I'm just sick and tired of the poor signal strength I'm getting. Is there anything I can do to get better reception in my home or in my car? I could have sworn I saw some segment on Screen Savers when they were looking at some guy's teched-out car which included a signal booster.

My other question is a bit of an odd one. I found an old HPC that I used about 6 years ago. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if there's any way to use the phone to access the internet from my WinCE1.0 HPC. I have an SE P800, which has a USB data cable available. I could then get a USB PC card for the HPC. The trouble, I suppose would be software and driver support. I guess the other possibility is that both devices have ir ports. Could that work?

On my last phone, I found much better reception with a powered, external antenna that clipped onto a window and powered off the cigarette lighter. I was spending a lot of time in the mountains of NC, and it probably doubled the number of places I could get a signal. YMMV.

-jk

The USB data cable is actually a USB -> serial dongle. You can buy serial only versions of the cable.

In my experience it has depended on first on the phone and then on the carrier.

I really like the sony-ericsson UI and interface but with the phones I have used (T68i T610) reception have been much worse than competing nokias or motorolas. They say that the new T637 and newer P 9 something have fixed some reception problems.

I've never had any trouble with any of the Ericssons or Nokias I've had. Signal is generally good around here though so that might be why.

Dignan, don't you know you can buy this antenna booster sticker? You just apply it to your battery pack and clip it back on. They say it boosts the signal by a large percentage!

Of course! It's so easy!

The problem with my signal is that I'm just on the edge of the nearby cells. If I stand by the window of my bedroom, I can get 1 bar, but sometimes it cuts down to zero and I lose the call. I'm hoping there's a solution for this. I don't mind if it's wired to the phone (I can use my headset for talking), I just need it to work.

SE sells this, but I don't know if that will work in either situation (car or home).

When Motorola was selling those monster gray analog flip phones you could get an, in car, hands free, adaptor, with a 5 watt booster in the trunk. I haven't seen anything like that lately.

If you get a good reception if you hang out the window then yeah, that cable along with an external antenna would help. Otherwise no.
It's not really useful in your house unless you're willing to install car handfree kit indoors.

Boosters for GSM are available here. I was trying to work out a good setup with them for my new house. Emails were answered very promptly and were well written. In the end, I just decided to forward all unreachable calls to my house phone (I have no cell service there) instead of nearly $1,000 worth of boosters and repeaters.

Depending on the type of service (bloody North American mishmash..) your provider offers, you may be able to improve things radically by getting a newer handset with more "bands".

I went from "fringe" here to full-bar simply by swapping my dual-band handset for a tri-band handset that doubled the number of cells it can talk to.

Cheers

Does it also prevent alien mind control or is that still a seperate device

I think they will give you the proper SE adapter and the kits come with an antenna if you tell them what phone you have. I think the home kit actually comes with two different kinds. If your car antenna has the same connector I guess you could use that too.

I was going to plug their repeater into their booster, so the subject of cell antenna adaptors never came up.