Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Inside Windows Vista: Windows Mobile Device Center and Sync Center
Posted by Kris Kumar in "ARTICLE" @ 05:00 AM
Control Panel Enhancements for the Mobile World
Figure 9: The redesigned Control Panel. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (115KB)
The Windows Mobile Device Centre is buried under the Additional Options.
Figure 10: The Additional Options. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (75KB)
The Additional Options hosts the Windows Mobile Device Center link. Every time the device is connected the Windows Mobile Device Center screen pops up, but in case you close it, then Additional Options is the place to go to re-launch the screen. The Mobility Center link is most likely for laptops and tablet PCs, when I tried to access the link Windows complained that the link is only available on portable devices, then why do they bother showing the link?
Figure 11: The help on Quick Connect. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (142KB)
If you read the help on Quick Connect, it talks about clicking a Quick Connect link on the Windows Mobile Device Center screen. But as you can see from the screen shots there was no such link. Either the help documentation is out of date or a feature is still under construction.
Figure 12: When a Windows Mobile device is not connected, then the Windows Mobile Device Center link leads to the ActiveSync style Connection Settings screen, which states "Waiting for a device to connect" at the top. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (86KB)
Figure 13: Every time a Windows Mobile device is connected, the user will be greeted with this splash screen. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (20KB)
Sync Center
Figure 14: The Sync Center. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (61KB)
The Sync Center is the hub for bringing all the portable device synchronization tasks under one location. It does not provide the sync tools, each portable device will provide some kind of special plug-in that lets its user perform the synchronization and view the errors from within the Sync Center. As mentioned earlier, I could not find means to establish a partnership with my Windows Mobile Smartphone or to specify which Outlook data I would like to be synchronized whenever I connect my Smartphone with Vista.
Figure 15: I installed ActiveSync 4.1 and tried to run it. Notice the error message is getting chopped off, that is definitely a bug. Click on the image for the high resolution image. (28KB)
Since the Sync Center does not provide the sync tools and is merely a hub for all the sync related tools, I decided to install ActiveSync 4.1. The application installed but when I tried to launch the program, I got the above error message. This definitely leads me to believe that there are some more pieces or maybe an ActiveSync 5.0 or ActiveSync 4.2, that will be released with Windows Vista to enable Windows Mobile device synchronization.
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