Playing with a VX3300

I've already de-lurked myself in part, but this post is what I was
originally writing before I jumped in with the issue of icons (with
Mac OS X) and with Subversion.  I've been reading the list for about
a month now, as I didn't want to just jump in with a newbie question.

At the beginning of February, I replaced my LG VX4400 phone with one of
its descendants, the VX3300.  It seems more stable than the 4400, but as
some of you already realize, BitPim doesn't support it.  In reviewing
the list archives, people have inquired about this a couple of times,
but none of the developers seems to have a working 3300 in their hands.

Since I still use my 3300 for day-to-day use, and don't have another
piece of hardware as backup, I can't loan it out - unless one of the
developers lives in the New York City area and could make do with just
one or two weekend days to play with it. :)  Unfortunately, I suffer
from a lack of knowledge about Python, so my experiments have so far
been limited to just playing with the phone over its serial port, and
using the released version of BitPim (presently 0.8.08).

I've made some observations about the phone.  Everything I've been doing
is on a Mac OS X 10.4.x system, using the USB/Serial cable that comes
with the Verizon connectivity kit.  The driver for this is the current
one available from the Prolific Technology web site (PL-2303 driver
version v1.1.0b1).  I spare readers from the verbose exceptions at this
point, since I don't know how useful they would be (yet).

1.  It has an easily accessible modem that responds to normal AT
    commands.  I connected to my ISP, which still supports serial
    connections on a terminal server in its modem pool, and used it
    without any problems.  This was a nice surprise. :)

2.  The serial connection only works properly with hardware flow control
    (CTS/RTS) turned OFF on the serial connection to the phone.  Trying
    to enable it will cause all output -- even from the command-mode AT
    commands -- to choke after just 2-4 characters.  Sending one
    additional character will cause another 2-4 characters to pop out,
    but this clearly isn't practical.  I suspect the phone itself
    doesn't know how to do this, or even XON/XOFF "software" flow
    control, as it doesn't recognize AT&K0, AT&K1, etc.  (See?  That old
    Hayes Smartmodem Optima manual *did* come in handy!)

3.  If the phone seems to lock up after some kind of transaction
    failure, it's because the phone has switched off the data port.
    It can usually be re-enabled the normal way (Menu, 6, 6, 1 [PC
    Connection], USB/RS-232C, select port speed).

4.  Setting the serial port speed to 230400 bps will work when talking
    to the phone via ZTerm or other terminal emulation software, but
    BitPim seems to choke.  Dropping the speed down to 115200 bps allows
    the phone to operate normally.  I can't help but wonder if this is
    due to the aforementioned flow control issue.

5.  The only way you can get BitPim to talk to the phone is to tell it
    that you're talking to the VX3300's older brother, the VX3200.
    This introduces some other problems, however (see below).

6.  When getting/setting phonebook data to/from the phone, an exception
    gets thrown.  While the traceback differs between these two
    functions (i.e. writephonebook vs. getphonebook), the error is
    always the same:

          File "p_lgvx3200.pyo", line 254, in readfrombuffer
          File "p_lgvx3200.pyo", line 547, in readfrombuffer
          File "prototypes.pyo", line 208, in readfrombuffer
        ValueError: The value read should be a constant of 514, but was 546 instead

7.  Reading and writing the calendar entries seems to work, although I
    didn't test it extensively.

8.  The SMS access sort of works - my outbox shows the messages I've
    sent, but the inbox only includes the callback number (or a name, if
    the number mapped to a phonebook entry at the time it was received).
    The messages themselves have blank "From" and "Subject" values, are
    missing the message contents, and have the "Locked" flag set.  (None
    of the messages are locked on the phone, AFAIK.)

It's worth noting that in this version of BitPim (8.0.08), the
application will stop talking to the phone after the exception is
thrown.  In some previous version (probably whatever was current on
2-6 February 2006), BitPim would keep talking to the phone and appear
to succeed in writing data.  Upon examining the contact list on the
phone, however, I found that (1) only e-mail addresses -- no phone
numbers -- had been copied to the phone; and (2) only entries containing
an e-mail address were copied at all.  This suggests that the phone book
format is similar, but not identical, to that of the VX3200.  This
probably applies to the SMS problems as well, although these can still
be read and written to on the phone with 8.0.08.

--
Gregory Pratt                                               [email protected]
East Rutherford, NJ, USA                       http://www.panix.com/~gp/
"The only good spammer is a dead spammer."
PGP Key Fingerprint:  DC60 FCDE 91E2 3D41 91A3  45DB B474 3D3A 3621 AAFE


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language
that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast
and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory!
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0944&bid$1720&dat1642