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iSunk.

My upgrade to Tiger went pretty smoothly, save one thing: iSync. I am trying to sync my Cingular Treo 650 to my new 15" Powerbook, bought to replace a 17" (which will soon be for sale, if you're interested.) For background:

The Treo synced fine via Bluetooth on the 17", but it was an upgrade from a Tungsten T, and I just basically plugged the Treo in instead of the Tungsten, and everything just worked. Just like it had before.

The 15" shipped with Panther on it, so I used the migration tool, which worked fine. I was able to sync the Treo without any problems.

After a couple of post-upgrade days of playing with various aspects of the system and getting app updates in place (had to rebuild Carbon Emacs), I decided that maybe I better sync the damn phone. When I plugged in the cable and hit the HotSync button, iSync started up and presented me with the "Merge? Overwrite? Decide!" first sync dialog. Well, dear reader, I did something stoopit. I panicked, thought "later for this," and cancelled the dialog.

Fatal mistake.

It's been like a week now (or at least it feels that way,) and I cannot get the Mac to

  • see any Bluetooth services on the Treo-I just get a message saying "No supported services were found on your mobile phone"
  • nor can I get iSync to install its shiny new conduit. It just crashes/quits when installing the conduit.

I have tried any number of things, read far more support forums than I find tasteful, uninstalled Palm Desktop, reinstalled Palm Desktop, bought and installed Missing Sync. I've trashed Bluetooth prefs, iSync prefs, device caches, you name it. Incidentally, how do you reinstall iSync?

Still, every time I run iSync and select "Enable PalmOS syncing", just when the line at the bottom of the Helpful Dialog says "Installing the Palm OS conduit..." iSync says "Nuh-uh" and just quits.

I am not normally the "pleeeez help me" type; I usually get a great deal of pleasure out of hunting this kind of twiddly shit down. But, man, I am stuck. This afternoon I found myself contemplating pairing the Tungsten with the laptop and then just using the Treo instead, given that they both have the same HotSync user id. If anyone has any helpful ideas, I am all ears.

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Comments

I have no wisdom for you.

I have only sympathy, because today was my very first encounter with bluetooth: I found out that the "bluetooth" phone I bought, the Motorola V710, is deliberately crippled with regards to file transfer and syncing, and is only usable as a wireless modem. Apparently allowing the former (which the hardware is perfectly capable of) would have interfered with Verizon's own business model involving making people pay to get pictures off their phones. The latter was crippled as collateral damage with regards to the former.

If I want I can jump on a class action lawsuit about this, but unlike the rest of the lawsuit people I found out about it while the phone was still in the "return with no questions asked and exchange" period so I'm suspecting I'll just go with that and forego doing my part to make some lawyers rich.

Just bitter ranting. Figuring this out, and figuring out that there was no hackish way *around* it, took up a good part of my afternoon today.

Good luck.

I've seen differing opinions wrt Cingular's crippled Bluetooth as well. DUN has definitely been disabled, but some say they can't get syncing to work on the phone, others say they can. I would be given to think that syncing somehow works, since I was able to sync it under Panther with the old Powerbook. At the moment, though, my head is starting to hurt, and I just had the privilege of watching my son watch A New Hope for the first time. iSync can wait till tom'w.