Cool phone, pity about the Mac support
Over the weekend I bought a three-month-old Sony Ericsson P800 mobile phone on eBay UK and it just arrived today! These phones can be had for a bargain right now, due to the recent introduction of this phone's successor, the P900.
The phone is, on the surface, awesome. It has a large 320x240 screen (Edit: it is actually a 320x208 screen) and, unlike most PDA phones, is shaped pretty much like an ordinary mobile phone. The screen is touch-sensitive screen with handwriting recognition (there is a stylus embedded in the side of the phone) and the Symbian OS it uses has a decent selection of third-party software. The major drawbacks are a proprietary memory card (Sony Memory Stick Duo - which is limited to 128MB at the moment) and the lack of Nokia's T9 predictive text input system.
However there is another major drawback to this phone - lack of OS X support! Firstly the included USB SyncStation stupidly does not work with OS X. You'd think you could just plug it in and browse the contents of the phone (as you can with other USB storage devices such as an Archos). Secondly the compatibility (via bluetooth) with iSync is atrocious. It is possible to sync the phone with OS X's Address Book and iCal, but only barely. To reliably sync even once you have to follow the steps in this Apple KnowledgeBase article - including a restart of your Mac system! After the one successful sync you will be unable to sync until you again go through the whole rigamarole.
I will keep on experimenting with the phone and report back here - I've added a P800 category to keep track of my exploring.
Related entries
London A-Z on your P800 - 1 August 2005Son of P900 - 20 July 2004
P910i Mac-centric review - 30 November 2004
RSS on UIQ - 15 December 2004
Free Tube Map for UIQ phones - 16 July 2005
Sony Ericsson P990 announced - 12 October 2005
Finally - P800 updated firmware - 22 January 2005
New SE P910i P950i leaked - 26 August 2005
1.5GB mobile phone - 8 September 2004
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Comments
i have just bought a mac with Tiger and sync 2i have been trying to sync with my p800.
the a calender and to-do were not a prob but the contacts NO HOPE. Getting a message on my phone "Program closed- Program main Reason Code USER Reason Number 11"
any ideas how to solve this?
Thanks
by: reda at June 23, 2005 3:45 PM
That is odd. I recently upgraded to Tiger and iSync works perfectly with my P800. In fact it is much much more reliable than it was under Panther.
When I first ran iSync (on Tiger) it uploaded a little program to my P800 which seems to help with the syncing. Did this happen to you?
I suggest you try and create a new user account and see if you can sync reliably from that account. If it works in that account, but not on your main account, the only solution that I am aware of is to re-install Tiger (this is what happened to me after an upgrade install of Tiger, reinstalling fixed everything).
by: thoughton at June 23, 2005 5:11 PM
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