wouldn't attempt on my V3xx.

User Interface: Overall it feels responsive, and is mostly intuitive. I had to click on everything at first to see if it was a button, and if it was, discover what it did, but I was able to figure out the entire interface by exploring without  accidentally deleting anything. I only have a few gripes, caused mostly by the fact that I'm a power user who doesn't like to wait for fancy animations to complete before making my next input. The home button needs to be pressed a bit harder and longer than I would like to return to the home screen and the sliders ("Slide to unlock", etc…) require a very deliberate pause at the end or they will automatically retract. I'm sure this was designed to prevent people from exiting applications accidentally or turning their iPods on in their pocket, but I find having to leave my finger in place for an extra heartbeat annoying.

Multi-Touch Input: The much ballyhooed "multi-touch" input is all well and good, but really doesn't add that much to the interface. Anything you can do with two fingers could have been done with one more on-screen widget. The Apple interface is slick, but they could have done it with a standard single-touch screen. I dislike the fact that with the capacitive sensing, you can't turn your finger backwards and use just a nail for fine control (and to keep grease off the screen). Instead, to make sure the capacitive sensor detects your touch, you have to mash your whole fingertip down on the screen, which adds to the screen-smudge factor.

Third Party Applications: I found many useful 3rd party applications for the iPod Touch (which will also work with the iPhone). In fact, several of these applications (OpenSSH server, mxTube, MobileCast) helped make up for the lack of iTunes support for Linux, and without them I wouldn't be able to use the iPod Touch without booting into Windows. [For example, I use MobileCast to download and listen to podcasts, and mxTube to download demo movies that I want to play on the iPod, ignoring the built in iTunes podcasts and videos portions of the UI.]

Use with Linux: It is possible to use the iPod touch with Linux, but you will probably need to use a Windows or Mac computer to initially jailbreak it. I found that the newest version of amarok and libgpod provided good music and album art support. (I am still lacking the ability to natively transfer photos or videos without using YouTube).

Value Proposition:
If all you want is a music player, you can buy an Insignia flash based music player that does not suffer from any of the above failings for less than a comparably sized iPod Touch. (I have one, mostly because it cost less and supports ogg vorbis music.) It's smaller, cost less than $100, and although it lacks the super sexy coverflow music browsing application, it's a better value as a dedicated music player.

As just a music player, the iPod Touch is slightly too big, too expensive, and doesn't play well with Linux. However, it's not just a music player. The larger screen, full featured video support, plus WiFi support and Safari browser makes it a full-on media player, e-book reader, and web tablet. It certainly beats the Nokia internet tablets. (Well, after you Jailbreak it and get a BSD/unix subsystem on it.) As long as you can find a WiFi signal, the web browsing experience is about as good as you are going to get without a keyboard or full sized screen.  

Missing Bluetooth & Cellular Radios: Hardware wise, the lack of Bluetooth is annoying. Speaking as somebody who rides trains and has to make transfers while carrying junk, having headphone or earbud cables is annoying. You may not notice it until you try out a pair of bluetooth headphones, but believe me, wireless headphones are great! The lack of bluetooth also means that you can't pair it with a phone that has a data plan to make up for the fact that the iPod Touch can only get on the internet at WiFi hotspots.  I don't mind the lack of a camera or cellular radio as much as the bluetooth.

Buy a (2nd gen) iPhone instead:
In fact, every time I wish for a feature on the iPod Touch, I can't stop thinking about it's big brother, the iPhone. A GSM radio for cellular data would prevent the loss of internet connectivity when traveling between hotspots, Bluetooth would allow the use of wireless headsets and headphones, and the camera would be a nice addition as well. In short, about the only advantage the iPod Touch has over the iPhone is a (relatively) cheaper price, and a slightly smaller form factor. However, it's not THAT small. If I am going to be carrying it around, I would prefer to add an inch and be able to replace my phone. In short, unless you do nothing but listen to music, buy an iPhone instead. How many iPod Touch owners don't also own a cell phone?

Due to my experiances with this iPod Touch, I am seriously considering buying a 2nd generation iPhone when they are released (as long as they support 3G high speed data).

• Organizing multiple pages of applications:Categories
• Downloading/Watching YouTube movies: MxTube
• Photos alternative: PhotoBoard
• e-Book reader: Books 
• Information Lookup: weDict , iMoon , iTrac
• Networking: Stumbler, VNsea (VNC for the iPod Touch / iPhone), TouchPad Pro (VNC without the display, still very useful for music player / presentation control)
• Games: Marble , Chess, LightsOff
• Utilities: SysInfo, AcceleroLog, TouchLayer

If your iPhone is not jailbroken, you will not be able to add any of the above games until they are added to the apple store. You can always play web-based games found on AppSafari: http://www.appsafari.com