We have a TR1MP that was my Christmas present to my better half. Both of us have iPAQs with inbuilt Bluetooth and I was looking forward to Activesyncing them via Bluetooth.
After much experimenting and swearing, I came to the conclusion that it just wouldn’t work. According to documentation on Sony support sites, the virtual serial port installed by their Bluetooth software is only guaranteed to sync with Sony PDA hardware.
This is nothing new for sony. My clie only accepts their CF WiFi card. While others charge $29-75 for the CF WiFi card, we are forced to buy Sony’s at $150.
It’s the sony way.
BTW, you can RMA it till your blue in the face, if it’s not meant to work with your PPC they won’t refund your money.
Actually the Motion Eye camera disappeared within a week of use as well, so it’s not just the BT that’s playing up.
As for the RMA, in the UK if it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then it’s not “fit for purpose” under our consumer legislation. Therefore, back it goes!
I for one will be sad to see it go, it’s a machine with a lot going for it.
[quote author=“AnthonyOD”]Actually the Motion Eye camera disappeared within a week of use as well, so it’s not just the BT that’s playing up.
As for the RMA, in the UK if it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then it’s not “fit for purpose” under our consumer legislation. Therefore, back it goes!
I for one will be sad to see it go, it’s a machine with a lot going for it.
The motion Eye camera issues has been discussed on the forum…a search should provide you with a fix.
As for the RMA, the tin {you mean the box it came in?} said you can use the BT to sync with PPC devices?
Oddly enough, their Bluetooth implementation in other areas is very good with HID support and mobile phone support. Their interface is also one of the nicer ones I’ve seen from many Bluetooth products who simply use OEM drivers which are not user-friendly.
I definitely agree. Of course it’s not really even Sony’s fault. If you look at the Bluetooth specifications, it’s so open ended. If the specs was more tightly enforced then Bluetooth would really work a lot better. A lot of other vendor’s products don’t always work well with others. Many vendors don’t implement all of the different various profiles at all because they’re not required to.
The Bluetooth logo does not automatically assume full compatibility. That’s definitely a shame as there should be some sort of extra official logos to show exactly what a product supports.
There should be a standard logo for serial support, HID support, DUN support, etc. So, manufacturers don’t necessarily need to support all the stacks/profiles/services but they should have to provide the standard logos for what their product provides. And this should be enforced by the Bluetooth SIG to allow customers to better understand what they are buying. A vendor can only get the official logos if their product is interoperable with other products and not some proprietary version.
[quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]I definitely agree. Of course it’s not really even Sony’s fault.
If we were talking about anyone other than Sony or Microsoft, I’d agree with you, but Sony has a long history of crippling their products, especially their computer products. Their MS reader needs a proprietary driver instead of just XP’s mass storage driver, the Clie NX/NZ series lacks software to be able to read CF memory cards instead of just their WiFi card, etc. I hesitate to say that Sony deliberately wrote their software to break ActiveSync a la “Windows isn’t done until Lotus won’t run”, but I’m sure it wasn’t on their debug checklist.
[quote author=“Drachen”][quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]I definitely agree. Of course it’s not really even Sony’s fault.
If we were talking about anyone other than Sony or Microsoft, I’d agree with you, but Sony has a long history of crippling their products, especially their computer products. Their MS reader needs a proprietary driver instead of just XP’s mass storage driver, the Clie NX/NZ series lacks software to be able to read CF memory cards instead of just their WiFi card, etc. I hesitate to say that Sony deliberately wrote their software to break ActiveSync a la “Windows isn’t done until Lotus won’t run”, but I’m sure it wasn’t on their debug checklist.
Yeah I agree…
I think anything Sony can do anti PPC the better off they think it is.
Even though I am not from the UK I am glad I understood that you felt BT implied compatability and not specifically stated…otherwise I can imagine the kind of returns that would happen.
A quick solution? Go out an buy a Clie, you’ll never look at your PPC again!
1. If the Bluetooth “serial port” doesn’t work with Activesync, one can only assume that’s it’s some kind of half baked implementation. I mean come on, what’s so special about a serial port? Other vendors can do it (and other manufacturers with onboard Bluetooth).
2. Sony have support articles relating to ActiveSync over BT using earlier versions of their Bluetooth software (on other machines), stating “to make it work, get this later version”. Admittedly not for Bluespace NE (the version that comes onboard the TR1MP), but I think this demonstrates that they’re aware of what people expect to be able to do with their machines. BT may be slightly shaky as standards & interoperability goes, but if others can manage it, why can’t Sony?
3. Yes indeed hindsight is a most exact science, however it’s a darn shame that not many of the reviews (at least not any I could find pre-purchase) mentioned any of these shortcomings for the TR1MP.
4. The camera doesn’t work and despite trying some of the online suggestions, it refuses to play ball. Therefore the machine is defective and is going back. I believe the phrase is “not of merchantable quality” :wink:
I stand by my comments about the machine, I think it’s a great piece of kit with some truly mind boggingly stupid flaws.
[quote author=“tifosiv122”]Go out an buy a Clie, you’ll never look at your PPC again!
The more I use PalmOS, the less impressed I am by it. It’s great for PIM, but once you try and do something non-trivial on it, like browse the web, do any sort of networking or access a memory card for anything but playing MP3s, it shows its ancient Dragonball roots. At least most Clies these days are available with more than 12MB usable RAM. To really beat the PPC, PalmOS 6 needs dynamic heap space, true pre-emptive multitasking and a better networking system.
