I’ve been investigating the possibilities of integrating most of my office activities by using a smartphone.

Until now, I’ve been using Palm PDA’s so I didn’t want to go to windows mobile in a big way, only to find that I might regret it. So I decided to start “small”

By small, I meant cheap, which meant I got an ipaq H6365 with pocket PC 2003 (big, heavy, but I can see if its suitable)

I managed to setup gmail, google calendar and google contacts, import data from the palm, and then active sync to the ipaq.

It would work for a few days, and then I started getting error 0x80004005 during an active sync (and no contact/calendar items would get updated)

I’m syncing about 15 appointments and about 475 contacts.

I’d disable the contact syncing, and the calendar would work fine. I then re-enable contacts and 0x80004005 happens again (and only 100 contacts will get transferred).

I disable contacts again,

In google contacts, i export all the contacts in google csv format (note: group associations will be lost), delete all the google contacts, import contacts from the csv file, enable contact syncing on the ipaq, and everything is fine again.

For a few days, then it all happens again.

It seems like an obvious bug with google contacts and/or their sync software.

Sure, I really shouldn’t expect much from a beta application, but I’d like it to work better

Then I find the real problem: seems that google mobile sync is only tested to work with windows mobile 5 & 6 (not pocket pc 2003 and earlier).

Luckily, I’m happy enough with using a windows mobile device, that I’ll be looking at getting a more modern HTC smartphone… maybe the original HTC Touch.