Archive for the ‘phone’ Category

Blackberry Pearl review

October 14, 2008

This phone is great! Just get one, it does everything. Well, almost everything. It’s a million times better than Windows phones. The brilliant predictive text software makes sure you don’t even notice you’re using a new half-qwerty style keyboard.

But I must complain anyway:

  • the email message system is a bit too ‘automatic’. By that I mean all received, sent and drafted emails are all in the same place: your inbox. Why they couldn’t have separate folders for sent and drafted email is beyond me. There is an SMS outbox but no email outbox. But there is a good customisable ’saved search’ function. So to see only mail you’ve sent, is as simple as typing alt-s, once you’ve set it up. If you don’t mind all that then its pretty cool because you can have your work and personal email, along with SMS, MMS, instant message conversations and saved web pages all in one list. 
  • you can’t easily save attachments. Well you can save the email they’re attached to, but not the individual files. There’s some commercial software called BeamBerry, of which I have a 10-day trial, but its says that .htm and .jpg are “unsupported types”. So it’s not really possible to organise your files like we’re used to doing in a graphical file explorer program.
  • I can’t figure out how to get the IMAP feature of synchronising ‘read message’ status from the phone to my web gmail account. Orange tell me it’s “not supported”. Maybe I can make my own IMAP proxy server that could do it!

Activesync is okay

April 24, 2008

I got my Windows Mobile 5 to Activesync with a laptop running Windows XP and copied all my Notes files across into Office 2000. Unfortunately I need Office XP to copy the Tasks and Contacts.

ActiveSync is rubbish

April 4, 2008

I connect my Orange SPV M3100 Windows Mobile phone to my Windows XP PC in order to back up some contacts and notes from my phone to the PC. It only requires me to install ActiveSync 4.5, unset the “use advanced settings” on my phone, and it just works. That’s good.
But then it starts copying 7000 work contacts from my PC’s outlook address book, mixing them all up with my personal contacts on the phone. And I didn’t even click ’sync’ or ask it to in any way!! After I click “Stop”, it continues to reconnect and do it again, every few minutes until I unplug the cable.

Actually the whole ActiveSync software seem pretty rigid and unyielding. It does what it wants to do, and you have very little control over it. New plan: Try installing SyncCE – an open source syncing software – on Mac OSX.

  1. Follow the instructions at http://www.synce.org/moin/SynceInstallation/Source
  2. The first package: libsynce-0.11 requires another package called dbus.
  3. Download and configure dbus (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus)
  4. dbus make errors like this:
  5. /usr/bin/libtool: unknown option character `z' in: -zUsage: /usr/bin/libtool -static [-] file [...] [-filelist listfile[,dirname]] [-arch_only arch] [-sacLT]
    Usage: /usr/bin/libtool -dynamic [-] file [...] [-filelist listfile[,dirname]] [-arch_only arch] [-o output] [-install_name name] [-compatibility_version #] [-current_version #] [-seg1addr 0x#] [-segs_read_only_addr 0x#] [-segs_read_write_addr 0x#] [-seg_addr_table ] [-seg_addr_table_filename ] [-all_load] [-noall_load]
  6. libtool doesn’t have a -z option. The version is: Apple Computer, Inc. version cctools-590.18.
  7. Try installing the GNU version. It installs in /usr/local/bin/, while the Mac version is in /usr/bin/. The $PATH variable shows that it will look in /usr/local/bin/ first, good.
  8. Run dbus configure and make again. Same error.
  9. Change the dbus Makefile to have LIBTOOL = $(SHELL) /usr/local/bin/libtool hardcoded.
  10. Run dbus make again. Same error. wtf?