Yes if the machine is faulty then you can return it with no problems but the phrase “not of merchantable quality” really refers to an item which shouldn’t have been sold in the first place. An item that should be of merchantable quality but is actually just faulty is just that, faulty.
If you have had the laptop for over 28/30 days then most places will want to get the laptop repaired and won’t allow you to have a refund. You can however under new EU laws which were passed into UK law not long ago request a refund within a 6 month period. They can only refuse to give you this refund if they can prove that the fault you have wasn’t present from a manacturing defect at the time you brought the item. This as we all know is pretty much impossible to do however most companies while complying with the law will make this an extremely hard route to follow. It could well involve letters to their Head Office, legal departments and a long wait before you get the end result.
That is also where the so called UK 6 year warranty comes from, it’s not actually that but after 6 months and up to 6 years if you can prove (Yes, you have to prove it after 6 months) that the product has failed because of a fault when it was manafactured (A latent fault basically) then you can have a free repair. I wish you luck on ever proving that though, if you ever win with one of those cases it’s because the cost of arguing the point with you becomes greater than the cost of the repair. Then you get it as a good will guesture.
Some companies are really good but in my opinion there is a lot more slimely ones. Not as in they will rip you off at sales time but they don’t provide reasonable after sales service. Be careful.
[quote author=“Drachen”][quote author=“tifosiv122”]Go out an buy a Clie, you’ll never look at your PPC again!
The more I use PalmOS, the less impressed I am by it. It’s great for PIM, but once you try and do something non-trivial on it, like browse the web, do any sort of networking or access a memory card for anything but playing MP3s, it shows its ancient Dragonball roots. At least most Clies these days are available with more than 12MB usable RAM. To really beat the PPC, PalmOS 6 needs dynamic heap space, true pre-emptive multitasking and a better networking system.
I have tried 3 PPC’s since their inception…the last one being a Compaq 5XXX model. So many issues and bugs in the standard software. I find the PalmOS to be very stable until you run programs from people who don’t know what they are doing.
I don’t mind NetFront, although most do, and I use PalmVNC to control my PC on my Palm…cool. Once the CF port on the NX series was hacked it opened up all whole new world. 1GB of Mp3s and 128 MB MS for apps along with Jackflash…what more could you want?
[quote author=“tifosiv122”]what more could you want?
Avast matey, thread hijack ahoy!
First things first. I have owned 2 PPCs (PPC2000 and 2k2) and I’ve had an NZ90 for about a year. Up until I got the TR, it was my main portable Net machine and can still almost always be found on my belt. I was an active member of Cliesource during that time. I’m a pretty knowledgable power user, so I’ve got JackFlash, ZLauncher, EruWare/Athena, SMBmate, WebProV, Decuma and such. I have no plans to replace it any time soon with a PPC. I do demand a lot from my equipment, though.
First up is stability, my biggest pet peeve. When you get past simple db-based PIM programs, the Clie and PPC are pretty much equal. With WisBar, it’s easy to close programs when you don’t need them and that probably kept my PPCs more stable than the average. With the Clie, it’s primary duty (like the PPCs before it) is to play MP3s during my commute. It’s not too bad just playing MP3s or just reading a document from the MS, but to do both flirts with a soft reset. Surfing the Net via BT for any length of time while playing an MP3 guarantees at least one soft reset. I guess it has to do with poor multitasking implementation or poor use of the MS bus. This afternoon, it crashed while copying an MP3 file via MSImport. It isn’t that the PPC didn’t do stupid shit too, but Palm doesn’t have an edge in the stability dept.
Multitasking and multithreading are things many Palm users swear they don’t need. Personally, I don’t like it when the device freezes for a few seconds while it waits for a network timeout instead of being able to fix the problem immediately. It’s also vexing to lose your state in a program that requires more state data than just a db record pointer. Say I’m searching for apartments on the Web and I see something cool. I want to check out my approximate monthly cost in a mortgage calculator or record the address in Memo. When I go back to the browser either I lose my page completely (WebPro) or I lose my browser history (NetFront). Grrr. This is also a big issue with programs launched from the MS. No state is saved.
A dynamically sized heap would be nice too. I’ve got a 4MB heap on the NZ. I find every once in a while NetFront will give me “page too large” errors. This is NF outgrowing the heap. Palm branded devices usually have less, which is one of the reasons WebPro was chosen for that platform over NetFront. I have 6MB free on the NZ, so it would be nice if for that moment, the heap could grow to accomodate that page. IIRC your NX has a 16MB heap. That’s usually enough for most pages, but wouldn’t it be nice to use that for programs if you wanted? Technical? Maybe, but PTL errors suck regardless.
There are other random annoying things like how badly PalmOS handles non PRC/PDB file transfers over IR or BT, Palm’s slowness in getting a standard 320x480 resolution API, resulting in 4 incompatable modes at last count (2 by Sony, 1 by Garmin, and the official Palm version) and a comparitively klunky sync program. Then there’s the stuff that can be laid directly at Sony’s feet, like using non-standard audio APIs, an over-expensive WiFi adaptor with a featureless driver and the sheer number of programs I needed to purchase in order for me to feel like my PPC: ZLauncher (admittedly better than anything on PPC), AcidImage, EruWare, JackFlash and myWorkBench (manage BT file transfers).
Can you imagine what I’d say if I didn’t like the fucking thing?
It isn’t that the PPC didn’t do stupid shit too, but Palm doesn’t have an edge in the stability dept.
