CF-P2 (British Gas Version)

Gotcha. Just out of curiosity - how much does the Braille interface translate for you? Does it translate any of the graphics at all; tables, boxes, headers, etc, or does it turn it all into text only like using Lynx?

How much actual display space do you get on the Braille panel compared to the LCD? I know that on my 24" LCD I can comfortably view 3 full typewritten pages side x side x side; how does that compare?

And finally - how much more could you see and it be useful if your desktop were viewed on say a 32" or 40" screen?

I know this sounds like a lot of silly questions, but you are in a position that is unique in my experience; needing to use the Braille panel enough to actually be bothered to learn it, while still being ABLE to compare the Braille real estate to its LCD counterpart.

mnem<~~~CuriousDwagon~~~<<<

 

Ive got my particular display configured to display text only, but insert "[alttext]" (where alttext is the alttext) where images are. images without alttext are ignored. The rest, really depends on how well the site is written. I like it when sites use h1, h2 etc properly, it really helps navigation. Tables are not displayed well, but as far as I'm aware table support varies from software to software.

The particular model I'm using lets me "view" 44 characters as one line, but the navigation controls are fairly easy to get used to, and then you can skim through.

At the moment, I've got my 19" laptop running at 800x600 with fonts all at around 22-24px, if that is any comparison. a tad cramped, but you get used to it.

 

Hello everybody,

I watched your posts with great interest,and now that my CF-P2 arrived I wanted to thank you for great advices.

I am especially interested in the WiFi discussion,and I was wondering if you looked for other devices that have the similar WLAN6060EBC2 chip.

After a quick search I found that the Sony Clie UX-50 has it,so if you find one broken or at a good price,get it .

 

Hi folks,

Fascinating discussion.

I've just bought an eBay ex-Centrica CF-P2 which seems to do all I want (no WiFi, but not really that fussed), however I can't for the life of me get it to stay in standby without it waking up after 10 minutes or so.
From what I can gather, you put it in standby by pressing the wireless and power buttons at the same time. This seems to do it, but a few minutes of inactivity later and it's back on.

What am I doing wrong?

 

IIRC, a long hold of the power button just turns the backlight off, hence it staying on. Give the power button a quick press, then wait for it to sleep. Can be a bit slow to go to sleep, but as long as the spinny thing appears, it should sleep shortly.

If you're still not having much luck, try the master reset with the .baf files I uploaded at http://toughbook.wikispaces.com/CF-P2

 

Anyone have the bigger round top cover for the P1?

 

I've tried everything I can think of now (on two different CF-P2s) including a master reset with the .baf file.

A short press of the power button does turn it off (sometimes with the spinny thing, sometimes without), but it can then wake up at any time without pressing any button or doing anything. It can be almost immediate or after a good few minutes and is really running the battery down - starting at 7am at 100% it can be at 30% by 6pm with it just sitting in my coat pocket. My old SPV M2000 would switch off and stay off (until a call, text or alarm) with just a press of the power switch and the battery would last for days before showing significant usage.

I've tried a bundle of power management apps (Slide2Shutdown, psShutXP, PocketPowerManager, EdgeWayPocketPCUtils [which seems to work the "best"] etc) but none seem to offer a solution.

Any ideas?

 

Might be a wake up event set incorrectly in the registry, or even a faulty button on the device. Enable all wakeup events under System>Buttons>Wake up events, close, reset device, repeat but this time disable and reset.
Could it be that you are accidentally pressing the voice record button? afaik that has a wakeup event by default.

 

Hi
I have a Cf-p2 phone the charge light comes on but it will not power up? Have Tried New Battery etc
any suggestions

 

Do you get a green 0% text on the screen when trying? The batter might be completely empty, needs some time to charge.

 

hi
No, Its completely dead although the battery is fully charged,It will not synchronise with my pc using a data lead either,

 

No,Its Completely Dead The Battery Is Fully Charged It Will Not Sync With My PC Using a Data Lead

 

Sounds like it might be broken...

