My i-mate SP5 has WLAN, Wi-Fi, whatever you want to call it. It still runs the smartphone edition of Windows Mobile 5, where things are a bit different from the Pocket PC stuff, apparently. I can’t figure out a way to set a static IP for that WLAN connection.

I guess I could probably go edit something in the registry, but so far I’m having a hard time believing there’s actually no way to do this via the normal user interface…

I’m having much less of a hard time believing that I haven’t found it yet, because I remember that this setting was always pretty hard to find (last time I looked was on my iPaq running Windows Mobile 2003). Some things are pretty well hidden in Windows Mobile… it took me quite a while to find out where I could lock the keyboard (hit On/Off, then 4) or how to adjust the ring volume (edit the profile, not possible where you configure the ring tone).

I’m glad I know Sarah Blow and she’s got better eyesight than me, apparently  – okay, and a lot more experience with Windows Mobile. She found the problem I had with ActiveSync immediately and pointed me to a setting in the Connection Settings dialog (File | Connection Settings), called This computer is connected to. This was set to “Automatic”, but there’s also an option “The Internet”. I’m not sure why, but changing this option made the whole problem go away at once… not only the part where the corresponding setting was overwritten on the phone, but also the fact that the proxy settings were reconfigured on every connection. Thanks, Sarah!

I have this nice new i-mate SP5 phone, which runs Windows Mobile 5. My desktop PC, to which that phone is usually connected with ActiveSync, has the ISA Server firewall client installed and the proxy settings in Internet Explorer come from that client automatically. So far, so good.

Now, as soon as I connect the phone to the computer, ActiveSync copies the settings for the proxies over to the phone and also resets the setting My desktop connects to (Start | Settings | Connections | Menu | Advanced | Menu | Options) to “Work”. This breaks my synchronisation, because the phone is supposed to synch to my Exchange server. If I delete the two proxy entries and set My desktop connects to to “The Internet”, everything is fine. But the next time I plug in the phone, the settings are overwritten again by ActiveSync.

How do I tell ActiveSync to stop fiddling with the settings on my phone? Any ideas?