Cell Phone Syncing w/ Your PC or PDA?

IPSection asks: "I have been looking for a way to sync my PDA or Outlook to my cell phone (a Panasonic EBTX210). The serial data cable didn't come with any software (of course) and the only commercial solution I see is software called FoneSynch from Paragon Software (Windows only). Is there any free/shareware software for Windows/Linux that allows this functionality? Come on all you cell phone users - don't tell me you type in all of those numbers manually?" We've handled this question in a couple of earlier articles before, however there doesn't seem to be an all-in-one utility that once can use to extract your messages/address-book from your phone (or to allow you to set your phone from your PIM, for example). Many utilities focus on a specific line of phones (like Gnokii, which only works on Nokia phones) and others only work if your phone supports GSM or CPDP. If no all-in-one solution exists, what utilities have you found useful in keeping it all together?

alas, wrong way to proceed

[lfourrier]

you look for the pdas and the phones documentations, then you buy the right combination.

I enjoyed some time Revo + S25 (siemens).
The S25 is one of the 4 model specially validated to work with the revo (with a motorola and 2 nokia).

Perhaps it's too much an european solution for you, but it had good Outlook sync for the Revo, and IR sync of phone number with phone.

Now, I broke the screen of the revo, reverted to palm, and want to change my phone (the battery begin to be old, and the phone stay on only 3 days;).

Further more, I don't know if choosinbg some psion pda is a good bet on the future.

It depends of your usage, and of your previsible usage, but I consider a phone is kept max 2 years, and a pda max 3 years. So, choose today some PDA you want to still have when you change phone, and then, choose a compatible phone.

All GSM phones speak Hayes AT over IR or RS232.

[LqdSlpStrm]

All your good old GSM cell phones speaks a rather hefty AT command set. The modem manual for the R320 (early wap phone) at Ericsson's developer area is over 300 pages long. You can basically explore the phone's entire funtionality through the command set.

Connect to your phone through a terminal emulator using either the IR COM port or a serial cable and COM1. Do the AT dance.

BTW:
You can shorten your connect time for a PPP based GSM data channel from 30 to 15 seconds by using an ISDN modem. This will not improve your bandwidth, only shorten the link setup time.
Do
AT+CBST=71,0,1
before you dial your ISDN modem.
Some networks can only hook up to an ISDN modem that is set to the older V1.10 standard. Check your local manual.
The time from ATDxxx to CONNECT is usually 4 seconds. The rest of the connect time is PPP negotiation stuff.

For what it's worth.