Xperia X1: Day Two, Initial T-Mobile Internet Woes.

Continuing on from my Day One post, I’ve stuck my T-Mobile Sim card into the device, and powered it on. To my surprise, the battery was fully charged, and the device auto detected the T-Mobile network settings. All wasn’t quite right though. The phone could make and receive calls, and the calls were nice and clear. However, trying to use my newly added data plan, the settings found T-Mobile’s EDGE network fine, but I could not access the internet. I then decided to try and see if things worked over my wireless network, and that work fine. Good speeds over my Wifi network, and it was easy to set up. The browser timed out with the following obscure error: http error:$CODE$.

So, now, I was stuck, something obviously wasn’t right with the T-Mobile network configuration. It worked the night before on my Nokia N95, so, I know the data portion of my plan is setup correctly. So, I went over to my local T-Mobile shop, and showed off the phone to the drooling store manager. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much help. I then went home and gave T-Mobile support a call. I didn’t know how they would treat me, since I’m in the US, using an unlocked/unsupported phone. Luckily, they were very pleasant (I’ve had good luck with T-Mobile, which is why I’m still a customer). I got sent over to Tier 3 support, and although the nice young lady on the other end wasn’t quite sure what to do, she had a script about setting up network connections on Windows Mobile devices. So, she got me to the general area to where I needed to fix. So, here’s the fix folks:

1. Go to the START menu -> Settings.
2. Click the Connections tab.
3. Click Connections Icon.
4. Select “Add a new modem connection“.
5. Give the connection some name, this isn’t important. Select Cellular Line (GPRS, 3G) for the modem. Click Next.
6. Access Point Name needs to be internet2.voicestream.com (I believe this is for the $25 add-on data plan, I recall someplace on the net I found a reference to internet3 for the next tier data plan). Click Next.
7. Leave the next set of options blank and click FINISH.
8. Back on the Connections page, click the “Set up my proxy server” option. Make sure you check the box next to “This network connects to the internet“.
9. Now the important one, click the Modem tab at the bottom. Select the connection you just added, make sure you DO NOT have the Auto Pick option selected.
10. Done, now you should be ready to surf the day away!

It turns out the problem stems from the phone auto detecting wap.voicestream.com access point, which I believe is their t-zones server. So, that was a fun waste of a few hours. So hopefully this information will help someone out.

Now that I got onto the net, how is the browser experience… With Internet Explorer, not so fantastic, but with Mobile Operat 9.5 it hurt less. This area is where the iPhone and iPod Touch’s trump the Windows Mobile device. The screen is already small, but with the resolution so high on this device the text is just that smaller. I’m now spoiled by the iPhone’s multi-touch zoom and overal responsiveness of the iPhone Safari browser. But Opera works well enough, and once I got used to working with it, I was equally productive. I was able to easily setup my Windows Messaging to pull email from my yahoo and google email accounts. The next thing I need to do, is sync it with my Exchange server at work.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about my experiences with hooking the thing up to my PC.