To return the phone or not to return the phone?!

[Guest stevekdavis]

Hi everyone,

I have 7 days left of my 14 day cooling off period with the SPV C500 and Orange and have found lots of little niggles so far.

Is there an update on the horizon or a workaround for any of these or am I better of sending it back and revisting in 6 months. I really really want to like this phone.

The main reason I wanted the phone was for mobile email. I cannot get a reliable method working.

My mail server is running Exchange 2003 with webmail over https, imap and pop 3 available. IMAP seems useless as it keeps hanging. POP3 is inconsistent with downloading the wrong headers and taking ages to connect and disconnect. And I cannot see any way of using outlook/exchange directly over GPRS.

I have confirmed these are not server issues by using outlook express and imap and pop3 with no issues at all.

Other niggles:

The phone has randomly rebooted about 3 times in the last week.

Voice tags have disappeared and need to be recreated.

Speed Dials stopped working until phone was rebooted.

Thoughts?

Steve

[Guest Jakob]

Im running my mail on a Exchange 2003 server and I Activesyncing the mail every 15 minutes and it works flawless:) And my server picks up from different pop3 servers.

The only thing is that i cannot sign digitally from the phone and i cannot request notification upon reception of mail.

My word.. KEEP the phone - it is fantastic - and I dont think youll find anything like it.

Jakob

Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest stevekdavis]

Are you connecting to exchange over GRPS though? If so can you give me an idiots guide for setting it up (I'm currently searching the forums) or point me to one?

thanks

Steve

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

I use Server Activesync to sync with exchange and it too is flawless :)

P

[Guest Jakob]

Yup.. I use GPRS to sync..

I will make an Exchange and Active guide for dummies:) give me a couple of days. (or maybe a week ..)

Jakob

Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest stevekdavis]

Hi,

Thanks for the responses so far, they've got me curious about activesync again.

I've been looking closely at the activesync/exchange setup and have been making a *little* progress. I'll point out that I'm testing this on a PocketPC2002 device as well as the C500 and the error is the same.

On the server: Win2003 SBS Std edition with Exchange 2003.

I have webmail, pop, imap all enabled. I have ticked all the boxes for mobile access in the exchange system manager, global settings, mobile.

My user account has all the exchange protocols enabled. This account is a domain admin. The local domain name is in the format domain.local with a netbios name of DOMAIN

I have disabled forms based authentication under the HTTP protocol in the exchange server manager.

I have confirmed that webmail is working by visiting (name changed!) https://myserver.co.uk/exchange and it now pops up a windows login box. Username and password get me in.

Setup server activesync on phone and the pocketpc and supplied server, username, password and domain. First problem was the non trusted SSL cert. Downloaded the microsoft patch and applied it to both the C500 and the ipaq.

Reset both devices - tried again. Now get "Synchronisation failed due to an error on your device. Error Code: HTTP_403" on the Pocket PC and a much longer message with the same errorcode on the C500 although it takes a good 10 seconds longer.

"Your account does not have permission to sync with your current account settings. Contact your exchange administrator. An error occured and scheduled synchronisation had to be disabled...blah blah

Error Code: HTTP_403"

The Pocket PC is using passthru internet connection on my desktop PC and the C500 is using GPRS.

I've checked and double checked username/passwords etc. I've tried the NETBIOS domain name and the DNS domain name domain.local and this seems to make no difference. If I miss the domain name out then it complains about missing credentials.

If I put the wrong password in on purpose it complains with the same error.

There's tons of post in the forum but nothing related to this.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Steve

[Guest Chaser81]

Niggles? Welcome to the world of Smartphone. Some things you have to live with (a bit like Windows on a desktop really!)

Edit: Sorry if that seemed unhelpful and irrelevant, it probably was! Hope you get your problem sorted!

[Guest Viama]

The big gotcha, and one cause of the 403's is that your primary email address on the exchange box must be the same as the username you are logging on as.

