A new toy, a suborbital orbital teddy bear, and a EUREKA! moment...

Well, change day for my mobile phone is now here :)

Having a spare day to do whatever I wanted, I went out and told orange to shove it, and went over to Vodafone instead, purely on reasons of coverage, data, and cost. That and the nice shiny new HTC Touch Pro 2 that was on offer too :)

Then, of course, I got stuck in a God-awful snarl-up on the roads. Someone must have had one hell of a fender-bender or something, took me ages to drive home. Anyhow, I eventually got home, and unboxed all the goodies, loading the new version of ActiveSync into the CD drive, and installed it onto my PC. And that's when things started to go pear shaped, writ large :(

Before I got this new toy, I was using ActiveSync 4.2 with my HP iPAQ hw6915 with no trouble at all: That worked like a dream.

I spent about two hours tonight, getting more and more hacked off - and that's putting it exceedingly mildly... those who know me will readily translate that as turning the air blue, sending my dummy (American: Pacifier) through the nearest Oak tree, and my teddy bear into low earth orbit, and then some ;)

The problem surrounded getting the PC, running Windows XP (SP3, yes, it's fully up to date with all patches and so on), to recognise and play with my new toy. Now, while it happily did this for my iPAQ, it steadfastly refused to do it for the Touch Pro 2. I thought that this was something to do with the new version of ActiveSync, but no, it wasn't. Wish I'd known about this BEFORE I'd started... ho hum...

Before finding the solution, I'd tried messing around in the hardware manager, reloading the drivers, unloading and reloading ActiveSync 4.5, the whole nine blasted yards, and at the two hour point, I was pretty much ready to launch the bloody planet into the sun, let alone all the high-tech stuff on my desk!

But then, in a moment of weakness, I actually looked at the ActiveSync help files... and had a EUREKA! moment!

I'd FINALLY found the solution. Buried beneath the HTC TouchFLO^tm interface on the TP2 screens is the actual windows mobile 6.1 operating interface. It's a right sneaky wotsit to find (well, I thought it was, anyhow), but find it I did. Combined with the information from the help files, it did the job :)

Here's the process:

Start -> settings (cog icon) -> ALL SETTINGS (bottom left of screen) -> Connections (tab, bottom right) -> USB to PC

You will now see a radio button "ActiveSync (Sync with outlook) - leave that clicked.

There's a check box immediately beneath - "Enable faster data synchronisation" - UNCHECK THIS.

You will find the Touch Pro 2 will now communicate with XP :)

Ye gods, it was a right bugger to figure out - couldn't find anything online, only stumbled on this by chance!

Hope this helps new TP2 owners like me, anyhow :)

Next up... phone Vodafone customer services tomorrow morning and find out why my unlimited internet hasn't been activated yet...