HOWTO: Get around Window's Mobile Space in Password Bug

If you are a user of a Windows Smartphone, listen up. I found an interesting issue with my Audiovox SMT5600 running SMartphone 2003 today and I thought I would bring it to your attention.

If you happen to change your active directory password and have a space in it and you try to sync to the Exchange server, it will fail. Well, actually it fails because there is a new password. The problem lies in the fact that you can't CHANGE the password on the Smartphone because the password field doesn't recognize the # key as a space! And if you hold the # down to load the symbol table... space isn't a valid symbol!

This irritated me this morning, as I was trying to sync this over GPRS while at a breakfast meeting. Was a no go. So when I got back into my office, I went on the hunt for a fix.

Ends up the fix is to not set the password up on the phone, but instead do so on the ActiveSync desktop application. Here is the steps to do that:

1. Start ActiveSync (or double click on it in the tray if its already running)
   
2. Click on the Options toolbar item
   
3. On the Sync Options tab click the Configure button under Server
   
4. Click the Connection button
   
5. Set the username, password and domain there
   
6. Hit Ok to dismiss all the dialog boxes, and push the changes to the smartphone (assuming its connected with the USB cradle)
   

At this point you should be ok and you should be able to sync again. Kinda silly if you ask me that spaces are not recognized in the password field on Windows Mobile. *sigh*

Serves me right for making a complex password. *lol*