I recently bought a Samsung SPH i500 (PalmOS 4.1) for my wife through
an eBay store (KM-Electronics). That was a mistake [1], but live and
learn.

The phone has a curious bug. Roughly the lower left 1/4 of the display
screen does not respond as expected to stylus input. I thought this was
a simple digitizer bug, but I tried scribbling over it in a paint
application. The area responds to pen input as expected.

Some pop-up menus, however, when they appear there, do not respond to
the stylus input, or the menu buttons respond erratically; almost as
though the owning application was polling the display for input
infrequently. Some menu buttons I can't get to respond at all. Mostly I
can workaround this problem, but there are a few screens I can't do
anything with.

Curious. I wonder if KM-Electronics, or whoever they bought it from
somehow hacked the phone, or messed up the firmware with the wrong
image file (I have reason to doubt the competence of this particular
eBay reseller). The OS version that displays in the 'info' list is
apparently more recent that the OS version in my own i500 (which does
not  have this problem).

I'm going to visit a Sprint store and see if they're reflash the
firmware. In the meantime, has anyone else seen a bug like this one? It
could be hardware or firmware or software, but since the paint app
works I'm thinking firmware or software ...

All thoughts welcome!

john
jfaughnan@spamcop.net

meta: Samsung SPH i500, PalmOS, Palm OS, PDAPhone, PDA, digitizer, bug,
defect, not recognizing, not recognized, no response, can't click
buttons, screen polling, event loop

[1]
http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/2005/11/perils-of-ebay-and-why-rough-vendors.html