Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Why I am disappointed with o2
I've recently got an O2 contract as a side effect of buying a phone I wanted as a present for Julia. I was on T-Mobile pay as you go before. What can I say? I am generally disappointed in many ways. Namely:
- You can't get SMS delivery notifications in a standard way. "Require delivery notification" flag is ignored. But you still can receive them - in a very awkward O2 way. You must begin your message with "*0# " (not forgetting the trailing space). Nice, isn't it? And I won't be surprised that my message character limit is now 4 characters less.
- Texts sent to my mom's Russian mobile (Beeline) are not delivered. I had no problems sending texts abroad with T-Mobile. O2's customer support suggested that they had no agreement with the target network. But I have a friend on Beeline who receives my texts with no problems! Yesterday mom's changed her operator to MTS so we could text.
- Recent charges (detailed call list) is available online but despite their promise that it gets updates within 24 hours, it's 3rd of Feb today and latest calls I can see are from 30 Jan. This will be less important later when my spending stabilises and I won't need to watch it closely.
- If I were on O2 pay as you go... I wouldn't be on O2 pay as you go. Their PAYG call charges are higher than anywhere else. 40p/min on calls to non-O2 mobiles while Virgin and T-Mobile offer 15p/min, and on 3 it's 12p/min. Ridiculous.
Thursday, 3 January 2008
Activesync via Bluetooth using Toshiba bluetooth stack
After spending too much time trying to set this up, here is the recipe (taken from many sources, for example from comments to this article):
- First of all, check (on your PC) from Start -> Control Panel -> Bluetooth Local COM which Com port the "LocalCOM-Server[SerialPort]" is assigned to (in my case COM7)
- Set SerialPort in "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services" to the assigned COM port you found before (for example, "COM7")
- Make sure in ActiveSync settings on your PC "Allow connections to one of the following" is checked and "COM7" is selected in the dropdown.
- Pair your Windows Mobile device with your PC (I've done it from mobile device).
- While mobile device is discovering services on your PC, you should be able to see ActiveSync activity on the PC as the BT serial port is probed for ActiveSync.
- The Serial Port profile, which was displayed before as available profile type should appear now as ActiveSync.
- Depending on Windows Mobile bluetooth stack, you now should be able to initiate sync by either
- starting ActiveSync on the device and going to Menu->Connect via Bluetooth, or
- if Broadcom stack is installed on the device (all iPAQs go with it AFAIK), going to Bluetooth Manager, finding "ActiveSync with <your PC name>
" shortcut and tapping connect on it. You create this shortcut by going to Bluetooth Connection Wizard and selecting "ActiveSync via Bluetooth".
