Mac OS10.3.3 + iSync + P900

What have you tried?
Go to control panel bluetooth.
Add device
Add the p900 here.
Then in iSync go to file add device and you should find it.

Yep. tried that. I have got the p900 added in Bluetooth and can trnsfer files, but it does not appear in iSync ?

Anyone else ?

P900 can be a bit awkward - more so than P800.
Try removing all pairings in iSync and the system pairing, then re-pair on both whilst the P900 is set to be discoverable, that's sorted it for me on desktop G4 and powerbook.

Muppet - TEMP wrote:P900 can be a bit awkward - more so than P800.
Try removing all pairings in iSync and the system pairing, then re-pair on both whilst the P900 is set to be discoverable, that's sorted it for me on desktop G4 and powerbook.

Yes, that's true. I have to do that every now and then.

Also, there are two wizards for creating a new bluetooth device. One is offering you to enable iSync capabilities, the other won't (only addressbook, modem and iCal).

Let me know if you need more details, so I can look this up for you.

Thanks for your help. I will try this tonight. Should I use the wizard or just pair device ?

just become member 😃

As I said before i will try this tonite - Mac at work has no bluetooth 🙄

Hi

I am a Mac user and need to do some changes to the language via my Apple Powerbook. I am one of those P900 owners with an Asian version. This P900 works in English and Chinese. While I have opted for English, the keyboard is unlike my previous P800 (which was all English) and now comes with options of Chinese characters limiting the number of English characters, eg, you can't find the apostrophe symbol ('😉. In addition, when one views the calendar in month mode, the day sysmbols on screen for M, T, W, T, F, S, S are Chinese symbols - so if you are reading the numerics of the month, you can't be for sure iimmediately f it's a Wednesday or Thursday. I rang SonyEricsson for help and was told that one cannot replace the language - you need to change the logic board. So I am in the queue to have it changed when the next batch of English versions of the P900 arrive in Malaysia. However, the officlal website of SonyEricsson says you can replace the language if you have the PC suite installed in one's computer. Can one change languages via the Mac platform? As I am a Mac user, I am wondering if this will work or should I just wait for SonyEricsson to come back to me with a new logic board? Thanks for your help.

Ok, so I tried this at the weekend. I got the p900 to appear in iSync at last, but when i tried to sync, it says the p900 cannot be found :frown:

It did give me a message about firewall at one stage but I have checked this in system prefs and it is not running - any more ideas 🙄

Ghazalie wrote:Hi

I am a Mac user and need to do some changes to the language via my Apple Powerbook.

I've successfully updated the firmware on a P900 using the PC Suite running on Virtual PC whilst connected to an ADSL line. In theory this setup would also work for you, but I have to say it was incredibly slow compared to a real PC. :s:
Connecting to a real PC would be much better, no matter how much I love Macs that's still how I do it now.

Muppet wrote:I've successfully updated the firmware on a P900 using the PC Suite running on Virtual PC whilst connected to an ADSL line. In theory this setup would also work for you, but I have to say it was incredibly slow compared to a real PC. :s:
Connecting to a real PC would be much better, no matter how much I love Macs that's still how I do it now.

i have done the firware via Virtual PC and it was fine 😃

Still cant get it to Sync via Bluetooth though 😡

Bruce Read wrote:i have done the firware via Virtual PC and it was fine 😃

Still cant get it to Sync via Bluetooth though 😡

see this thread http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum//forum/thread/23123/

it should answer all your problems.

Here is the complete solution:

1) Open iSync
2) Add new device (make sure your P900 is discoverable)
3) Add P900 (or .P900) in iSync
4) Close iSync
5) Open System Preferences - Sharing
6) Go to Firewire
7) Click on "New"
8) Port number - "Other" - Port Number Range or Series = 3004
9) Description = Put something like Bluetooth
10) Close all
11) Open iSync and do the thing 😊

Explanation:
By default on Mac OS X 10.3 Firewall is switched ON. iSync is done via Bluetooth port 3004. The other solution is to disable Firewall for all, which I wouldn't recommend.

Bruce Read wrote:Can any one help ?

I cannot seem to get my P900 to appear in iSync in Mac OS 10.3.3 under Bluetooth or by using USB - any ideas ?

Most times you will need to apply the patch mentioned in this page
http://chrismiles.info/mac/tips/addressbook_p900.html

Bruce Read wrote:Ok, so I tried this at the weekend. I got the p900 to appear in iSync at last, but when i tried to sync, it says the p900 cannot be found :frown:

It did give me a message about firewall at one stage but I have checked this in system prefs and it is not running - any more ideas 🙄

I have tried it also. It id work fien for me until I updated the P900 with the latest software from the Sony Ericsson website. I can use it in Address Book, or with Salling clicker, but no way it will show in iSync. I have a friend who has teh same phone, same Powerbook, same OS, and his works OK.

Any ideas?

