I’ve wanted a Bluetooth enabled cell phone for a long time. I tried switching to Rogers and a Sony T68i a couple of years ago but their network has this annoying habit of dying 3 blocks from my home (not good when your cell is your primary phone) so I had to switch back to Bell Mobility.

Unfortunately Bell has the crappiest selection of phones on the planet. It’s taken forever for them to get a Bluetooth phone (that’s not a PDA, or limited to headset connectivity) in their lineup. They’ve finally done so with the Motorola E815.

I picked one up at a Bell Mobility store last night. Though the E815 is not the slickest phone around (I’d prefer a RAZR) it’s that whole "beggars not being choosers" thing.

When I got home I paired it with my laptop and that went without a hitch. I was able to get iSync to successfully sync my Calendar but it failed to sync my Contacts with a "The connection was lost while talking to the device. Device "Motorola Phone" synchronization failed" error.

It turns out that this is a common problem (as noted here, here, and here). Apparently there is a setting in the phone that conflicts with iSync and prevents it from succesfully syncing your contacts. The recommended solution is to perform a seem edit on the phone to disable the offending feature. To do so requires a Windows XP machine, software, drivers, an expensive USB cable, and a bunch of headache.

The alternate, I discovered, is to use OnMadeSoft’s OnSync. OnSync is a $US12 piece of shareware that provides and alternate means of syncing your AddressBook with your phone. I downloaded the demo and tested it, and it works great. OnSync also gives a great deal of control over the format of the phone contacts entries which is nice.