Some notes and impressions

[Radovan Garabík]

Since October 2021, I am a (proud?) owner of a new Cosmo Communicator. SInce I had Gemini PDA for two years or so, these notes will be written with an implicit reference to the Gemini. This is going to be a random list of notes without any overall structure.

I specifically wanted a US keyboard layout - when the package came, I unwrapped it to reveal an US plug charger - well, I had not thought about this. But nevermind, I was not planning to use the original charger anyway… Then I turned my attention to the second box I received, almost as big as the one with Cosmo. And  in that box, carefully padded, completely unordered, was an EU  plug charger… kudos to the
Planet for their foresight.

Anyway, I am using (since the Gemini time) this beast:  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000298379442.html and it charges the Cosmo (and Gemini) maybe by ⅓ slower than the original one, but the Cosmo gets significantly less hot during the charging (random non-turbo old USB chargers charge it in many, many hours).

Ledison does not seem to work at all. I could see a use of flashing patterns on the CODI (without the CODI running) for some announcements, but  this is not something I cannot live without.
There seem to be no manual describing various LEDs on the CODI anyway.

CODI makes it OK (not great) to use the Cosmo as a phone in one-handed operation. However, there are other situations where you really need to use the *smart* phone aspects one handed - most prominent using GPS and a navigation software of your choice when going somewhere, but these days also buying public transport tickets (which you can do while walking to the bus stop, holding your average Android phone in one hand - but not with the Cosmo), showing QR codes everywhere (loyalty cards,boarding passes, COVID pass…) etc.

What I miss is a kind of VNC-like software running on the CODI, mirroring the main screen. Even if scaled or panning and in slow frame rate - for emergency or casual use, I can see it quite convenient. Failing that, is there a picture browser on the CODI? That would help at least with  the QR codes. However, I guess this is moot with the development of the Astro Slide (Planet should have opensourced the CODI software, really - after all, they are aiming a bit at the geek be and Linux community).

The keyboard, compared to my previous Gemini, feels a bit inferior - the keys have a little bit more “plastic” feel,  they are less “springy”, almost as if the membrane were a bit thinner. While on Gemini the keys produced a dull “thud”, on Cosmo they produce a plastic “click” which contributes to a slightly toyish and cheaper feel.
But the keyboard works well, only sometimes I see double “l” letter, and the “a” sometimes stays stuck after opening the lid. Both are infrequent enough not to bother me much so far. Obviously, the build  quality deteriorated - or I had an exceptionally high quality Gemini specimen?

After upgrading the firmware to v25, upgrading CODI took several tries, all on Airplane mode & Do not disturb - but finally it flashed the firmware OK.

Unfortunately, battery usage (Settings→Battery→⋮→Battery usage) says
“Battery usage data isn’t available” and I have no idea how to fix that. This means I do not see which applications drain the battery. I made sure
settings_battery_display_app_list (in Settings→System→Advanced→Developer options→Feature flags) is on, but it did not help.
GSam Battery Monitor seems to work, though.

With CODI enabled, if the COSMO is closed, CODI turns off its display in a minute or so of no activity. However, CODI kept turning itself on again every few minutes - the culprit was BatteryBot, obviously it was updating its notification every few minutes (apparently, when the battery level changed). Disabling notifications for BatteryBot solved the issue. Anyway, BatteryBot is somewhat unnecessary anymore, finally it is possible to turn on the percentage indicator without any helper apps.

As with the Gemini, the Navigation bar buttons are GIANT. There is now an option to hide the bar, but since the button *are* useful, I’d like to keep them. Setting Settings→System→Advanced→Developer options→Smallest width to some large number helps, but then the font inside Agenda gets comparably smaller. And if I set the size of the buttons to be comfortably small, the Agenda day numbers will be unreadable (in the Monthly view), and Control-arrows change the font size only in the left column…. sigh. In the end I settled down on 508 as a compromise.
Previously (on the Gemini) I used SecondScreen overscan to hide part of the buttons, but it has its own problems - like hiding the rightmost edge of fullscreen apps.

[Daniel W]

Hi and welcome to the Cosmo crowd, I suppose. Here are my notes on your notes, in the hope that you might find something useful.

