O2 XDA Mini S - using without a SIM card?

[Mannish Boy]

Hi everyone.

OK. So, I've got an XDA Mini S and I've just got to the end of my O2 contract, so they've sent me a free phone (which is nice). It's a Walkman phone, which I'd like to use.

Therefore, I'll have to remove the SIM from my Mini S and put it in the new phone (I'm continuing with the same contract, so there's no new SIM). This actually suits me, because although I think the Mini S is a great PDA, I don't think much of it as a phone. Plus, my use of it is pretty heavy, so if I ALSO use it as a music player, the battery's dead in no time at all.

So what I'd like to do is be able to use the Mini S to still do text messages and email, but send and recieve them by connecting to GPRS via Bluetooth through the new mobile (with the SIM in it). Expect I can't figure out how to set up the Mini S to do this. Can anyone help?

Sorry if this is all a bit garbled :)
Thanks in advance.

[brins0]

I'd think doing the email would be easy... but as most sony phones are a little trashy (in my opinion) I doubt they will do the text message passthrough thingy some of the good phones have, mainly nokias.

To get the email working, you'll need to setup the GPRS connection on your sony one, then turn it's bluetooth on (make sure it's discoverable). Then search for the services supported on it, using the wizard. You're looking for "dial-up networking". Select this, and then try and dial the connection from the bluetooth config panel thingy. If I remember correctly (not done this since back in the WM2003 days), you need to dial *10# or summit from the wizard, then it will connect to the sony phone via bluetooth, and start the GPRS connection. Once it has dialed, just use the wizard as you would have done before.

I'm sorry if ti's a little vague, as I mentioned i've not had to do this for a couple of years. I'm someone will say if i've missed something out...

Hope it helps you :)

[hanmin]

Well, an idea. Why don't you get the SIM into the miniS and use the Sony as walkman without the SIM? Else, sell the Sony and get yourself multiple (and larger capacity) battery for your miniS?

[Mannish Boy]

Well, an idea. Why don't you get the SIM into the miniS and use the Sony as walkman without the SIM? Else, sell the Sony and get yourself multiple (and larger capacity) battery for your miniS?

Well, I initially thought I'd have no use for the new phone, but I like the idea of the music player being the same system as that for answering calls - if I'm listening to music on the new phone, I'm not going to miss a call (and this is something I'm likely to do as it's my work mobile). I have a bigger battery for the Mini S, but it makes the phone into a bit of a lump and still only gets me a day and a half of normal use (which doesn't include listening to music). And swapping the battery means restarting the Pocket PC, which is a bind.

Thanks for your reply, Brins0 - I'll give it a try. I think you might be onto something with the code for the phone to dial into GPRS. I think it might also want a "standard" O2 username/passowrd, though I'm not sure what these are. If anyone else has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

[hanmin]

Well, I initially thought I'd have no use for the new phone, but I like the idea of the music player being the same system as that for answering calls - if I'm listening to music on the new phone, I'm not going to miss a call (and this is something I'm likely to do as it's my work mobile). I have a bigger battery for the Mini S, but it makes the phone into a bit of a lump and still only gets me a day and a half of normal use (which doesn't include listening to music). And swapping the battery means restarting the Pocket PC, which is a bind.

Yeah, I know it is good to have a music player with a phone function. However, for my case, its the vibration that alerted me on in coming calls most of the time. It is SMS vibration that I've missed.

Anyway, I'm impressed that you can get a miniS dead in a day and a half without music. You do talk a lot on the phone, huh? I talk on average 30 mins on the phone and it lasted me 3-4 days on a full charge, on a normal battery. Well, anyway, consider the size of the screen and power of the phone, you can't compete with a Sony phone, say W610, which has a rated talk time of 7 hours (gsmarena) and Wizard's 4 hours. Sony *is* pretty good in what they do.

ANYWAY, good news for you is that, I did manage to tried to sync my SE T630 (old one) with my PC before using IR connection using software found on (myt630.net) and I can send SMS (via the phone) using my PC. However, getting the SMS is another story, I think I'll have to do a check-mail thing (eg, pull) on the phone to get new SMSs, it doesn't seems to do a push (that's 3-4 years ago, my memory is failing me). So, I'm pretty sure that Sony's phone is able to get you to send SMSs without problems AND I've seen software for Palm that enables you to send SMS using phone connected via IR and BTooth and I'm sure you get that for PocketPC. So, for SMS you'll probably need to use other software that is meant for real pocket pc (eg without phone function) to send your SMS.

Anyway, let us know of your progress. Like, how good is the Sony phone in terms of battery life with and without the music :D

UPDATE: This is an example
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/12/13/sms_pocketpc.html
though I was looking for something that cost $0.

[Mannish Boy]

Your right about my heavy use of the Mini S. I don't actually make that many calls, but I do use the PDA functions a hell of a lot. I also rely heavily on email for work, so being able to leave the Mini S connect to ActiveSync via Bluetooth has given me a lot of freedom to move around the house - at the expense of flattening the battery pretty quickly. One thing I've noticed already is that the battery does a lot better when it's not connected to a phone network. I wouldn't have expected that to take much power, but there you go.

Anyway, I've figured out how to use the email function through the phone. I set up a new dail-up connection which connects to O2's mobileweb GPRS. The reason I struggled to begin with is that I was entering the APN (on the Mini S) as "mobile.o2.co.uk", which I think would work IF I was connecting directly from the Mini S. BUT, what I needed to do was enter the APN as *99# (found that on the web somewhere) which prompts the PHONE to connect to O2's mobileweb, and therefore allow the Mini S a GPRS data line. Hope that makes sense! Phew!

As for SMS, you're right: I need a third party program to allow that. I was hoping the Text Messages part of the Mini S's Messaging application could be reconfigured, but it doeesn't look likely. Can anyone recommend a good, third party SMS program for Windows Mobile 5?

Thanks everyone!