 

Hi
yes have come to that conclusion as well,I have managed to
obtain a full service manual for the phone, will start looking for
a component/switching fault...

 

Probably its better idea to get an other one for 25-30 quid...

 

Hi, I just got mine in today.
Does anyone else in the USA have att settings for data that work?
Also does anyone know how to ge into service mode on the phone?
I am also looking for the service manual.

 

yeah, kinda stuck.

some just stole my hd2, so i busted out my cf-p2. battery is charged (I had charged it for storage) as well as being on the charger.

power button, or hard reset, or hard reset w/record button; it just hangs at the panasonic "full reset" "initializing" screen.

Thoughts? I'll try to reload the stock baf when i get home (but not if that requires windows running, I never get past the above screen)

 

panasonic backup pops up after the "Welcome to Windows Mobile" and calibration screens.
If you're not getting past there, it could be some form of crap stuck in the ram.
if you've got a tri-wing screwdriver, it might be worth unplugging the backup battery, pressing power, plugging the backup battery in, then turning the CF-P2 on to try and clear the ram.
whilst you're in there, look for any swarf on the pcbs. same with the dock connector, give that a clean. and remove the SD card.
good luck!

 

figured it would require ripping it down.
thanks lxsys!

 

not necessarily, as i sorta said (maybe not very clearly), it could be something on the dock connector, or an SD card that doesn't want to play nicely.
give those a go first if you haven't taken the screwdriver to it yet.

 

Hi all.
Who has backup-battery photo or knows his type (voltage, capacity, rechargeable or not)?
Thanks.

 

Odisee: Its a Ni-Mh 2.4v 15Ah Rechargeable battery pack. Varta part 2/V15H
Service manual quotes part number "N4HHECB0001".

 

I don't get it. I had tore the unit down before and poked around in there trying to figure out the wlan chips. put it back together and it worked well (test calls, installed some progs and played around a bit). I then made sure it had full charge, placed tape over the battery's terminals and reinstalled the battery. It's just been sitting there for months.

sim card or not, sd or not, charge cable or not, hard reset or not, it doesn't matter, it won't go past that screen. I'll tear it all the way down tonight, and put it back together, just to be sure.

 

Chances are, because there was no main power source actively applied, the backup battery held ram data up for a while, and after that started to deplete, holding data intermittently, and possibly even causing corruption.
If the CF-P2 had a good charge since reinserting the battery and trying to power it on, then chances are that the battery has been given a charge enough to hold the crap in ram.
It took just a few seconds to clear my ram on my CF-P2, but you might want to try leaving the battery out for a tad longer.

 

Thank you, but just to be clear:

8 months (or so) ago I pulled the unit all apart, put it back together, and it worked just fine afterwards. i charged the battery, left it disconnected, and put it away for later use.

Today: put the battery in, fired it up, and it hangs at panasonic "initializing" screen
Took it apart, pulled back up battery held power/reset buttons: still hangs.
Took it all apart, pulled back up battery held power/reset buttons: still hangs.
I even tried several sd cards while hard and soft resetting, with no go.

Also, while holding pwr, reset, and record, you can see the diagnostic boot screen. with the sd card installed there are several additional lines that display, and one of them says something about no bin file found.

I'm just pissed. I've been holding on to this thing as an emergency phone, it's now an "emergency", and it ain't working. sob.

 

The .bin not found message would be the CF-P2 bootloader trying to load firmware files from the SD card and not finding any.
You probably need a full .bin firmware restore from the bootloader here. The .baf "firmwares" are nothing more than a few dlls and registry entries.

I've done a dump of my CF-P2's NAND, and I'm in the process of making it into a useable format for device restoration.

