New Phone Hurray! I-Mate SP5

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After my last phone (I-Mate SP3i) having a few little hiccups (keypad joystick not working at times) which then went on to be become an even worse situation after giving the phone to a repairer in town in the morning to look at and quote on fixing. I went back in the afternoon to see how it all went and to pick it up (as the problem was only intermitent) and he said that he won’t be able to fix it but his repairer in Melbourne will be able to. He said that they can quote on it before repairing it and the he will send it down that afternoon if I wanted him to. I said thats all fine and that I just needed to get some numbers out of the phone. He handed it over and said he couldnt get the keypad to work at all (never happened before) and asked if there was some trick to fix it and I said no, you just turn it on. He then said he never opened it up and that it just happened which I think is just pure BS.

Anyways he sent the phone down to the repairer who said there was no parts available for it through Imate so I was given the phone in a completely useless state. Not happy at all so Its time to take action. I called another repairer in town who is currently analysing the phone to see if they can work out what has happened to it so I can find the other repairer responsible for the phone and to give me some kind of compensation, as I am in no mood for someone to F up my phone and get away with it.

So anyways…. I can’t stand not being without my phone with some of nice features it had so I got myself a new Imate SP5 which is the updated version of my own SP3i and god damn it is one nice phone. In looks its certainly quite a bit nicer then the older model (althought the older model still does look quite good) and the speed difference is quite noticeable. Infact a lot of things have been improved compared to the old model which is great. It actually runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and just overall is much quicker especially on booting up and also going through messages and menus. Also seems a lot more stable then older model. Also has a few newer features such as a better camera and now with built in wi-fi which is great.

Now Ive got the fun task of trying to sync the phone with my laptop. I can easily sync my contacts/meetings/appointments using Outlook but Im not a big fan of Microsoft software and use the lovely Mozilla Thundbird as my email client which has now also just added built in calendar support through an extension called Lightning.

My only drama now is to get the SP5 to sync with Thunderbirdas it is made to sync with Outlook only. Thankfully someone has released a program called Birdiesync which is designed to sync most flavours of the Windows mobile editions with Mozilla programs such as Thunderbird, Lightning and Sunbird. The first problem I ran into with the SP5 was that it is not able to installed unsigned applications such as Birdiesync but a quick search led me to this blog post which shows how to unlock the SP5.