Review: NEC Mobile Terminal S1596-01

Weird...it worked fine on mine. You are talking about the one on the top of the device...correct? I plugged in USB flash drives and they all showed up fine...

Perhaps the original owner did something in the registry to disable it so people couldn't use that port on purpose?

The only quirky thing I noticed was that the wifi shut off once you plugged the device into the desktop cradle...but it still connected with the internet if you plugged in the Ethernet cable into the cradle....it became hardwired to the internet. Pull it out and the wifi came back on.

I think I saw that auction for the 4 of them...did they all come with batteries?

Yup. Battery life is not terrific, though.

I wonder where in the registry it could have been disabled. Nothing in HKLM/Drivers/USB looks out of the ordinary.

Another quirk is that the device doesn't seem to like any non-native file explorer programs. I tried more than one (Total Commander, Dexxplorer, etc) and none of them want to show most of the icons alongside the program names, and these file explorer programs eventually freeze up. Not good, because as you point out, the reset button on the rear does a cold reboot, wiping installed files, shortcuts, and registry changes.

True about Total Commander...I noticed that on several CE devices...the build I had for my 50x15 was the same thing...no icons.

As far as your battery, they must be getting worn. One I had only lasted 15 minutes, but the other was good for 5 or more hours with wifi.

For the USB port, now I REMEMBER! On my CF card there was a folder that had the two update files. You had to copy them onto the S1596 and then the USB port would work. They were the USBMSC.dll and USBDisk6.dll files.

Later on I accidently erased the card and performed a hard reset and discovered that my USB did not work either. Then I searched and found a Japanese NEC web site that had those two updates on file and redownloaded them.

That solves the USB port problem...but you have to have those specific two updates.

And if you check the H/PC Update here on HPCFactor, you will see that I have them waiting just for you to resolve your USB problem.

I believe I've already located the files you're talking about and tried them already, but just to be sure I downloaded the ones from H/PC:Update and copied them onto the device. Same result. (Tried this on a freshly hard reset one, and tried more than one FAT32-formatted USB flash drive recognized by every other CE device I'm currently using. Tried Regflush followed by Warmboot after all this - same result. I tried running regsvr2.exe on them to register them, but got the "Found control, but could not find DLLRegisterServer!" error message. )

Hmmm...this is where I downloaded them from: http://support.necam.com/Retail/Paneli6/

If I remember correctly, all I did was copy them over to the Windows folder and then performed a warm reset.

Seems that when I stuck in the USB drive, it took a few seconds for it to be recognized...

Also, remember, after you perform a hard reset, you need to go back into the maintool and turn everything back on again as it is off by default.

Already did that - no change.

Sometimes the acknowledgment sound happens within a few seconds, sometimes it takes a minute or more. But the result is always the same: nothing showing up.

And it is that way on all 4 of your tablets?

I've tested three of the four, all with the same result.

I'm perplexed why the port doesn't work for you as it did for me. I wonder, are you testing it with it sitting in a cradle at all? Have you tried a different format on your USB drive?

I don't have a cradle. (You can sync by direct USB connection or WiFi, of course.)

I'm going to pick up another USB flash drive one of these days when I'm not so distracted by work and other things. I could try another format, but FAT seems sillier than FAT32 on an 8 or 16 GB USB stick (although they seem to always come preformatted that way ).

Well, I picked up a fresh USB flash drive, and sure enough, it was not recognized by the primary S1596-01 I'm using - but it was recognized by the others. So maybe there's something I've installed that's conflicting (either file or registry value or both). I did notice that when I tried recopying the driver files over to the device while the flash drive was inserted, it wouldn't let me because the file was in use, even though it wasn't recognizing the USB drive. (BTW, I was incorrect when I said that that device's USB port wasn't recognizing USB keyboards or mice - it just wasn't after I tried the flash drive. After a warm boot, both keyboard and wireless mouse were recognized - though a few keys didn't seem to do anything even though they work with other devices. BTW2, the new USB flash drive came preformatted to FAT32, but my XP PC wouldn't offer FAT as an option - only FAT32 and ExFAT.) If I have to do a cold boot again in the near future, I'll try it again then - I'm not in a hurry to go through a restore, so I'll wait.

Very interesting...well good to know that it works on your other 3 anyways.

The one I owned and sold, the USB worked fine with everything. There were some limitations however on the mouse...the scroll wheel didn't work. Using the cradle added multiple USB ports, and I plugged in a USB hub and had 6 working ports, so I could use a keyboard, mouse, flash drive, and whatever without problem.

It would be interesting to compare the registry with the one that didn't work and perhaps import the registry from the other machines to see if that is the culprit.

I always thought FAT and FAT32 were the same...and that FAT16 was the really old FAT.

Well, I think we've chewed the FAT enough for now.

Wrong forum CEGeek....jokes go in the other spot...

Of course, a politician has to be quick on his feet...how soon till your election?

That doesn't go here either, Rich.