Blueunplugged:

http://www.blueunplugged.com/p.aspx?p=120134

It supplies up to 1A (IIRC), which is plenty, and converts down to 5v too (so it works with my BT GPS unit, which gets unhappy if you put 12v in it).

Absolute bargain for £1.95 - I got two

Geoff

I read on xda-dev that the 1.40.30.00 version of the radio stack gave improvements to the signal and battery life so I tried it.

So far, (touch wood) since Thursday it's working like a dream: the phone now works exactly how I always hoped it would. I get a signal throughout the house (even in the previously "dead" areas) and the battery life is incredible: I'm running emoze on push email setting and the battery used to be dead by the time I went to bed, the last three days have been around 50-60% remaining at the same times. It hasn't crashed yet, either.

I haven't tried 3G-GSM handover so can't comment on whether that's solved or not. Some of the forum posts suggest not.

I'm not sure if we're supposed to link to radio ROMs given that they're of questionable (ahem) legality, but I'd recommend anyone who's technically capable of doing this to do so - a search on google for the radio version gives a very helpful first result

Geoff

The Sale Of Goods Act?

Geoff

Is there a known hardware fix for this? My Vario II does it too - I just assumed it was a problem with the phone and I'd have to put up with it

Geoff

Given that it seemed not, I bit the bullet and did the hard-reset, having managed to get the two talking via IR enough to pick off the files I needed before the reboot.

Seems to be fixed now, and the new radio module is installed and running. I'll see how it compares in 3g as opposed to the original (which I had real trouble with). Once that's working ok I'll go for WM6 but I didn't want to do two things at once!!

Geoff

Seriously, dude... 11 months later?

Recently I got a new (well new-to-me!) Thinkpad X31 laptop which I took away on holiday with me. While in a happy place but with no sunshine for a couple of days (grrr) I figured I might as well try upgrading the ROM - both the new radio (which is supposed to help with my 3g problems) and the WM6 that's knocking around.

Anyway, I installed ActiveSync 4.5 on my X31 and connected up the USB cable expecting everything to be fine, but I got a constant "connecting" message in AS on the laptop and eventually it just goes back to "disconnected".

Well I thought it might be AS4.5 (I have 4.2 on this machine) so I uninstalled, downloaded 4.2 from MS (it's still on their site, thankfully) and tried again. Still no dice.

So I tried taking AS out of the equation altogether - running WM5torage usually cuts out any of these issues. Sure enough, I connect the cable and the computer comes up with "Found new hardware - USB Mass Storage Device". However I then get "A problem occurred during hardware installation. Your new hardware may not work properly".

After a few hours of tearing out hair I decided it must be an issue with the X31 and I would leave it until I could get home and reinstall XP, so I gave up and went out to sit in the sun, which had finally reappeared.

Anyway, today I tried connecting the phone to my work PC, which has always been fine, and I get the same issue! Both activesync and the USB Mass Storage fail.

Now I'm running emoze, which I could see possibly messing up ActiveSync (in some weird way), but which I can't see affecting WM5torage. It's also been fine up until now.

I'm using two different computers and two different USB cables and one of the machines has been working up to now, so I'm 99.9% certain it's a problem with the phone, not with (eg) firewall settings, cables, PC settings etc.

It's clear that USB is at least half-working because the PC sees the phone and recognises what mode it's in (AS or Mass Storage) correctly.

Short of a hard reset does anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers

Geoff

Working perfectly on my Vario II, thanks very much! The same notification was being used when a new emoze message arrived, even though there's a "new emoze message" notification which also gets called... very irritating!

I switched to GSM-only because I found a separate issue - when using emoze push email on 3g the heartbeat repeatedly disconnects and reconnects - bringing my standby battery life down to around 4 hours.

Since then I've not experienced any crashes. Could be a coincidence, I suppose.

This could be down to my misunderstanding. I'd misread a FAQ on the emoze site (talking about sleep mode) and thought that meant that it won't pick up email when the phone's in standby mode (ie when you tap the power button on the phone) - this is wrong, it works fine when in standby.

Certainly in the three days since I posted this I've had battery life which is around normal or even better than it was on 30-minute IMAP polling.

On the other hand it may be down to a GPRS issue - the day it died so quickly it did seem to be reconnecting every time I looked at it, which (I assume) would cause a significant battery drain.

My vario II produces the same result in that it goes offline, but it doesn't freeze - everything seems normal. The first I know of the problem is either when I try to call out or someone rings me on my landline to let me know my mobile is offline.

Cycling the phone connection in the comm manager does solve this for me.

Geoff

Ditto.

There's a few people on ebay selling a no-name rip-off brand called Holox (rip-off because Holux is a recognised and well-thought-of brand) which are ridiculously cheap and work very very well - you can expect to get one for about £30 delivered and it is the absolute DBs - it works through the UV filter on the windscreen on my wife's Clio, from inside the glove box, indoors in a multi-storey building, just about anywhere, starts up from cold to first-fix in seconds too.

It has a 13 (?) hour Li-ion battery chargeable with a standard USB power cable (they supply a UK plug adaptor with it) and was my favourite bargain buy from last year.

