Analyzing the locked MP3 player

I own a wonderful shiny piece of technology which is called Cowon S9. Since Cowon seems to be a very nice company it let's the owners play with the devices and allows them to create custom user interfaces - we'll come back to this later.

A few days ago I found a problem with the player while using it and documented it in a video.

Of course the video is a result of a - in this case - quite quick analysis.
First I tried to reproduce the problem as close to the conditions to where I found it:

Start the player → Switch to "Music" mode → Start the music replay → "triple-tap"

After confirming the issue I went on with the questions

1. Does this only happen in "Music" mode?
2. Does the music need to be playing?

I restarted the player and tapped around in the main menu, nothing. Browser mode, nothing. Settings menu, nothing. I assumed that it is limited to the "Music" mode (which actually isn't the case, but I found that only later).

I then tried to produce the bug without the music playing and the screen locked up.

By following a lesson from James Lindsay's EuroSTAR 2008 workshop (it may not be his idea but that's where I learned about it) to try and reduce the necessary steps I was able to remove unecessary - and probably misleading - information from the final report, i.e. the video.

At this point I had done everything I could (and spent the time I thought appropriate) to analyze the issue. However there were still some open points.

As I wasn't sure if this is a bug in the firmware or in the modified user interface I consulted the users of the iAudiphile/Cowon S9 Forum. This triggered the opening of a bug report thread where I discovered

• that it's unlikely to be the firmware which causes the problem
• what the reason could be
• and finally how to work around the problem

Following this, another issue connected to the same UI and the screen locking function was posted by someone else.

Maybe my initial report results in two fixes in some of the next versions