Motorola RAZR, GPRS, and T-Mobile 


I finally had to ditch my (partially) trusty Nokia 3650. It had taken to turning itself off randomly every 5-10 minutes. A battery change and some wishful cleaning didn't help, so I bit the bullet and purchased a new RAZR, which was just made available in the local T-Mobile stores. Yes, the thing doesn't have have the capability of the 3650 with the well-developed series 60 platform, but damn is this thing sexy! Lightweight, thin, and a standard keypad - all things lacking on the 3650.

However, there was one problem. I got all my contacts and calendar synced in about five minutes, thanks to OS X's iSync. But try as I might, I couldn't get the little thing to establish a working GPRS connection. It would always just fail during (or just after) the authentication phase. Sometime silently, sometimes not. There are about a million tutorials on the web for getting GPRS working with OS X, and all point to this page that contains nicely formatted GPRS and modem scripts for just about every phone in existence, but nothing I did would make it work. Until...

I put the APN in the Phone Number field. Some pages want a *99# there, some want the word none (like for my 3650), some are blank. But for T-Mobile and this phone, it wanted the internet2.voicestream.net stuck in there. Worked like a champ. So, the quick settings I used are:

Phone Number: internet2.voicestream.net
Username and Password are both blank
Modem type: Motorola GPRS CID1 (retrieved from the above mentioned page, .ZIP linked here.)

Hopefully this will help someone else and save them some pain. And by the way, T-Mobile. Your help pages suck huge schlong. They are so content free as to be completely worthless.
 

 

Posted: Fri - August 5, 2005 at 01:26 PM          

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