The Data Connection

Ok, so last weekend you could hardly pry the thing out of my hands, it was great, sleek, black, and shiny. Didn't take me too long to get most of it figured out, but I'm going to skip straight to what is the most important issue. It's probably not limited to the Touch Pro and probably not just the HTC handsets - but it's worth noting.

The data connection, the one you are paying for by the megabyte, can be automatically activated by any of a number of on-board programs!!!!

Let me spell that out, software that comes with the phone, preinstalled, can automatically dial the data connection, and retrieve/send data - that will cost you money!!

Common offenders are: Active Sync, the email client, TouchFLO's Weather client.

There are no warnings either - all that happens is the little 'cellular radio' icon changes to a data symbol (either two arrows over the signal meter, or a 'H', or a 'G' or a '3G') that's it!

I tried a whole load of things to stop this from happening, here are a few:

• turn off data connection, you'd think this would do it wouldn't you? NO, the nice switch in the TouchFLO system just gets flipped back to ON
  
• remove password from connection details - results in very irritating pop up constantly asking the password
• remove connection from connections system - results in connection being dialed anyway
• Install connection monitor SPB GPRS Monitor - no use this just monitors, I already know it's dialing, thanks!
• Install GB-Softtweak - no use, only has option to force Always On, which is bloody useless, unchecking this option does not force Always Off either.

So what to do?
I finally found a program call "Pocket Toolman", this allows the disabling of both WAP and GPRS, and this actually works, you can have all your programs set to auto-sync and they can't dial the connection; but you can activate it when needed from the TouchFlo connections setting page.

So it only took me a week, but this area of slight irritation is now solved - to be honest this is something that should be in there from the beginning

Pocket Toolman is free; more information and a download are available here
http://pockettoolman.blogspot.com/