Part of the fun of having a blog read by 10 9 people is that you have quite a lot of headroom to write about whatever strikes your fantasy at any given time.

A few months back, I posted a rather lengthy blurb about how lame the Japanese cell phones are when it comes to interact with a computer, from simple things like having a common address book, to buying expensive cables that become useless when you get a new phone from the same manufacturer.

Well, not so many things have changed on that front (unsurprisingly), but one element of the equation improved the odds of me not whining again (uhmm well, ok, I’ll try) : I’m (of course?) talking about Tiger, and iSync 2.0.

So, when I left you guys at the end of Part One, I was still pondering whether to buy a Sony Ericsson V802-SE or wait some more for a miracle to happen.

While I didn’t get any richer, nor did I find the perfect woman, the information leaks about the various components of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger got me excited again, and made me buy that damn SE phone. And actually, things *will* be fine and dandy starting April 29th 2005, at around 18:45 JST, after Tiger is installed on my Tibook.

See, the iSync compatibility page got updated for Tiger, and to my surprise, lo and behold, the V802-SE is right there on the list. How cool is that ? well, not **that** cool, but close enough to get me excited for a few days. (oh God, how pathetic have I become?).

Last Saturday, off I went, to the Vodafone shop of Tokyo Station. Two hours later I was home with my brand new phone (copper color model).
Of course, it still doesn’t work with iSync 1.5, but it does with Salling Clicker (good buy, btw) on Panther, and that’s friggin’ kewl.

I won’t say anything about Tiger right now, the Powers-That-Be won’t allow any conspicuous talk about unreleased stuff, but expect a “Part Three” followup of this post soon.

The other point I’d like to touch base with is Bluetooth in general, be it on Mac OS X or the phone itself. It’s no secret that it’s a power sucking feature, and that it still has a few glitches (I have not tried any rev 2 products, though).
But the integration is very, very pleasing : it doesn’t get in your way, you can have a headset paired with both the Mac and your telephone while next to each other, and receive or initiate calls from either device (via Skype or otherwise) seamlessly.

So, it seems that albeit slowly, Apple has caught up (yet not entirely, still) with the phone extravaganza and I am still surprised that they went the extra mile to specifically support the Japanese version of the V800 by Sony Ericsson. This can hopefully only get better in time, and I’d expect to see more phone conduits from Apple soon.

P.S.: No, ladies, calm down, I won’t disclose my new phone number…. Well ok I can make an exception, but I’ll need some pictures and an acceptance to a dinner invitation before I do :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 03:49 CEST and is filed under Apple talk, Rants & Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.