The Cosmo doesn't have a row of five RGB LED's anywhere so, as I seem to faintly recall, the idea was that the Cosmo version of Ledison would use the CoDi to show the color patterns, but I have never read about anyone getting that to work and, at this point, I have stopped hoping it will ever get fixed. Since it, on my unit anyway, more than doubles the battery life, and also because mine is so buggy, I have just turned my CoDi off from the settings menu. Before I did so, it kept waking up for everything and anything, such as when AirMail or Google Play were merely checking for mail or updates. Quite often it woke up for no apparent reason at all, and stayed on for 40 seconds.

As far as I know the LED's on the outside of the Cosmo lid works as follows: The quick start guide that came with my Cosmo, says the LED above the camera hump is a 'Wireless Indicator LED'. I have occasionally seen lit in magenta during phone calls, which I think tells me I only have 2G coverage at the moment. I have seen other people say it's magenta when Mobile Data isn't working, which I suppose it isn't on 2G, so that might be the actual meaning. It turns on in red when the Cosmo is in flight mode and in blue when the mobile hotspot is on (with the lid closed).

The LED in the other end of the lid, below the fingerprint rocker, comes on in red, when charging at below 80% battery level, at which point it turns yellow. Then it turns green at around 95% charge. The same LED blinks slowly with short flashes in yellow when there are unread SMS or MMS messages. I think it flashes in yellow for missed calls too. Mine flashes the same way, but in green, when I have unread Skype messages. It flashes red when battery saver mode has turned on due to low battery level, but not if I manually turn the battery saver mode on.

Then there are the two LED's on the fingerprint rocker itself. Their behavior seems a bit erratic at times. As far as I understand, when the CoDi wakes up in its locked state, both are supposed to be red. After unlocking the CoDi with the fingerprint reader, both of them turn blue. When the CoDi is enabled, but sleeping, they occasionally light up in either red or blue, seemingly for no reason.

While the phone is ringing, the left LED is green and the right is red, to indicate which way to press the rocker to answer or dismiss the call. They are also red/green when the CoDi is showing the contact list, call history or the keypad for manual dialing. In that state, pressing the green side is supposed to call the selected/entered number, while pressing the red side should return to showing the time and date.

When a compatible media player is playing and the lid is closed, the LED's in the rocker are flashing alternatingly in blue, which I personally find so distracting that I avoid playing media on the Cosmo, with the lid closed. This can also happen when Spotify on my Cosmo detects that Spotify on my PC is playing... I got rid of that by turning off "Spotify Connect in background" in the Spotify settings on the Cosmo and then swiping away from the list of recently used apps (the square navigation button).

There is no picture browser on the CoDi as far as I know. The closest thing I have found is that the CoDi media player UI can show album art. I have personally only gotten this to work with Spotify, but I can neither get it to play files from the local file system, nor get it to reliably change tracks or pause from the CoDi. The media player UI detects VLC, but just shows its default cone icon and can't control the playback. Someone mentioned the opensource media player Vinyl, but for me it behaved much like VLC. If some actually supported local media player could be found, creating, potentially silent, local media files with whatever "album art" one would want to display on the CoDi could, perhaps, be a really messy way to show small still images on the CoDi.

Yes, upgrading CoDi firmware is a pain. Flight mode and DND seems to help a bit, but it can still be really tedious. It's just one of the many bugs related to the CoDi, it seems. It would indeed be nice if Planet would opensource the CoDi firmware. The closest things we have, seems to be the projects mentioned here: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?topic=36060 but, as far as I know, the micro controller they chose is very limited, so it might not be possible to do all that much.

Regarding the keyboard, my Cosmo has, in my opinion a noticeably better keyboard than my Gemini, so my experience differs from yours. On the Gemini the keys were a bit wobbly and unreliable, lest I hit them dead center. On the Cosmo, I initially had a similar issue with the space bar, which would only register if I hit the center third of it, but I fix that by putting a small piece of a thin self adhesive label under the key cap (like so: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?topic=34914). For a while, my Cosmo typed a double 5. I removed a few key caps in that area, to make sure the rubber mat was clean and flat. Whatever I did, solved the issue, as it was gone after reinstalling the key caps.

