The problem
Here’s something that I found annoying a few weeks ago, until I found a hack: when I have particularly long text notes stored in my Outlook tasks and then synchronize them with my Windows Mobile 6-powered O2 Xda Orbit phone/PDA I discover that the notes are truncated. I get this message at the foot of notes:
[Text truncated on device]
Which is really annoying, because I track a lot of projects using these notes, and on a couple of occasions I’ve lost notes that I really needed to refer back to.
The hack
After a search on the Web I discovered on the PocketPC magazine forum that there is a hack to get around this. The forum topic is ironically called “Active Sync MS Mobile 2005 Truncated Contacts Issu”.
- Download and install a Registry Editor for Windows Mobile — I used the demo version of Resco Explorer 2007.
- Open up your Registry and apply this hack: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ActiveSync] “BodyTruncation”=dword:00005000.
- Switch off the screen, then reboot the PDA.
- Wait 3-5 minutes after rebooting to absolutely make sure that the Registry has been updated.
- That’s it … when you next sync your PDA you should be able to sync longer notes.