Has Anybody Else Tried Mobile MSN through Sprint PCS on a Treo?

I have a client with a Treo 650 smartphone using Sprint PCS. He is the
president of a local accounting firm. We have signed him up for
mobile.msn.com so that he can keep track of his calendar and contacts when
he is out of the office. The system knows he is using Sprint PCS (for
example, when you click "Contact Us" on the Help screen, it goes to Sprint
Tech Support!).

From a PC-based browser, we have customized his layout to only show his
Calendar and Hotmail. However, when he uses the phone to log on, he sees a
generic layout with News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, etc.

After talking with Sprint people (and it's obviously not their problem), we
changed the url to http://mobile.msn.com/wml (WML being Wireless Markup
Language). Now the initial screen layout is correct, but when we click on
the Calendar link, we are sent to a page with the address
mobile.msn.com/pocket which displays a "Page not found" error message. In
other words, the WML page is being driven by a program that knows who the
customer is and what his desired screen layout is, but the links that appear
on that page are WRONG! He doesn't have a Pocket PC-based device.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Microsoft has not finished coding
their Mobile MSN support for Sprint PCS phones. We can't find any Help link
that will allow us to send this trouble call to Microsoft. As I said, the
Contact Us link goes to Sprint, and when I tried to send a message using a
form-based page based in the MSN.COM page, it kept coming back to ask me for
a detailed description of the problem (I had entered a five-paragraph
description, but apparently the script that drives the form didn't see it).
This kind of shoddy performance is not something I would expect from the
world's leading software company.

Phil Somerset
ENDS, LLC
[email protected]

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› See More: Has Anybody Else Tried Mobile MSN through Sprint PCS on a Treo?

In article <[email protected]>,
"Phil Somerset" <[email protected]> writes:
> I have a client with a Treo 650 smartphone using Sprint PCS. He is the
> president of a local accounting firm. We have signed him up for
> mobile.msn.com so that he can keep track of his calendar and contacts when
> he is out of the office.
[snip]

You *seriously* expected a Microsoft service to work cleanly with a
non-Microsoft product? Excuse me, and no offense intended, really,
but what colour is the sky on your planet?

--
Jim Seymour | "There is no expedient to which a man will not
[email protected] | go to avoid the labor of thinking."
http://jimsun.LinxNet.com | - Thomas A. Edison

Phil Somerset wrote:

> This kind of shoddy performance is not something I would expect from the
> world's leading software company.

But MICROS~1 *specializes* in doing things half-assed...

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / [email protected] / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"