The "Battery usage" doesn't work for me either. I haven't bothered trying to solve it, but I might try that GSam Battery Monitor.

I have personally set Settings -> Display -> Advanced -> Font size to small and Settings -> Display -> Advanced -> Display Size (using Shift-Control-C) to Custom (360). In my opinion, that allows me to fit a reasonable amount of stuff onto the screen, while still being able to read even the finer print in most apps.

[Radovan Garabík]

As far as I know the LED's on the outside of the Cosmo lid works as follows: The quick start guide that came with my Cosmo, says the LED above the camera hump is a 'Wireless Indicator LED'. I have occasionally seen lit in magenta during phone calls, which I think tells me I only have 2G coverage at the moment. I have seen other people say it's magenta when Mobile Data isn't working, which I suppose it isn't on 2G, so that might be the actual meaning. It turns on in red when the Cosmo is in flight mode and in blue when the mobile hotspot is on (with the lid closed).

[...]

Then there are the two LED's on the fingerprint rocker itself. Their behavior seems a bit erratic at times. As far as I understand, when the CoDi wakes up in its locked state, both are supposed to be red. After unlocking the CoDi with the fingerprint reader, both of them turn blue. When the CoDi is enabled, but sleeping, they occasionally light up in either red or blue, seemingly for no reason.

This differs from my experience - the LED above the camera shines red iff the airplane mode is on and the CoDi is turned off and the Cosmo is closed (regardless of the Wifi status, as long as the airplane mode has been selected before switching the wifi on).

And initially there were no lights on the rocker (with CoDi off and Cosmo closed); but then I played with it, installed some packages, disabled some intrusive built-in ones, modified a lot of settings etc... and now those two LEDs shine red whenever the Cosmo is closed (and CoDi turned off), and I can't find any reason why. So by default I have three red LEDs shining whenever I close the lid for the night. Fortunately it does not seem to drain too much battery - certainly much less than with the CoDi enabled.

[Radovan Garabík]

Regarding the keyboard, my Cosmo has, in my opinion a noticeably better keyboard than my Gemini, so my experience differs from yours. On the Gemini the keys were a bit wobbly and unreliable, lest I hit them dead center. On the Cosmo, I initially had a similar issue with the space bar, which would only register if I hit the center third of it, but I fix that by putting a small piece of a thin self adhesive label under the key cap (like so: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?topic=34914). For a while, my Cosmo typed a double 5. I removed a few key caps in that area, to make sure the rubber mat was clean and flat. Whatever I did, solved the issue, as it was gone after reinstalling the key caps.

For the completeness - finally the "double L" and stuck "A" bothered me enough to look into  the issue - there was a tiny fleck of dirt beneath the "L" and cleaning it makes the key work perfectly. The "A" however, after removing and cleaning was not stuck only sometimes after opening the lid, but half the time, which made typing almost impossible. Fotrunately, I have a spare, though damaged keyboard on my Gemini, so I swapped the keys - and now the "A" on my Cosmo works perfectly  (I hope it won't keep falling out - but then I have a lot of other replacement keycaps available, though with a different letters on them).

The Cosmo "A" keeps getting stuck on the Gemini as well, so obviously it is the  keycap itself that is problematic (maybe a bit thicker than necessary?).

However, what surprised me was that the Cosmo mat is white (or white-ish), while the Gemini is black. If I am bored some day, I might try to replace the Cosmo mat  with the Gemini's one, to see if the typing improves (it is not bad - but the Gemini was a bit better).

[MonkeyControl]

However, what surprised me was that the Cosmo mat is white (or white-ish), while the Gemini is black. If I am bored some day, I might try to replace the Cosmo mat  with the Gemini's one, to see if the typing improves (it is not bad - but the Gemini was a bit better).

You may lose your keyboard backlight if you change from the Cosmo white or translucent mat to the Gemini black or opaque one, but it would be interesting to hear what your typing impressions are if you are bored and have time. 
I always felt the feel of my older now broken Cosmo keyboard was firmer and somehow better for me than my newer still working Cosmo, so one day I swapped the older mat into the newer unit, and I noticed a definite improvement.