THE IPAQ - SOME OUTSTANDING OPERATING ISSUES

CONNECTION PROBLEMS WHEN SYNCING WITH TWO PCs WHEN ONE CONNECTION IS BY INFRA-RED

The iPAQ is notorious for USB sycing probems but the serial cradle works well as does IR syncing which is extremely fast. You can also sync the iPAQ with two different PCs, say home and work. This also works well if both communicate by serial, but I had a lot of problems when I was trying to sync one by serial and one by infra-red. That appears to be an extremely haphazard affair, with no consistent or effective control. So I bought another serial cradle.

OUTBOX MESSAGES PROBLEM WHEN SYNCING WITH OUTLOOK

I can transfer outbox messages by making that selection in the manual 'Windows CE Inbox Transfer' function available on the Outlook menu, but transferring outbox messages through synchronisation doesn't work properly.

After synchronising, the messages do arrive in Outlook's Outbox but they look like incoming or sent messages. You can overcome this by selecting 'Resend This Message' under Actions in the desktop's Outlook menu for a given message. It tries to dispute that I'm the original sender, but lets me do it. The message then appears normally.

To make a manual transfer, select in Tools a menu item called 'Windows CE Inbox Transfer'. This is greyed out unless the palmtop is actually connected. The menu has a tickable box to collect Outbox messages from the palmtop. Unfortunately the function isn't sticky and has to be activated each time. Messages imported in this way appear normally.

10 October 2001