I’ve had my Qtek 8310 Smartphone for a couple of months now and I thought I’d setup Windows Media Player (WMP10) synchronization to make my life a little easier.
It seemed easy enough to set it up, I just checked to sync Media in ActiveSync 4.1 and followed the on-screen instructions to complete the setup from the WMP Sync tab. However, on the sync tab I got a message saying “No Device has been Detected”. After some Googling I finally found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article that solved the problem. Basically you go in to Add/Remove programs, select ActiveSync and then do a repair and restart Windows.
While I was at it I decided to find out how to change the Device Name (ie my phones name) in Active Sync. I found this discussion thread that describes some tools to do it or that you go in to your phones registry and change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Ident\Name entry. Since there is no Registry Editor included in WM5 I downloaded Mobile Registry Editor 1.1 which is one of the tools suggested in the thread. It worked like a charm. One thing I really liked about this tool is that there was no installation necessary, I don’t like installing stuff as it has a tendency to mess up my computer… In this case I just unzipped the three files to my Desktop and ran the exe from there.
Ok so that worked out well, but this should be way easier don’t you think? According to some of the info I came across while searching for this answer, you could do it from the UI in Pocket PC 2003.
I’m actually quite happy with my phone, only a few minor disappointments…
Before I bought it I didn’t realize that there are different editions of Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) – the Pocket PC and the Smartphone edition. The Smartphone edition is for devices with keyboard only (no pointing device/stylus) and smaller screen. There are some differences that do make sense and then there are those that don’t.
Into the latter category falls one thing that is very limiting to me: You cannot work with Tasks well in a Smartphone. First of all you can’t show them on your Home Screen (I tried some 3rd party tools but these did not work well). Second, if you create a Task on your phone you cannot set Due Date and Reminder. Third, Reminders don’t even show up on your phone (not sure if they do this in the Pocket PC edition either).
To end on a positive note, if you’re running Exchange with SP2 you can at least sync Tasks over the air (I cradle my phone once a week at the most).