Food for thought

My collection of gadgets isn’t as impressive as Scott Hanselman’s is, but I’m constantly working on it, so last week I bought a Palm Tungsten T3. Yes, I know it’s not the latest and greatest, but it’s perfectly fine for me. It has a good calendar obviously, but also Bluetooth on board, which means email and web browsing work seamlessly (well, almost). It also has a 400 MHz CPU so it can play good quality MP4 videos on its wide screen. And I bought it for around $180 with a complete set of accessories that come in the original box.

I wrote “almost” about the connectivity part though, because of one little hiccup, which you probably won’t notice, unless you own a Motorola V3 (RAZR). Configuring a GPRS Internet connection over Bluetooth with this phone was a nightmare. Even though I had the latest drivers from Palm. They worked fine for the SMS/dialer part, but not for the GPRS modem part.

After two days of searching the Internet (I did the mistake of looking for a general solution, not the V3 specific one) it finally works, thanks to a post on Palm forum.

So, in short, here’s what you need to do. The settings I used are for polish provider Era GSM, so where I typed erainternet, you should put something specific to your provider; same for the DNS.

1. Create a new connection on the Palm: go to Prefs -> Connection -> New and configure as follows:

   Name: LAN V3 (or whatever)
   Connect to: Local Network
   Via: Bluetooth 
   Device: (tap to find, select your phone, follow the guidelines)
   

2. Go to Prefs -> Network -> New and type

   Service: Dialup Connection (or whatever) 
   User name: erainternet 
   Password: erainternet 
   Connection: LAN V3 (the one you created above)
   

   Select “Details” and and set it to:

   Connection type: PPP 
   Idle timeout: Never 
   Query DNS: (unchecked and put 213.158.194.1) 
   IP Address: (checked) Automatic
   

   Select “Script” and enter the following:

   Send: at+cgdcont=1,"IP","erainternet" 
   Send CR: 
   Send: ATD*99# 
   Send CR: 
   End:
   

You’re done.

If you want to use your Palm to send SMSs or use Dialer, add another connection, this time configuring it as Phone and using Universal Phone Driver.