Possible progress:
I've uploaded my dumps from partitions 2 and 3 of the device here http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VJB148G2 however theres still 1 more parition to dump which is more likely the rom - if you look at the size of the zip, theres a good 130> mb compressed down to 3.8. something tells me that that is more than likely the /Storage partition (16mb) and the RAM (eg my docs and programs). I've got my xeon workstation on dumping the roms out of the NAND dumps (if they actually are where the rom is...)
Remember these aren't firmware. The CF-P2 will refuse them if you try to get it to use them, as they are not rom files.

Updating on my progress:
Barking up the wrong tree. Those dumps appear to be completely useless - I dumped the wrong device. I'll try to acquire a data lead so I can rip the rom via itsme's tools +activesync which seems to be the way to go now.

 

oh...you would just happen to be the man!
let me know how that goes, because as of this moment, I have a brick....

thanks again!

 

Actually, would you mind pressing Power, Reset, and UP Volume, and taking a picture of the screen that the CF-P2 displays?
The pull the battery, hit reset and the CF-P2 should go back to normal boot.

Here's the results from my healthy CF-P2


Some more discoveries, the CF-P2 hangs at initialization if the battery door switch is registering as door open. Upon switch being closed, device requires a reset, then will hang at boot with "Loading... " screen but nothing much else apparently happening. Device required a full reset. Probably nothing much but I felt it was worth documenting here.

 

....no, I can't. d@mn thief took my camera phone, and it's all I had.
But bit for bit, my boot screen looks just like yours.

and those symptoms seem like mine. I'll pop it back apart and play with the switch...

Thanks

 

nope. took it apart and was hoping to bypass the switch, but it's smt on the board.......

I'm gonna start looking around for a replacement...

 

If it is the switch, Power + Reset + Rec, Pull battery cover of quick. Screen should flash something about reading binfs and the SD thingy. The device should then sit and wait with a blank screen and no backlight (cpu is awake). Put battery cover back on, and the boot should continue.
Hope that may give further insight into the issue.

 

Hmm, whats the price on these things? in good condition and a good battery.

Cause i've been through three, nearly four, nokia 1616's at work. maybe its time to invest in something, shall we say, more durable than wet crisps.

 

I purchased mine last year for £35 in "Toughbook Good" condition. Few light scratches and dings, but other than that its fine. Its on the CF-P2 page on the toughbook wikispace if you're after pics.
They've gone up a bit since and would set you back around £45 excluding shipping.
There's always one going for £19 too, but you'll have to enquire about shipping if you're not in the UK.

 

Ta, mate. My girlfriend is in Birmingham for a few more days anyway. Hopefully she's in shopping mode, (when is she not? )

 

@lxsys:
I just did that, and it did just as you said. i guess the switch is good.
wth is going on with my unit then? have you heard of other units that have this issue?

 

I've seen units fail to boot when components on its I2C bus failed to initialize and didn't want to play nice. A good(ish) indication would be check the keyboard leds, are they behaving normally, same with the status led.
This was an issue with dirty ribbon contacts, so it might be possible that if you had touched the ribbon contacts with your fingers, as the CF-P2 lay in the draw, the small bits of acidic finger stuff on the contacts gradually led to a poor connection. A bit of careful cleaning with Isopropyl alcohol should help if it is a connections issue.

 

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Just a quick update.
Spectec (SDW-821) SDIO WLAN-11b/g.
It wont work with our CF-P2, I tried 5 kinds of drivers, It wont recognized the card when push it in to the SD slot.

Will try another one soon.

 

people!
I used a cfp2 whilst I worked @ british gas, I can awnser a few questions!
wifi was never available on this unit, it just used vodaphone gprs, maybe it said 3g if there was a 3g signal, I cannot recall that bit.

we used to have loads of the data transfer leads and threw them away regular,, along with the headpiece sets!.

I still have the original B.GAS issued P2 instruction booklet/operator manual and FAQ'S , if this is of any use to anyone, reply and I will scan and up,load.
I have a P2 and unused car kit, im just fitting it in my 4x4 and wondered after readin all 24 pages of this thread, as technology has moved on has anyone solved the wifi capability yet?

 

Please scan the manuals and upload.