Getting EV-DO to work on a Treo 700p

Submitted by doc on Thu, 07/13/2006 - 05:55.

Rather than just append a comment to the end of the last thread, I thought I'd start a new one on a note of success, which may be leverage-able by other customers of Verizon and the Treo 700p.

I not only got the Treo 700p to bridge to the Net over EV-DO from a Mac laptop using a USB tether, but I notice a Linux driver in the collection included in a directory of drivers that came with USB Modem from Mobile Stream. This is an encouraging sign.

I also got the same thing going using Bluetooth.

I also got the Treo to sync with the Mac laptop, where it merged and synchronized calendar and address book entries without any problems. I have not managed to to this with any Palm device since I gave up on them with Sony Clié that now sits in a drawer somewhere.

I also got it to work with my Motorola HS850 "ear snail" bluetooth headset.

Most of that wasn't my doing, really. Credit goes to Kim, the tech support person at Palm. She helped me find and eliminate a lot of old interfering code that had been laying around the Mac laptop. Took about an hour, but it worked.

Note: Mac users may need this download here.

Tested speeds so far aren't great, but we live where cell coverage is marginal in any case.

Over the USB tether, the best speeds I got were about 200Kb down and 100Kb up. Over Bluetooth, best speeds were about 120Kb down and 80Kb up. I also got a bunch of worse readings, before I put the phone in the window.

Not ideal, but not bad. For the hell of it I tried living with it for the next two hours of work. It was okay. Should do for the beach next week.

This fix was a lucky break for the Treo, by the way. I went by the Verizon store to turn it in on the way home today, but found the store was filled with confused customers complaining that their phones wouldn't work. Turned out Verizon had an outage. Some problem with one of their cell towers. "We're working on it," they said to some customers, who passed word on to other customers, who passed word out through the crowd.

Observation: a large percentage of Verizon customers coming to see What The Problem Is were very attractive teenage girls. "What is it with this?" I said to one of the other customers, a young guy who made it his job to inform these girls beyond the call of mere information passing. "I don't know", he said, "but I'm liking the job".

The next step in this project will come at OSCON, week after next, when I will be in the company of alpha Linux hackers, including device driver gurus. I'll get to see some of the same folks when I am at Linux World Expo in San Francisco next month. Sometime between now and then I'll upgrade the ThinkPad to the latest Novell Linux Desktop (SUSE Linux 10.x). And we should be able to get something going with that laptop too.

I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, check out Don Marti's latest on How to get stuff working.

And thanks to all of you, here and in emails and on the phone, for your help with this.