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Dear all

Having had my P800 for nearly two months now I've come to depend on it more and more and was singing it's praises to anybody who would stop long enough to hear them. I make about 8 flights per month & spend at least 10 nights per month away from home so anything that combines the functionality of my old Revo, a phone and an MP3 player gets my vote.

There were definite glitches with the P800 in the early days, including:

(i) trying to paste a repeat event from 31/3 to 1/4 would crash the diary program with:

Program Apparc serverthread reason code kern-exec reason number 0

(ii) or sometimes it would just throw up:

E32USER-CBASE Reason number 42

I didn't ever get a satisfactory reason about this, so I just avoided "pushing" the phone into this state.

After the initial "new user" behaviour, my daily backups and sync's (with Outlook) felt a little unneccessary for a device that now started to work so seamlessly, so i started to do them weekly, in the Cradle linked to a new Compaq Evo laptop running W2000.

Last Friday, after starting the backup normally, it seemed to take forever, but finally indicated (on the laptop) that the backup was complete. On the phone however, there was a file corrupted message (nothing else was indicated, no 10 sec reset or anything).

I waited for a few moments and called a friend who also has one and he had not seen this before. Since I was unsure what to expect I started a second backup, to try and preserve whatever situation the phone had got itself into and then work back from there.

It wasn't an option, and so I reluctantly had to take the phone out of it's cradle to see what "file corrupted" really meant.

Uuuughh - I was nearly sick

BAD BAD STUFF

> 320 contacts in the phonebook were gone

> All my speed dials were wiped (no number or associated photo was on there)

> All my Jotter files had been wiped

>All my tasks had gone

CURIOUS STUFF

> My user greeting was still there

> All the folders for the Contact categories (Family, Hotels, Airlines etc) were still there, although the numbers had been removed

> All the folders for the Tasks categories were still there, although the tasks themselves had been removed

> All the folders for the Jotter categories were still there, although the jottings themselves had been removed

I quickly checked my laptop

> The 320 contacts that SHOULD have been in Outlook contacts were reduced to 7 ! This I could not work out - NO contacts on the phone but 7 on the laptop? - It doesn't make any sense.

>None of the future appointments that were on the phone had transferred successfully, however ALL of the old repeat activities that I had deleted on the phone 3 backups ago were now back on the P800.

What has happened? I will (hopefully) restore from a week-old backup the contacts, although it means overwriting my diary and putting it back a week. This is a small price to pay to get my numbers back to where they were, but I absolutely CANNOT BELIEVE that in 2003 I should be stitching together the remnants of 2 or 3 backups to get a very expensive device to resemble the data-state it was in 3 days ago.

The P800 is too expensive to justify this, and if the platform cannot back-up safely then I would recommend "buyer beware". With such problems for a normal PC-based backup strategy I now believe that this "over the air" synchronization that is mentioned as a feature is just hype.

Currently I am back to using it just as a phone. When anybody rings me and it gives me the "Add to contacts?" option, I really wonder what the point is, since I cannot be sure when it will next let me down.

I never ever experienced the cold icy fear of losing all the numbers in my Nokia 6210 and the P800 opens up a far far worse scenario, given that you can centralise so much of your life on it.

This situation happened to me just before I had to make a flight, so I had to hastily jot down on paper any numbers I had in the office, and then get my secretary to sms me all the numbers I would need on the trip I was about to make. This had been information that 10 minutes earlier was in the P800.

If anybody out there (Sony Ericsson Tech support perhaps?) can give me a definitive reason (and a fix) why this happened with a "will never happen again" guarantee then I would like to remain a P800 owner.

However paging through the countless reviews of the phone on the web made it clear that nearly everybody focussed on the "wow" factor of having a phone AND an mp3 AND a camera in one device, and not the stability of the platform it is based on.

When the realities of trying to run a proper business life on this phone are examined, I wonder if Sony have tried to do too much. I would happily forgo the camera (awful resolution) and the MP3 player (no software) for a phone that didn't fail it's owner in the fundamental rule of any device - DON"T LOSE THE DATA.

My phone apps are:

Phone R1D
Bluetooth R2C
Organiser R1F01
CDA R2A01

If anybody else has experienced a similar shock with the P800 please comment to this thread or mail me offline at: mmcg1@bluemail.ch

Thanks

Mike
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Posted: 2003-03-31 01:04:00
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This is a sad story!

I have had a P800 for 3 months now and it has never lost it's entire information store up to now. However, I do have 2 colleagues who have had the P800 format itself and loose all data.

My advice is make a backup often.

However, what sounds strange is that your Outlook seems to have lost much of it's information. That to me sounds like something happened to your Contact list before you synced last time and made a backup.

This is a very well put post, have you tryed sending it to SonyEricsson Tech support?
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Posted: 2003-03-31 01:39:00
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Merkur

Thank you for your comments. Since this happened on friday before an afternoon flight, tomorrow will be the first possibility to reach Sony on this.

