Thank you Verizon Treo TSRs!

Uncharacteristically, I'd like to thank the Treo 650 experts at the
Houston Verizon Call Center for their expert help and assistance offered
to me to get my buddy's Treo 650 Palm toyphone FINALLY synchronizing with
everything, simultaneously, today. The phone syncs and works just great
with some features Hotsync'd down the cable and email wirelessly sync'd
over the network. Great information, very professionally given......

Here's today's story.......

My buddy, Joe, has hounded me to get his Treo 650 Verizon Wireless box to
work properly ever since he found out I knew how to get his office
network functional. I'd looked at it, before, but Joe was always in a
rush to make that next real estate deal, so didn't provide enough
downtime for me to do the research, properly, to accomplish the task.
Today, he did......

The initial symptom was when you did a Hotsync from his office computer
with the phone via the cable with the pushbutton-on-the-plug that
initiates the hotsync. Every time you tried to sync it, the log reported
the Contacts List, Calendar and Tasks did not sync because of error 4004,
a file-not-found error where these databases reside. HotSyncing was
useless.

Having failed to find his CD-ROM he was supposed to get with the phone,
with him swearing he never had one, I wondered, aloud, where the software
on his office computer came from. It was the Handspring software he used
with his old Palm Pilot, loaded to the gills with unpurged databases with
8 years of contacts, tasks and calendar data.....(sigh). He never got,
or never found, the Verizon disks...which include HIDDEN away in them
INtellisync so you can sync to Outlook and Palm Desktop simultaneously,
something Palm's software wouldn't do. (Step 10 on Verizon's Wizard asks
you if you want to sync from a single source, either or, when they
install Palm's sync or partially from Outlook and partially from Palm
Desktop, which requires they install Intellisync software.)

Well, I need the CD to reinstall, so I dragged him over to the main
Verizon store for some TS, a CD and a replacement AC power brick because
he left his Treo AC power supply in Aspen, Colorado, a few weeks ago when
he was on a ski vacation, where he got VERY sick with some flu or other.
The main store had no AC power supplies or CD, but they let me borrow one
to reinstall it. I ripped a couple of copies, of course, for backup.
The power supply is ordered...(sigh) If you're in Aspen, check the flea
market for Joe's.

Once in the store, STANDING at the tech support counter (still no chairs
or a nice couch), we coaxed one of the techies out of his burrow, where
they hide in the back, and I explained our sync problem, including
complete, annotated logs all neatly printed out by a massive printer that
colates and staples. His face blanched at the mere mention of "Treo
650" or "PDA phone" and he hurriedly excused himself to retrieve the 866
number of the Treo experts I later found are located in Houston, but from
his accent I'm sure he's from Bangledesh or India. The fellow in Houston
was very helpful and quite patient, a trait one can only hope spreads,
like Bubonic Plague through Europe in the Middle Ages, to the rest of the
Verizon tech support team! Dis Dude KNOWS Treo/Palm OS and setup! He
also seemed relieved to talk to someone who wasn't a
lawyer/housewife/teenaged girl, but could at least "speak computer"....
(c; Joe just stared at me as I explained what I'd done and what I'd
found as he listened to my side of the "tech talk".

Well, it seems Treo 650 is incapable of syncing any one of the
application databases from BOTH wireless sync and HotSync, together. You
must CHOOSE which method each of them is to be sync'd from and configure
the phone, the wirelesssync.vzw.com account and the Palm Desktop software
all together before it will work! (Ask yourself WHY can't it do that.
My inner self didn't answer, either.)

So, not documented on VZW's Treo webpages...not in the manual...or
anywhere I could find, my Houston expert fed me the steps over the phone
on how to do what we wanted to do....email over wireless...everything
else over the cable back in the office. I asked, stupidly of course, if
he could EMAIL me these nicely-typed instructions or point me to a proper
webpage, but, no, that's not possible, doesn't exist. So, I stood at the
store on Verizon's desk phone and wrote all this down on the back of my
log printout, as best I could, so I could remember what he told me at the
computer, later in the afternoon.

Question - Why can't there be a webpage on how to configure this at
Verizon...or an email text message that can be automatically sent??
Well, Duhhh...

I've done it so here's how, if you haven't copied it down from the phone,
yourself....

Phone config...
Open WIRELESS SYNC
Click the upper left WIRELESS SYNC sign to get the config menu to popup.
Choose the top selection.
UNcheck everything you want the computer to sync over the cable. Default
is everything checked for over-the-network syncing. In our case, only
the emails, software upgrade and the network upgrades come in wirelessly.
I even unchecked complete system restore on the bottom of the list as
there isn't that much time in a year on this slow datalink.
Set the phone aside, we're not ready, yet.

Webpage config...
Logon to http://wirelesssync.vzw.com/ and logon to your webpage-based
email there. Click the SETUP button, upper right tabs on the screen, to
open a menu and click OPTIONS (oh, oh, old memory failure, I'm pulling
this from there). Tell the webpage you only want to wirelessly sync
email (or whatever you want) so it doesn't try to update the phone
databases you want to sync with the cable. I guess the webserver is too
stupid to connect to the phone and ask the PHONE, not you, what you want
to wirelessly sync, data the phone has in it....(sigh). Ok, now the
server knows what you want. OK your way out of the menu stack and log
off properly to save it.

Software config....(sigh)
Well, you don't really configure the software. You hack into the file
structure and make Palm Desktop NOT find the backup file structure by
renaming BACKUP folder to OLD BACKUP folder. This forces the software to
recreate BACKUP folder.....and not read the old config it got from the
phone that's all wrong...
Open Windows Explorer
Browse to C:\Program Files\Palm and open it.
Rename the BACKUP folder to OLD BACKUP folder...effectively making it
invisible to Palm Desktop, without erasing it.
Get out of Windows Explorer and REBOOT Palm Desktop to let it find the
missing folder to recreate it. This prevents the Palm Desktop from
reading its cached structure and instructions stored in there, somewhere.

Now that Palm Desktop is rebooted, plug in the cable and press the
Hotsync button. Voila!...it works!.....FINALLY!

It's so easy any C++ programmmer, EMC Field Service Engineer, IBM Systems
Analyst or Linux hacker can configure it!

But, I doubt poor Joe, anyone at the courthouse, or a real estate office,
or the non-technical man-on-the-street would ever get it working, don't
you? What a configuration nightmare for a little toy Palm Pilot!....

NOONE AT VERIZON WIRELESS' MAIN STORE HAD ANY IDEA OF ANY OF
THIS!...nada.

"Remember, I'm pullin' for ya. We're all in this together." - Red Green,
Possum Lodge, CBC.

.

Loading