Can anyone give me info to use my p900 as a modem for my G4 powerbook. I swithched the bluetooth modem settin on the powerbook, but the computer does not connet even if both devices are communicating? I am not sure also which modem to pick from the macs pulldown list of sony ericsson modems. Any help would be appreciated

fghhg wrote:Can anyone give me info to use my p900 as a modem for my G4 powerbook. I swithched the bluetooth modem settin on the powerbook, but the computer does not connet even if both devices are communicating? I am not sure also which modem to pick from the macs pulldown list of sony ericsson modems. Any help would be appreciated

Check out Ross Barkman's home page:

http://www.taniwha.org.uk/

He offers a number of modem scripts for the P900 and other phones. I'm using them, they're working great.

Christophe wrote:I have tried it also. It id work fien for me until I updated the P900 with the latest software from the Sony Ericsson website. I can use it in Address Book, or with Salling clicker, but no way it will show in iSync. I have a friend who has teh same phone, same Powerbook, same OS, and his works OK.

Same here. The computer is paired to the P900, I can transfer files via Bluetooth File Exchange, but iSync does not recognize the device. I have tried every suggestion outlined here (and then some) but no luck. A tech doc at Apple suggested removing the device from the list in iSync, and now I can't even get THAT back.

OS10.3.4, latest software and firmware from SonyEricsson.

If anyone finds a solution, please let me know lgrillo[at]mac.com

Best wishes,
Lynn :frown:

Excuse my french, but finally got the bugger working with iSync. Using 10.3.4, latest P900 firmware. Only took me about 3 weeks of tinkering. 😃

I have everything working except SMS via address book. I got address book contacts, iCal events, you name it. Groovy.

The information you need is here: http://milliwaysconsulting.net/useful.things/osx/isync_and_sony_ericsson_p900_problems.html

Note the plist file, that's key. It tells iSync this phone is OK to sync. It mentions a MAC address. That's the MAC address of your phone, not your macintosh, you can get it off the Bluetooth Preferences Pane in System Preferences.

I'm so so happy. 😃 It's synced address book notes, photos from address book, everything.

From what I understand, the SMS problem is a limitation of the Hayes stylie command set of the phone, so it doesn't seem a fix would be possible unless it came from Sony. So I'll give up on that one.

Fixing the plist file worked partially in that iSync now at least the P900 icon is back in iSync again, but it still won't synchronize. I get the same old error message saying it cannot find the device during the sync pocess.

Here's the error (note that this comes after I get a message on the phone saying the computer wants to connect. I accept, and then):

Thursday, June 10, 2004 2:26 PM
|P900| iSync was unable to connect to P900. Try syncing again.
Can't synchronize calendars and To Do items to P900: device is not available

The work-around mentions a file called BTConduitDefaults.plist in /Library/Application Support/SyncService/501. I don't have one of those, so maybe that's the problem.

Also, I have tried synching with Airport off and VPN off, and it makes no difference.

What a headache. :frown:

Thank you for the continued help, though.

Lynn Grillo
lgrillo[at]mac.com

lgrillo wrote:Fixing the plist file worked partially in that iSync now at least the P900 icon is back in iSync again, but it still won't synchronize. I get the same old error message saying it cannot find the device during the sync pocess.

Here's the error (note that this comes after I get a message on the phone saying the computer wants to connect. I accept, and then):

Thursday, June 10, 2004 2:26 PM
|P900| iSync was unable to connect to P900. Try syncing again.
Can't synchronize calendars and To Do items to P900: device is not available

The work-around mentions a file called BTConduitDefaults.plist in /Library/Application Support/SyncService/501. I don't have one of those, so maybe that's the problem.

Also, I have tried synching with Airport off and VPN off, and it makes no difference.

What a headache. :frown:

Thank you for the continued help, though.

Lynn Grillo
lgrillo[at]mac.com

I have the same Problem, OSX 10.3.4 and P900 newest firmware. Can t get the P900 to appear in my isync.
If anybody finds a solution please inform me
Andreas462

weder wrote:Yes, that's true. I have to do that every now and then.

Also, there are two wizards for creating a new bluetooth device. One is offering you to enable iSync capabilities, the other won't (only addressbook, modem and iCal).

Let me know if you need more details, so I can look this up for you.

Many thanks!!

lgrillo wrote:Fixing the plist file worked partially in that iSync now at least the P900 icon is back in iSync again, but it still won't synchronize.

And I don't think it's due to BTConduitDefaults.plist - I got the same result with and without that file.

i don't even have those files at that location. how do you get them?

i tried downloading the bundle and those files aren't there.

ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi all,
I've been experiencing similar problems with my P900 and traced it to when I upgraded the firmware (ok, I cheated on that one and used a PC since the upgrade software won't work on the Mac). Anyway, when I first started having a sync problem, I decided to delete and re-pair the device. When I did this, the phone showed up in Bluetooth Preferences as a "Miscellaneous Device" instead of as a "Phone".

I should note at this point that I tried all the other things I could find mentioned for this problem, ranging from pairing my device from the computer to even stopping the calendar application on the phone before running iSync to detect it.

