Over the last two days, I finally found a few hours to experiment with my Windows Mobile driven smartphone, an HTC Touch (ok, it's branded, so it's aka MDA Touch).
With Windows, it syncs out-of-the-box, what a surprise, but with linux, things are a bit more interesting. I am running a Debian/Lenny on my laptop, an old Acer Travelmate 732TL, a Pentium III-500 with 256MB RAM. My intention was to enable the laptop to synchronize with the phone through a USB-cable-connection, and to use the phone for internet-connections. I installed the SynCE-suite packages, along with multisync, and tried my luck. Well, what shall I say, it failed. After looking at the SynCE-manpages, I found out why: Windows Mobile smartphones require a special kernel-module to work properly. So I downloaded the module-sources from the SynCE-website, compiled and installed them, and tried again, running the following commands:
modprobe rndis_host
synce-serial-config ttyUSB0
synce-serial-start
pls
This time, it worked. I got my directory-listing. An ifconfig showed me this:
ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:192.168.131.102 P-t-P:192.168.131.201 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:994 (994.0 B) TX bytes:119 (119.0 B)
The two ip-addresses are the default-values of windows-mobile-phones. As far I as can tell, one should leave them as they are, since it does not seem to work with different ip-addresses (at least not for me, that is). Of course, you are free to try and comment on this 
.
Internet-Connections
The next thing I tried now was to establish an internet-connection through the smartphone. From the phone's manual I knew there was a program for a shared internet-connection, where the telephone connected itself into the internet by using GPRS/EDGE, and acted as a router/nameserver for the connected computer. I activated that program from the programs-folder (in german, this program is called "Internetfreigabe"), selected "USB" for the connection to the computer, and the GPRS-profile, and then let the program connect to the internet. Though the telephone complained about ActiveSync being "active", it connected me to the internet. An ifconfig gave me now this output:
rndis0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 80:00:60:0f:e8:00
inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::8200:60ff:fe0f:e800/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:8050 Metric:1
RX packets:59 errors:53 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:102 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:6848 (6.6 KiB) TX bytes:19488 (19.0 KiB)
I tried to ping my server using its ip the first time, and its name the second, and both worked fine: I was connected. However, further experiments showed that simply connecting the phone and loading the modules, and then activating the internet-connection on the phone would not work. And rndis0-interface would show up, yes, but it will look like this:
rndis0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 80:00:60:0f:e8:00
inet addr:169.254.2.2 Bcast:169.254.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:8050 Metric:1
RX packets:12 errors:9 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:48 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1124 (1.0 KiB) TX bytes:7168 (7.0 KiB)
Take a good look at the ip-address, you will notice that it is different from the first two ifconfig-dumps, which used the same ip-adress. A connection will not be possible this way, it has to be set-up and established through synce-serial-config and synce-serial-start before.
Though I have installed Evolution, multisync, and several plugins/modules for both programs, I was not yet able to synchronize my telephone's address-book, calender, todo-list etc. with the laptop. May be Debian/lenny uses packages which are not as up-to-date as I would need it, I have take a further look into this, still. The most important two things, anyhow, being able to transfer files between telephone and laptop, as well as establishing an internet-connection for the laptop by using the telephone as a router/modem, are working now, and quite without an effort, too.
I will continue with my smartphone-experiments, so stay tuned!