Tease!

Come on, tell us the others. I tried funambol but got bored with trying to set it up before I could see if it worked or not.

After this recommendation I tried it out and you're right, it does work quite well!

Unfortunately it absolutely kills my battery life - previously I had the phone set to pick up email every half-hour through imap but setting push email brings the battery life down from 10 hours (or so) to about 4.

Is this something you just have to live with for MS-style "push" (which isn't really push at all but really an IDLE implementation) or is it a problem with emoze? The reason I ask is that our sysadmin here is due to upgrade Exchange to 2003 this year and if the battery life will still be a problem I shan't bother to hassle him - if I get blackberry service instead I assume the battery usage would decrease dramatically.

The usage for the day was around 700k, so the actual transferred data can't be the problem.

Cheers

Geoff
[edit]See post below - I seem to have overcome this issue.[/edit]

Catchphrase tones...


Seems like there's a bit of a blip at the end there.

I have this one  Catchphrase22k_mono.wav ( 65.13K ) Number of downloads: 1604
which seems a bit better, I've converted to a 22kHz mono WAV, which is good enough for SMS tones.

Hiya

There was a post back in July '05 which suggested wifi support "within the month"... did this ever get any further?

Cheers

Geoff

I've sent a report to t-mobile's technical team, since I'm pretty sure MS wouldn't speak to me directly. They were remarkably helpful, for what it's worth. Will keep you posted.

Geoff

I guess that's a no

OK, so I want to be able to send email through a work server since when I connect to the work LAN all other SMTP traffic is blocked. However to send email from outside the network I need to authenticate and the AUTH must be NTLM.

This never worked on my sp5 but I wasn't that bothered - I only really used it to read email anyway - but now I have my vario I'd like to be able to send too. Unfortunately it still doesn't work so I thought I'd do a bit of investigation... I set up my own sendmail server with NTLM auth, which works fine with Outlook and Thunderbird, then pointed my phone at it. It still fails, so I did a tcpdump and I find that the phone's auth mechanism appears to be broken.

What happens in an ESMTP session with thunderbird is basically

> EHLO hostname
< 250-tosh Hello hostname [MyHostIP], pleased to meet you
[ then the list of supported codes ]
> AUTH NTLM [long string]
< 334 [another long string]
> [even longer string!]
< 235 2.0.0 OK Authenticated
> MAIL FROM geoff@geoff.geoff

You get the picture - from then on it's a standard SMTP session.

Now what happens in the ESMTP session with the phone is:

> EHLO Inbox
< 250-tosh Hello [MyPhonesIP], pleased to meet you
[ then the list of supported codes ]
> AUTH NTLM [long string]
< 334 [another long string]
> MAIL FROM geoff@geoff.geoff
< 501 5.5.4 cannot decode AUTH parameter MAIL FROM:

It's fairly obvious what's wrong here - we're missing the final auth response to the server's challenge (the "[even longer string!]" bit). Is there something I'm missing here, am I being stupid?

Has anyone else managed to get NTLM working on a WM5 device, if so what did you do?

Thanks!

Geoff
[edited for clarity]

So my new Vario II is very nice and shiny but there are a couple of things I can't figure out and which are causing me real trouble.

First, I can't figure out how to tell the phone to use my memory card for ringtones. I tried changing the "HKCU\ControlPanel\SoundCategories\Ring\Directory" key (which I found reference to on xda-dev for the Wizard) but it made no difference. When I right-click on a file and click "set as ring-tone" it simply copies the file into phone memory, which sucks.

Second, I really want an app which adjusts my notification settings depending on time (or even just manual intervention): currently if I want to be notified of new emails during the day I have to manually change all the notification settings when I go to bed if I want the alarm to wake me, which isn't ideal. This is the kind of thing which even a basic series 40 phone can do and it bugs me that I can't do it with this.

[incidentally the fact that the alarm won't work when the phone's powered off really annoys me, especially when my old iPaq with WM2003 could wake itself, but I can live with that if I can do profiles properly]

Any ideas?

*chuckle* you mean the great big thing covering the whole screen? No, it's not still there.

He's had a pretty good look, there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary.

[edited for typo and cropping]

Hi

A mate and I both received our Vario II's on the same day (woohoo!) so we decided to have a play with video calling. He can see me ok but the picture from his face-camera (ie the one at the front facing the user) is pink ( ) and distorted.

If he flicks over to the main camera the image is fine.

Anyone come across this before? Are there some settings somewhere for the secondary camera? Or does he have a unit with a dodgy connection to the secondary camera?

Cheers

Geoff

Hmm. I tried that and it works here, but definitely didn't at work...

I just tried copying the work key to my home router and I can access it fine, so I guess there's another problem with the router at work (either set to G only or they've given me the wrong key!).

Thanks for your help!

Geoff

I can enter an ASCII WEP key into my SP5 with no problems. I also know it's possible to enter a hex key because an IT guy did it for me for another AP, but I can't figure out how to do it.

Can someone tell me how stupid I'm being and put me out of my misery? Thanks!!