Hi,

I recently got a Handspring Visor Platinum, which is really a nice
little PDA runnign PalmOS.

Before I had a "normal" Visor, which uses a slightly older PalmOS
version.

The main difference seems to be that hotsyncing is now incredibly
timing-critical to do. I must press the Hotsync-Button on the cradle
and within a short fraction of a second after the "ucom0 at uvisor0"
message on the console I must start the pilot-xfer (or similar)
program to transfer a database or application to the palm.

With the old Visor I could press the HotSync button and have some
seconds time to start the syncing application.

It seems that the Visor Platinum (and from what I've heard the Prism,
too, and most likely the Edge as well) expects an immediate response
from the Desktop after it initiaes a Hotsync-Operation. If that
response is only a tenth of a second (or thereabouts) too late, it
merely times out after a few seconds claiming that the connection to
the desktop could not be established.

Unfortunately however, I cannot start the synching software before I
press the button, because it only tells me ttyU0 ("ucom0") is not
configured which is true, since USB devices are configured at run-time
and the Handspring HotSync-Cradle only attaches when the button is
pressed.

How do we escape from this vicious circle?

About one time in five I get the timing right manually and am able to
transfer files to the PDA. But it's still very frustrating, and I
cannot see a reason for the protocol change on Handspring's side.

I'm running standard NetBSD-1.5.1/i386.


Regards,

Bernd

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD: We don't negotiate with terrorists.
		-- Miles Nordin