As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous posts (here and here for example) I’ve been looking for the perfect mobile device, and not finding one. At some point today UPS will be dropping off a fresh new HTC TyTn II. I already know it isn’t perfect, but it is a nice incremental upgrade to the TyTn I’ve been using since last fall.
The TyTn II upgrades the original model in a number of ways. It has a new CPU (still the same 400 MHz clock as before, but with a secondary core and acceleration for 3D and Java) and twice the internal memory, and runs Windows Mobile 6 out of the box. The screen now flips up to an angle for better viewing while you use the keyboard. The camera has been upgraded to 3 megapixels. And last but certainly not least, it has an internal GPS which works both on and off the mobile network.
I won’t say more about it here yet, because I’ll be reviewing it for The Gadgeteer — look for my review soon, perhaps next week. In the meantime, you can catch up by reading my Gadgeteer review of the TyTn from last year.
As I mentioned a couple of days ago I have been playing with a Nokia 770 lately to see if it is a viable addition to my gear bag. What I didn’t mention before was the difficulty I have been having tethering my HTC TyTn to it through Bluetooth. It may seem silly to use a full featured PDA phone to tether anything smaller than a laptop, but since the TyTn has 3G and the 770 has a decent web browser, it seems like they might make a good pair for those times when Pocket Internet Explorer isn’t enough. It’s worth a try, at least.
The first problem I encountered is that I have Windows Mobile 6 on my TyTn, and that version of the OS no longer has dialup networking support. According to Microsoft’s infinite wisdom, we should all be using personal area networking for Bluetooth tethering. It works really well with the Mac’s built-in Bluetooth stack (and with Vista, I would think), but smaller devices like the Nokia tablets and TomTom GPSes haven’t quite caught up yet. One of the clever hackers at xda-developers put together a package to restore the missing DUN support, so I installed that.
That wasn’t enough, though, as the 770 insists that the TyTn has no usable services on it. It is supposed to support DUN, file transfer, and SIM access, and all of those are enabled on the TyTn, but the 770 still refuses to pair with it using the last official OS release (Internet OS 2006). The 2007 hacker edition of the OS (the N800’s OS backported to the 770) worked better. The phone pairing applet still didn’t work, but you could pair the TyTn using the generic Bluetooth control panel. I don’t want to run the hacker edition OS on my 770, though, as it tends to be slower and more crash-prone on the 770 hardware, and seems to be missing some core features like streaming audio playback. So I went back to the 2006 edition, and today I finally fixed the problem.
My solution isn’t exactly for the faint of heart, though, as it involves directly editing configuration files. Full details after the jump, if only so I can remember what the heck I did in case I ever have to re-flash my 770…
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