Samsung SCH-i760

Last week, I got a Samsung SCH-i760.  I have been looking for a new phone for a while.  I had been using the limited browser on the E815 for checking email and reading rss feeds.  But the interface is really bad, especially when filling out an html form.

In addition to the SCH-i760, I was also interested in the Verizon Wireless XV6800.  Both of these phone are Windows Mobile phones that have have integrated WiFi, that are available on Verizon Wireless.  I was also interested in these as I could install other programs.  The reason that I picked the SCH-i760, is because there are hard phone key pad.  This makes it easy to dial without having to use the touch screen.

Setting up the phone was pretty painless. I installed The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile on our mac.  The using that, I installed GooSync to get my contacts and calendars that are hosted in Google Calendar on the phone.  Then I installed MilkSync for my task list.  I also configured the mail client to access my GMail account via IMAP.  Lastly, I configured ActiveSync to get my work email/calendar from my work's Exchange server.

 

There were several problems that I encounted with this solution:

1. Even though GooSync can be configured to sync particular Google calendars to categories on the Windows Mobile Device, ActiveSync doesn't do that.  So after syncing with the Exchange server, all of the events that were in Google calendar were added to the exchange calendar.


2. At one point, I selected that ActiveSync should synchronized my work contacts.  I later decided to disable that, so I unchecked this option.  The next time that ActiveSync performed a synchronization, all of the contacts on the phone were deleted, even the ones that weren't sync'd through ActiveSync.


3. If Google Calendar happens to get a calendar event from Exchange through GooSync, it will send meeting requests and reminders to all of the other attendees, even though I didn't schedule the meeting.


4. It looks like there is a bug in GMail's/Windows Mobile IMAP implementation, where HTML or rich text messages will not be shonw in the device.


5. There doesn't seem to be a way to have ActiveSync have different refreshing intervals for calendar and mail.  I would like to have my calendar kept up to date, but be able to stop email checking.  If you disable email checking, it removed the local cached messages that had been downloaded before.

There are several things that would make this phone work perfectly for me:

1. Allow you to specify a category that ActiveSync should synchronize.  This way you can have an Exchange calendar/contacts sync'd with a single category on a device.  This would allow sync multiple calendar systems with the phone.


2. All you to specify a differnt syncing schedule for calendars and email in ActiveSync.


3. Fix the display of HTML messages from GMail's IMAP implementation.