Of Bluetooth, iSync and Japanese Phones, Part Three
by kurisu
It’s now been officially a week since I’ve started to toy with Tiger. While I won’t comment on all the bugs in Mail, Spotlight or the Finder, I’ll give my thoughts on the upgraded iSync, and how it changed my life in the land of capsule hotels.
First and foremost, my Vodafone 802SE works out of the box, as can be seen on this screen capture :
which is fine, and hasn’t crashed on me yet. Big step forward.
However, I was a bit less enthused after I tried to do things a bit more fancy.
See, while everything LOOKS integrated, when you poke around, it’s not.
If you have a bluetooth enabled phone, you are already familiar with Address Book’s bluetooth button and contextual functions :
which by all means is a great addition and very well thought… except that it DOES NOT work.
When someone calls, you get a nice popup informing you of the caller ID. That’s the theory… in practice, on my V802SE, I get the following :
…although the caller’s number is clearly in my address book.
Now, I already hear you say “but perhaps your phone provider doesn’t have caller ID”. Except that it does. And it works fine when I use Salling Clicker.
Same annoying problem with the SMS function. If I use the contextual menu item to send an SMS, the message simply doesn’t get sent. No acknowledgement or failure message is given. Nothing.
As rumors start to abund about 10.4.1, I really get the feeling that Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.0 was rushed out, probably to ease the pain of the recent PowerMac G5 revisions.
So, on the one hand I can now have a unified address book on all my devices (which is good), but on the other, none of the niceties bundled with Address Book work.
Uhm, I guess the latest motto is “be happy with what you get and shut up”.
May 6th, 2005 at 08:27 CEST
I have too a problem with my k700i (Sony Ericsson): when I send a SMS, the SMS is send, but I have no informations about that: neither “Message sent” nor “Ok” :0( I hope that Tiger will make this well …
May 6th, 2005 at 08:54 CEST
That behaviour (no acknowledgement of sent SMS) has been around since the begining of iSync and Bluetooth: it did the same on my Siemens S55 (please can someone shoot the dog that ate it?) and it does the same both on my K700i and my wife’s T6xx (can’t remember the exact ref).
May 9th, 2005 at 16:17 CEST
Thank you for saving me the time, money, and disappointment of going out to buy this phone here in Tokyo as I was planning. Indeed, I’m sure the bugs will be corrected eventually, and when they are, I’ll buy the phone.
Please keep us all posted on the site once these bugs (especially the caller-ID problem) are fixed.
Also, if you get the phone unlocked so you can travel outside Japan and use a different carrier (as some online have already), please tell us.
May 11th, 2005 at 05:43 CEST
I don’t get the SMS problem, japanese carrier/phone doesn’t support SMS protocol right? Or do you mean c-mail?
My contract with AU will end in october, I’ll see then cause I like the caller id to be displayed on my comp’ screen.
Thank you for the thorough review though
May 11th, 2005 at 14:12 CEST
@bikoko : Vodafone offers SMS and MMS (from and to all Vodafone users i.e. in Japan and everywhere else, and from/to overseas networks) as well as email (c-mail) in Japan.
May 14th, 2005 at 19:24 CEST
Hardmac,
thanks for this info, I’m going to go to the vodafone store at tokyo station tomorrow and I was debating getting this phone or the nokia 6630 (Vodafone 702K I think…) but I guess it can’t be sync’d with isync yet, so this may push me to getting this one instead, thanks!!