bluetooth hotsync Treo 650 with Windows / Toshiba

This was a real pain.

After reading numerous articles on what to do, I was still stuck. The basic setup is to run the setup wizard from the treo, and follow the steps.

That's it. The wizard essentially says, create a local COM port on the PC, enter that port in the HotSync application (Settings->Local tab), make sure the 'Local' port is ticked, off you go.

My laptop (a Tosh portege) has the Toshiba bluetooth software installed. Looking at the COM ports (via Control Panel->Bluetooth local COM) shows a load. My mistake was to tell the PC HotSync to use the COM port tagged as "LocalCOM-Client". What happens is that bluetooth connects, but HotSync on the PC never starts. Eventually, HotSync on the Treo times-out.

Tell HotSync to use the port assigned as "LocalCOM-Server[SerialPort(TOSHIBA LocalCOM)]" instead, and is starts and syncs perfectly.

Palm OS & SD card directory structure

I had all manner of fun trying to install Frodo on my Treo. It's a Commodore 64 emulator, and a good one at that. The Frodo application itself is easy enough to install (via desktop), but I found it was easier to put the games (.d64) on the SD card myself (via care reader & normal file manager).

Put the games in Palm/Programs/Frodo/ directory, create it if need be. Most other apps seems to pick up stuff in the root directory. I tend to avoid the Palm/Backup and Palm/ directories.

The Frodo manual mentions this now.

The detail can be seen in the Palm programmers reference.

Treo 650, timezones & Outlook

I've got an Orange Treo 650, latest build. I sync this with my Win XP laptop, with Outlook 2002. It's a work laptop, and I also use OneBridge to sync remotely - although this is for inbox only. The other conduits, contacts, notes, and notably calendar are synced locally via cable.

I was really pleased that Treo 650 supports timezones for calendar entries. I often have meetings or calls that are scheduled in CET (France), and since I live in GMT (London) it's nice to be able to put the invites in their original timezone.

However, it doesn't sync properly. Outlook doesn't understand timezones, and really snarfs up the synced calendar if you start entering timezones on the Treo.

I've now gone back to the Treo 600 way of doing it - simply convert all 'foreign' timezone meetings back to native GMT, and all is well..

Lesson learned: avoid mucking about with timezones on Treo 650.

One still odd behaviour, an Outlook calendar invite sent my someone in France will have it's start as a CET time, say 11am. Outlook will convert this to GMT for PC viewing, here 10 GMT. But when it syncs this, the Treo will get the proper time (11am), but the wrong timezone (CET). Worst of all, Treo suddenly thinks that that day is all CET, so other entries from me are wrong... bah.