My primary email address was [email protected], whilst my AD login name was jdhewitt. Once I changed my primary address to [email protected], everything started working. It took looking through the IIS logs to figure that one out!

Keep the C500, it's the best phone I've had.

[Guest Doombrain]

"]I use Server Activesync to sync with exchange and it too is flawless :)

P

OT: ever had your alarm have a funny on your audi??

[Guest stevekdavis]

my default email address is now the same as my logon id and that makes no difference (luckily as it would be an invalid address [email protected])

I was then searching around and found this article which looked interesting: http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmac/archive/2004.../10/129376.aspx - It looked like this new virtual folder is already there but called exchange-oma. Any way, followed it, no change. Have now backed it out. One point to note is that the article refers to changing the registry and using /ExchDAV and yet another related article says not to use the leading / - does anyone know which is true? With or without seems to make no difference.

In case it's of any use, these are the last 2 lines from my IIS log file for the last 2 attempts to connect from my PPC (not even trying on C500 at the moment)

2004-10-07 13:32:21 10.100.0.185 POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync User=stevedavis&DeviceId=A7000D6080DD77A138000050BF1977E0&DeviceType=PocketPC&Cmd=GetHierarchy 443 - 62.232.15.210 Microsoft-AirSync/1.0 403 6 0 1744 324

2004-10-07 13:33:20 10.100.0.185 POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync User=stevedavis&DeviceId=A7000D6080DD77A138000050BF1977E0&DeviceType=PocketPC&Cmd=GetHierarchy 443 - 62.232.15.210 Microsoft-AirSync/1.0 403 6 0 1744 324

Not sure if it's relevant but SBS generates it's own self signed web cert. PPC doesn't give me the option of select SSL but on the C500 if I clear "this server uses SSL" then I get a HTTP_404 error stating that it is not an exchange server.

Steve

[Guest stevekdavis]

Here are some further updates.

I have moved from an http_403 to an http_500 error. I set the IP access permissions for the Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync virtual server to grant access to all.

I also now actually get an event logged in the application log:

Source: Server ActiveSync, ID: 3005

Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [bigbird.davisnet.local] User: [[email protected]] HTTP status code: [501]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly.

This is one of the smtp address for my account and I have tried making it the default address for my account all with the same http_500 error.

I've added the registry key SMTPProxy for the domain davisnet.me.uk in case that made any difference

[Guest ChadH]

I don't know if this will help, but try making sure that your Mailbox Alias is the same as your primary email address. I had this issue when setting up a SPV E100 and E200, I have been using this (the SBS2003 setup) for a while now, and it is awesome.

However, today I upgraded to a C500, and I am having problems - it still works fine with the E100 and E200. Basically, whenever it tries to synchronise, it gets as far as 'Looking for changes', and then prompts me for my password. I re-enter it, and it just continues in a loop until I cancel.

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers,

Chad

[Guest ChadH]

OK, I fixed my problem. If you configure server active sync from the phone, it pays no attention whatsoever to the password you type in (apparently). Configuring it using a PC (whilst connected to PC Activesync) seems to sort it out OK.

Don't send the phone back though. Apart from a couple of minor bugs, it is an awesome phone - these may well be fixed in a software update at some point.

Chad

[Guest ChadH]

OK, slightly more info on my problem above after reading the bug list for the C500. It would appear that when typing in a password, the 0 key doesn't actually put a 0 as it did in previous models - probably a + instead. :roll:

[Guest Confucious]

stevekdavis - what have you decided? Are you keeping it or not?

[Guest stevekdavis]

It went back last week :-( - a real shame but email was the killer app for me and without a 100% reliable method of accessing it it was next to useless for me.

I'll keep monitoring the situation and if a) There's a firmware update that fixes the IMAP locking or POP header mixups or ^_^ I can get activesync over http working with my ipaq (smartphone will be the same) then I'll revisit the phone.

Thanks for everyone's input though.

Steve