Category: Mobility

T-Mobile G2 free through Jan. 20

I bought two of these this week. My Blackberry was working fine but my wife’s phone was having problems. The price was right but I cannot find the $50 mail in rebate form. I had a surprisingly difficult time ordering the phones via the t-mobile web site using Internet Explorer. I ended up using Google Chrome to get the pop up windows to show up.

I also had a difficult time changing my handset on their my.t-mobile site. It kept changing back to the Blackberry even though that phone did not have the SIM chip anymore! When the site changed my phone device to the Blackberry, it would complain that I had the wrong data plan for the phone. I had to reset the phone almost every time I logged into my.t-mobile.com.

If you’re looking to snag a T-Mobile G2 (check out our review) on the cheap, it’s now available for the low, low price of free through Jan. 20. With it you get great keyboard, fast processor and that crazy locked-down hardware that took way too much time and effort to crack. (But cracked it was. Huzzah!) Anyhoo, you’ve got a couple days left to pull the trigger. Get it at the source link. [T-Mobile]

T-Mobile G2 free through Jan. 20 posted originally by Android Central

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T-Mobile G2 free through Jan. 20
Phil Nickinson
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:45:01 GMT

In and Out of Bluetooth Hell

This all started out when I noticed that I had left my Blackberry USB cable at work. Since the Blackberry USB is pretty unique I would have to go find my Blackberry charger to charge my phone. That got me to thinking that this might be a good time to setup my WiFi and Bluetooth connections. Setting up the WiFi connection was simple and uneventful. Now I have faster web browsing on my phone while I am in my house. Setting up the Bluetooth connection was not that easy.

Shortly after I purchased my laptop three years ago I decided to add a bluetooth card. My thought at the time was to use a bluetooth headset for VoIP phone calls. The VoIP project did not work out so I turned off  the bluetooth card. What I remember of that work was that I had to install the Toshiba bluetooth stack to make the bluetooth connection work. I do not remember ever getting the Microsoft bluetooth software to pair up with the bluetooth device.

So I go into the Toshiba software and turn on the bluetooth card. Within about five minutes I have my Blackberry 8900 paired up with my laptop. Everything looks so slick! I have visions of a tethered laptop. One last test remains. I cranked up the Desktop Manager and started the bluetooth configuration. Lo and behold, the Desktop manager cannot find a bluetooth device! I’ve got a paired device. What do you mean you cannot see it?

After some research I find out that those fine folks at RIM only work with the Microsoft bluetooth stack. Well that sucks! So I removed the Toshiba stack and rebooted. After it finishes rebooting, I try to pair up. The Microsoft software cannot find any bluetooth device. I seem to remember being in this position once before.

After a little more research I find this post, BostonPocketPC – Remove Toshiba Bluetooth Drivers and Install Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. Although I do not use the Vista operating system, the author implied that there were new bluetooth drivers from Microsoft and the easiest way to install them was to install a recent version of Intellipoint. I installed Intellipoint and nothing changed. The drivers still had a 2-001 date. It looks like I am still using the old drivers. So I deleted the existing bluetooth device configuration in the Device Manager, turned off my WiFi and bluetooth(Fn F2), and rebooted. When XP rebooted it found the bluetooth card and installed the new drivers. Although my phone could not be found using the normal bluetooth(PAN) search, it was found using the control panel version. My Blackberry 8900 is evidently an “other” bluetooth device. Within a few minutes I was paired up and synchronizing my contacts. I am still a little miffed that I cannot manage my media files but it works for basic synchronization. I suspect that is on the ToDo list for the developers at RIM. Wow, that took a lot longer than I expected!

Correction 4/26/09

This morning I checked the bluetooth synchronization again and the Microsoft stack does not pair up. I guess I am going back to the Toshiba stack. At least it works as a modem!

My New Cell Phone is a Blackberry 8900

blackberry8900A week ago my old cell phone, Blackberry 7100 died. It would no longer boot. Although I was interested in the iPhone and Android the biggest features I use other than the phone features are the email and web browsing. After using the 7100 for several years the feature I yearned for than anything else was a full keyboard. It is really painful to reply to email and surf the web without a full keyboard. The keyboard issue dropped the iPhone out of the mix. Of the phones with a full keyboard, the Blackberry 8900 was the safer choice for a Blackberry user. Due to contract complications that the store could not resolve, I had to order my phone directly from T-Mobile. So I put my SIM chip in an old Nokia I had forgotten to recycle and ran as a regular cell phone for a week. Last Friday I finally received the phone and synchronized it with Outlook. That was good timing since I had to make an unscheduled out of town trip on Saturday. My father died. He had been in the hospital for over a year battling MRSA. He won that battle with MRSA but he lost the war. This week the rest of his organs started failing.  By the time I got on the road the diagnosis was that he would not see another sun rise. The hospital had given him a sedative to make him more comfortable. He died before I got there. When I got to my parents house my nephew was still trying to hack into my mom’s wireless router. She had recently gotten broadband access and did not remember anyone giving her the passphrase. I quickly read my email to make sure that nothing bad was happening and then got back to the real meaning of the trip.