I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't charge off USB because ...

Liam Westley — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:48:07 GMT

I recently bought a new Windows Mobile phone, Benq E72, and one reason it won over a Samsung model is the standard mini-USB connector for data and charging (hint, hint, Nokia).

Why does this matter? Apart from charging off any laptop, and off an 4 x AA battery pack I already have for emergency charging, it can even charge off the weirdest devices. Here it is with a standard USB to mini USB lead charging from my Philips DVD recorder which has a USB port for displaying photos and playing MP3s.

If you need a clearer image of the phone screen try here.

I'm always stunned by phones with a mini USB port but can't charge from it (Nokia's, until recently), even more by phones with a mini USB port that will only charge from their own charger (Alcatel). Not counting the worse offenders, phone manufacturers who connect via USB but have customer connectors (Samsung, it's you I'm looking at) that lock you to the one and only charger you get with the unit.

Windows Mobile – sync issues (again) and how to avoid ‘Align Screen’ on a hard reset

Liam Westley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:49:41 GMT

Fixing synchronisation

Yesterday, I realised that my HTC TyTN II phone had stopped synchronising with Outlook, with the Windows Mobile Device Center (under Vista) reporting the completely useless error code, 0×8503001c. Without synchronisation a Windows Mobile phone becomes fairly unproductive as you scurry around trying to duplicate Outlook items onto the phone, never getting it quite correct.

The only recommended Microsoft solution is to break the device partnership between phone and operating system and synchronise from scratch. This means deleting ALL your data – that is ALL 800+ contacts and all my upcoming diary items. Never mind, if I have to. Except it still would NOT synchronise - so now I had a blank Windows Mobile phone which had no phone numbers in it anymore. Arrrrghhh!

At this point I tried synchronising via a Windows XP machine running ActiveSync 4.5, hopefully avoiding any WMDC issues. No. Still no synchronisation. I even deleted the PIM database file on the device, but no joy. Then I found this post,

http://www.metalvortex.com/blog/2008/01/26/50.html

So, I uninstalled WMDC 6.1, and installed the older WMDC 6.0. It worked.

Avoiding Align Screen

During all this I was contemplating the idea of having to perform a hard reset (which I have had to do previously with a HTC Wizard to solve synchronisation issues). The issue I have with performing a hard reset is that I cracked my LCD screen some time ago, and have been quite happily living with a keyboard only device for nearly six months. When you hard reset one of the startup steps is the Align Screen wizard to calibrate the touch screen. So I thought a hard reset would result in a device which I could no longer use as I wouldn't be able to get through the Align Screen wizard.

While waiting for failed synchronisation attempts I had Googled an amazing fact. If you perform a hard reset, but want to skip the Align Screen step, you can create a new zero byte file called ‘welcome.net’ in the root of a storage card (a 2Gb microSD for me) and ensure that storage card is inserted during the startup steps.

One of the other oddities of my phone is that at some point in the past month it had decided that ringing for an incoming phone call was a frippery which I no longer required. Whatever settings I used it would only vibrate. It took some time to notice and explained why I had been missing quite a few phone calls.

So with the knowledge that I could get synchronisation working and armed with a microSD card containing a zero byte file called ‘welcome.not’ in the root folder, I performed a hard reset, still with some trepidation. Wooooo – I now have a ringing phone again. It synchronises properly and it appears to have recovered quite a bit of storage space by being hard reset (internet cache I reckon).

Conclusion

Windows Mobile is still a strange world for a standard consumer, with random synchronisation problems with zero help from Microsoft on how to solve them, and some of the most arcane, random configuration options (a storage card with a zero byte file!!!).

Still love my HTC TyTN II though.