Like most phones these days my Cingular 3125 (aka, HTC StarTrek, aka QTek 8500) uses a combined headphone/charging port preventing the use of regular 3.5mm headphones.

What’s less common is that it’s impossible to get a simple headphone adapter for it. The only adapters I can find have an 80cm long cable ending in a combined volume control/3.5mm socket. When you add in the length of your regular headphones that’s a serious amount of cable!

The 3125 is a pretty decent media player and great for places like the gym. I decided to I’d take the headphones that came with the phone and perform a little surgery to make my own compact adapter

Requirements;

• A 3.5mm Jack from Radio Shack (~$2)
• A soldering iron and basic skills
• Fine wire strippers
• A set of helping hands
• Patience

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In Windows Vista, Windows Mobile Device Center is the new way to create partnerships with mobile devices and synchronize items such as contacts, calendar appointments and email with Outlook.

My first attempts to use Windows Mobile Device Center resulted in a lot of problems. Neither my T-Mobile MDA (aka Cingular 8125, aka HTC Wizard) or my Cingular 3125 (aka HTC StarTrek) would synchronize with Outlook 2003. Instead the synchronization would fail with with an unhelpful error of “The Server Is Busy”.

Some Googling showed me other people with Vista having similar problems, but no solutions, so I thought I’d post the steps that got things working for me.

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