Customer Reviews

Motorola Mobile Phonetools 2.0 w/ USB Bluetooth Adapter

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Unlike the user manual says for the Motorola V710 AND the Mobile Phone Tools 2.0 manual says AND Motorola's website says, this product is incompatible for the V710. Do not purchase this product if you want to transfer multimedia files (MP3, pictures, video, etc) between the phone and your computer. Verizon installed it's own software on the phones to lock out that capability so that it's subscribers were forced to email their pictures to themselves (for $ of course). If you are in the market for multimedia transfer from your V710 phone and your computer, go to Motorola's website, and bring up the V710. Click on accessories, and you will see a San Disk Transflash Card (64MB or 128MB) and a San Disk Card Reader available. The card inserts into the tiny port on top of your phone and you can save all of your pics or vids to that. Then, remove the card, plug it into the reader and plug that into your USB port on your computer. You can now transfer anything you want.

After noting on both the Amazon and the Motorola websites that this adapter IS compatible with the Motorola V710 phone, I haplessly purchased this item.

In ten hours of troubleshooting, I was able to get the correct drivers installed to enable BlueTooth. This in itself was quite a project on XPsp2.

Although the BlueTooth drivers were installed correctly, as demonstrated by a number of working BlueTooth functions like 'pairing' the phone with the computer, I was never able to get past the 'Initializing' screen on the simulated phone display. In several hours of troubleshooting this, I came across the following note buried on Motorola's website:

"NOTE: Currently, the Motorola V710phone [sic] distributed in North America supports Mobile Phone Tools only through a USB cable connection. A solution to support Mobile Phone Tools over a Bluetooth connection should be available later this year."

The note itself is undated. With only a few days left in 2004, I am left wondering what year is `this' year.

It would be nice to have been told this before buying the thing. Now I have to go through the hassle of returning it.

I gave this item two stars instead of one because for all I know the actual Phone Tools may be fantastic; I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. The problem, of course, is that I'll never know if the Phone Tools are any good. I couldn't get the software to initialize.

Incidentally, I could not find anywhere in the Internet the USB cable compatible with the V710 which was mentioned in Motorola's note. Admittedly, I have not scoured the web for this cable, but my first fifteen minutes of searching proved fruitless.

I hope this information helps some other user out there.

I bought this to use with my V551 (basically the made-for-Cingular V600, only a few slight differences). My gamble paid off, and it DOES work with the V551, as well as several other models added with version upgrades downloaded for free from Motorola. Works as advertised after finally setting it up properly.

The setup difficulties account for the missing star. It was a bit annoying having to immediately update the software with 3 or 4 successive downloads, but I was glad that Motorola at least made these upgrades available for free. Once it was initially working, I could only synchronize my contacts and calendar entries, but I soon found that it was my firewall preventing media transfers. If you have problems, remember that Bluetooth does count as a network connection, so you have to OK it with your firewall. Unfortuately, this isn't easy information to find in the manual or Motorola FAQs.

After upgrades and setup, the adapter and software finally work perfectly as advertised. No problem synchronizing with Outlook (I still have 2000), and media transfers (pictures, ringtones, etc.) work well. I especially like the included tools to automatically trim pictures to fit as wallpaper and to quickly transform sound files (including my MP3s!) into ringtones.

The product does work well when set up correctly with compatible phones. I believe that most Motorola Bluetooth phones are compatible, with the exception of the V710 (mostly Verizon's fault, not the adapter's), but try to make sure your model is supported. You heard it from me that it can work with the V551.

WARNING: Do not buy Mobile Phone Tools version 2. Motorola tech support has informed me that it does not support the RAZR V3. Motorola's Mobile Phone Tools version 3 (SKU: 98654H) is supposed to, though. You'll probably need to go to the Motorola website to get this, since Amazon doesn't seem to have it.

I am a fairly advanced computer user, so if I'm having so much trouble with this software and bluetooth connection, I can't imagine how any normal person could figure it out. But worse, the software IS CLEARLY DELETING VALUABLE CONTACT INFORMATION FROM MY OUTLOOK!

To start, users of Windows Service Pack 2 have to do a manual work around to get the bluetooth to work. They explain this once you dig deep at the Motorola support site. But the instructions are terrible and only after careful guessing was I successful.

But that's when the real fun starts. For several days, it appeared everything was running just fine -- then everything stopped working. I even upgraded to the newest 3.0 version, but still no luck. Only after a difficult system restore and reinstallation did things work again. No idea why.

That's when I noticed the biggest problem of all. After doing a sync, the software was DELETING business addresses and removing the street address from home addresses. Crazy since that information doesn't even sync to the phone. I can't explain it, but I was fortunate enough to have a backup of my data and try again. Sure enough, it did it again.

I must note that I also run Plaxo to keep my contacts up to date. Perhaps there is some conflict with that software, but considering millions of people use it, it shouldn't matter. But I saw big problems even after uninstalling Plaxo.

This software is not ready for primetime and should be pulled. It's just not worth risking the loss of your contact data!

When I bought my Motorola Razr V3, the Phonetools came up under related items. This led me to believe the software was compatible with my phone. It isn't. It does specify the software only works on the V600 under the Product Desciption which I should have looked at. The Phonetools for every other Motorola phone is available elsewhere. Just a heads up.

The package is very simple and does work as advertised - UNLESS your carrier is Verizon. The firmware they put on prevents you from getting pictures/video/ringtones on or off the phone so that you have to use their messenging services to email them off. Phone book and Calendar still seem to work correctly...

1) Bad Product. Mind you I am with verizon so my Razor is also crippled. Only the address book works. And I only tried one way. Someone else's reveiew stated this software deleted their addresses when syncing. The calendar sort of half worked. Literally. It transferred about half of my appointments. 2) Insanely bad tech support. One week of phone tag. Many unreturned calls. I sent them logs per request but never got feedback. I went to Verizon and spent hours reburning my firmware per their request. I asked for supervisors and only got one on my third request. The first two never returned my calls. FInally they spilled the beans. The software was designed to only transfer a subset of appointments. Recurring appointments are skipped. No message , no warning , nothing to be done. Then they insisted that the phone itself doesn't do recurring appointments. This is clearly false as I use that feature every single day with the phones keypad. When I mentioned this fact they they hung up.

ALternatives : Bitpim ( Free ) & DataPilot ( Good Service ).