After some frustration and some searching around, I found this VERY helpful link at http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]@.599cf152/371. If the link doesn't work, try a search on "P900 syncproblem" on the Apple discussion boards. Thanks, by the way, to Mr. Jon Kenyon who made the post!

The gist of the issue, at least for me, was that the P900 originally declared itself to be a P810 and iSync was configured to recognize this. Referring to Mr. Kenyon's post, you will see a reference to several configuration files that have entries for a string like this:

<key>SONY ERICSSON--separator--1021011-BVP810</key>
<string>symbiantool</string>

You need to add a pair of lines just like the ones above, EXCEPT that the "BVP810" is replaced with "BVP900". It seems that SonyEricsson got around to changing this string during a firmware upgrade, which (for me anyway) is why it just stopped working.

<key>SONY ERICSSON--separator--1021011-BVP900</key>
<string>symbiantool</string>

Incidentally, these special lines go into these files (again, courtesy of Kenyon's post on the Apple discussion site):

/System/Library/CoreServices/SyncServer.app/Contents/Resources/SupportedBluetoothDevices/SymbianConduit_phones.plist

/System/Library/SyncServices/SymbianConduit.bundle/Contents/Resources/SymbianConduit_phones.plist

Now, if you are comfortable with Unix, I would run your favorite text editor from the terminal and make the changes. I ran a command like this:

[FONT=Courier New]sudo vi SymbianConduit_phones.plist[/FONT]
from each of the two directories above.

If you have the developer tools installed, you could browse to the files and use the Property List Editor instead. A quick procedure for this:
1) Use Finder to navigate into the System/Library/CoreServices directory
2) Right-click (or control-click) the "SyncServer" application and select "Show Package Contents"
3) Click down through the Content/Resources/SupportedBluetoothDevices folder
4) Double-click on the SymbianConduit_phones.plist file - this will bring up the PropertyListEditor
5) Within the file, expand the "Root" tab to show the properties in the file
6) Click "New Sibling" to create a new key/value pair
7) Enter [FONT=Courier New]SONY ERICSSON--separator--1021011-BVP900[/FONT] in the Property column
8) Enter [FONT=Courier New]symbiantool[/FONT] in the Value column

If you don't have Property List Editor installed, double-clicking on the .plist file will likely bring up a text editor. You can just add the two lines shown below to each file in that case.

<key>SONY ERICSSON--separator--1021011-BVP900</key>
<string>symbiantool</string>

In any case, after adding this new entry to both of these .plist files, I restarted my phone and my Mac. From that point, I was able to use iSync with the P900.
If you check out Mr. Kenyon's post on the Apple discussion site, you'll see some other procedures as well - these are, I think, for situations where you've already sync'ed before.

I hope this helps - it was very frustrating to have iSync capabilities just disappear, but this did the trick.

Thanks,
Dave Thompson[list=1]
[/list]

Many many thanks to davet42 for the solution and that useful link. It�s working now after l-o-n-g 5 weeks since I upgraded the P900 firmware.

One more thing I want to mention; it was bugging me. I hade to change the file permission of the file "/Library/Application Support/SyncService/501/SymbianConduitDefaults.plist" from 644 to 444 after making the necessary changes as describe there (http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]@.599cf152/371). Those who are not familiar with Unix this command will do that for you. Launch terminal window (Application>Utilities>Terminal) and issue:

chmod -w /Library/Application\ Support/SyncService/501/SymbianConduitDefaults.plist

I had to do that. On every reboot, OS X was removing the extra lines I added to make it functional. Not sure if everybody needs to do that.

Thanks!!!

With all this i dont suppose some1 has worked out how to sync the birthday field yet?

This might not applicable to all situations, but since it worked for me I'd thought I'd share it;

Had several problems trying to get the P900 syncing reliably with iSync. It has worked, and then failed and generally been a bit of a hit and miss thing. However, a month ago I was attempting to get the thing working for once and for all so I used a PC to update the firmware in the phone, deleted all trace of the P900 from the Mac and attempted to start from scratch with fresh installs of the i-apps and a new pairing.

From that point on iSync would connect to the phone, but would always report a NSyncConduit error.

At that point I gave up until yesterday, when I thought I'd have another go. Again I updated firmware, reinstalled i-apps and also implemented some of the useful tips on here regarding .plist's and such.

No joy.

However, I then found and deleted the iSync.ini file on the phone (C:\Documents\iSync.inc) - you can do this with the trial download of FileMan from Handigo - and hey presto on the next iSync it all worked. (iSync automatically recreated a fresh copy of iSync.ini on first run)

I'm making the wild assumption that the root of my problem was that iSync.ini file remaining on the phone even though all the other apps & connections were refreshed. I obviously can't rule out one of the previous steps, but given the error had always been the same up until the point iSync.ini was removed, it does point a guilty finger at it.

Hope this helps anyone else who's in a similar situation.

Pete

I have published a solution for p900 and iSync:

http://homepage.mac.com/sspence/p900/

Simon