Hugo’s blog

My iPod has been signaling me that the iPhone is coming up soon by slowly dying. Considering the price of the iPhone, I thought I’d look at alternatives, and I ended up transforming my iPod into the iPhone of the poor: not as cool, not as powerful, but much cheaper – a 6th of the price. I documented my experience (setup and results); I wanted in particular podcast synchronization to work seemlessly, just like it did with the iPod.

Since the beginning I started using my Treo, I noticed a Logging In message after each HotSync. I looked around on the Web but could not find anybody else with the same problem. And judging by the noise in speakers I heard a couple of times, this Logging In was indicating access via GPRS.

I finally figured the problem out. My Orange Treo came with a Talk Now application, which AFAICT is some kind of IM application, and also AFAICT, doesn’t work, as I saw a message saying that it had been deactivated or something like that.

So, removing this useless application made my message go away. I’m not sure what it was trying to do, but I’d sure be interested to know.

Regardless, I am wondering how much in GPRS charges (especially when I was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago) that will have cost. Now that’s a pretty nifty way for an operator to make a few extra bucks.

It looks like the version of pilot-link on etch doesn’t like the Treo 650.

I have found two solutions:

• install the latest beta of pilot-link: I used 0.12.0pre4, and I rebuilt J-Pilot, and it works for me
• use Bluetooth: I’ll have to give this one a try

This reminds me of why I switched to a Mac for my laptop: I managed to sync with USB and Bluetooth without any problem (though the Bluetooth syncing was slow).

Update (2006-02-02): it looks like it works out of the box with jpilot 0.99.8-0.99.9-pre2-1.