		Support

If you require support for our picoSky product, first see if your questions are already answered in our Support Forum and if they are not then please feel free to email us at .

If you have questions regarding your order, or if you need assistance downloading and installing our product, for the fastest response please complete the Handango Customer Support online form at http://www.handango.com/miniCustomerSupportForm.jsp.

Thank You!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Why am I unable to download the trial version?

The primary reason people are having difficulty downloading picoSky is that they neglect to enter the full URL for our wireless website into their phones mini-browser: http://www.bubbasbits.com/wap/ Every character in this URL is critical, including the last forward slash.

The secondary reason is that their phone does not support J2ME^TM applications. This is true for all phones from Verizon Wireless^TM, which only supports the BREW^TM language. Some phones such as the NEC^TM 515 do support a version of Java^TM, but unfortunately not the most common version of Java^TM on cell phones, J2ME^TM.

Why does the Moon phase image look incorrect or like garbage?

Certain phones have a J2ME implementation bug that prevents picoSky from rendering the Moon phase. So far the two phones that we have found problems with are the Samsung^TM SGH-X426 and the Siemens^TM S56 phones.

Why does it take so long to render the sky?

The performance of J2ME phones varies wildly, from a worst case of a bit under half a minute to a best case of under 1 second. Most phones should render the sky in less than 30 seconds for the first view, and less than 5 seconds for any further views within the 15 minute recalculation time period.

The reason that the phones take time to calculate and render the sky is the shear amount of calculations required. The first release of the J2ME language does not support floating point numbers, and so all of picoSkys' calculations must be done using integer math (fixed point to be precise). Each star, deep sky object and text label requires a complex transformation to calculate where they are in the sky for your location and time. As well, each planet, the Sun and the Moon require even more complex calculations, especially for the Moon.

Recently however, we have made great strides in optimizing the performance of picoSky. Our latest version will now often render the sky in a quarter of the time it took for our first release on the same phone before. The table below shows a few phones and how they performed for version 1.1 and now how they perform with the latest version 1.4.

Table of picoSky benchmark results:

	V1.1		V1.4
Phone	First	West	First	West	Increase
Nokia^TM N-Gage^TM	3	1	<1	<1	400%
Nokia^TM 6200	17	4	4	1	420%
Nokia^TM 3595	30	7	7	1	463%
Sony Ericsson^TM T616	60	17	18	4	350%
Siemens^TM S56	80	19	28	3	319%
Motorola^TM T720	96	23	26	4	397%

Rendering with Deep Sky Objects enabled.
Fixed Date = 3/23/2004 18:26 (6:26pm)
All Times in Seconds

In the table above "First" means the time in seconds taken for the first time the "Show Sky" screen is rendered, while "West" means how many seconds was required to show the western sky (pressing "6" on your phones keypad). The first pair of numbers represents version 1.1, while the second pair represents version 1.4. This means that with version 1.4 the first screen may take 30 seconds to be displayed, but every view before the recalculation time (defaults to 15 minutes) will then take less than 5 seconds. As can be seen the performance increase is dramatic.