However I totally agree with your comment on backups, as it is something I adhered to religiously on my revo, series 5, series 3, all pc's etc, and most recently my P800.

BUT - How often does anybody actually TEST the backup (ie RESTORE it?).

I am sitting here at my laptop at nearly 2:00am and guess what? I have made 7 attempts to restore the week-old data to the phone and I keep getting the following message:

"Restore failed to complete

It is recommended that you try to restore the phone again.

Make sure the phone is properly connected.
Please turn the phone on in order to make and receive calls again".

"

I have switched off bluetooth and IR but despite quadruple-checking all connections (which can "see" my P800 on Explorer), I cannot get a restore.

When did you last try to restore a backup to your P800? Are you SURE it backs up correctly.

I think that your friends experience serves to only support my growing fears about the P800. How many posts will we see in the months to come of people crying over crashed phones and unrestoreable backups?

At 2:00am on the Monday before a week of conferences in 3 countries, I want to cry for buying this piece of rubbish - hardly the experience that Sony intended and I expected when I handed over my money 8 weeks ago.

Ah well!, - onto Restore attempt 8.

Best wishes,

Mike
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Posted: 2003-03-31 02:20:00
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Update to this "saga"

I couldn't get ANY backup to restore correctly. I spoke to SE in Zurich this morning and a very helpful tech support guy said "throw away the install CD!" Apparently the version 1.1 of PC Suite that ships with the P800 can cause...CORRUPT BACKUPS !!!!!

He could not have stressed any stronger that ALL users should have taken PC Suite version 1.3.1 off the SE website and installed it and backed-up from this version.

SE Switzerland are currently investigating my situation but I think all P800 users should be warned that in addition to any phone-related issues, the PC backups you could be doing may well be unreadable during a restore attempt.

I hope what happened to me doesn't happen to anybody else.

Best of luck

Mike
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Posted: 2003-03-31 12:33:00
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Hi Mike,
For what it's worth, I too had a few problems with my P800 (actually due to rogue software though - no data loss).

Anyway, I wanted to restore my machine back to the last good backup and had loads of problems with the restore failing. I realised that the problem could be to do with the fact that the machine is in a poor state of partial restore and thought about returning it to its factory state. I thought that if I could get it back to factory state, I could resync my machine and reinstall the apps if the backup failed again.

So I used the hidden P800 menu trick (make sure the flip is up and the keylock off, then jog up, press *, jog down, jog down, press * , jog down, press *) and then I used the format C drive option. After a while it gives you various messages about returning the machine to original state.

Then I tried to restore the last known good backup (the one that failed before) and suprise suprise....it worked... my restore worked, although I found out that it must be on a freshly formatted machine.

You might want to try that, although please dont do this unless it is a last resort, I only did it because I got the point of having to reinstall stuff and then resync and I realise that the resync for you with lost contacts etc is difficult.

One more thing, I too used ver 1.3.1 of the PC Sync software..and I've read a lot about people that have had problems with the older version backups..

Good luck.
Simon

[ This Message was edited by: vowless on 2003-03-31 23:13 ]
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Posted: 2003-04-01 00:07:00
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Hi Simon

I don't seem to be able to replicate what you describe. How exactly does the format work?
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Posted: 2003-04-03 03:09:00
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I have had the same problem as you, but with version 1.3.1...
You should be able to restore your backups, if both the drives are freshly formatted.

Use the method described by Vowless to enter the service menu. Then select menu 5, Format Internal Disk. When done, make sure you also format the memory stick using the Format Disk option in Control Panel. This is what made the difference in my case, since somehow the format of the stick was corrupted. Now you are ready to restore your phone...

Good luck!
Stefan
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Posted: 2003-04-05 17:15:00
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Hi Mike,
SBC_dk is correct, the format disk option is used to clear down any data and settings you have on the P800 and effectively return it to factory defaults.

I didn't actually format my memory stick, but I did format the C drive (the internal memory) and basically once you have used the secret (or not so secret now!! ) menu, choose the option 5 to format the internal disk, follow the menu options through (cant quite remember them and dont want to reformat my machine) but they make pretty normal sense (like do you want to format - are you really sure etc), the machine will eventually be complete and require restarting. Once done, you will have a machine which is as though it left the factory.

For me, that was the key to being able to restore the machine, and several older backups worked fine. However, dont try to restore the machine with out first formatting the disk. There have been some comments about ensuring enough memory etc, but I found they didn;t work suucessfully.

As a last resort, I had the chance to rebuild the machine by reinstalling all my apps and resynchronising from scratch. So that was always my final option, just in case this didn't work..

I'm now more careful with which applications to install and take regular backups...

Good luck
Simon
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Posted: 2003-04-05 23:44:00
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