Mac Geekery

Answer

The magic of the V551J “hack” was that the driver already existed in OS X, but a newer firmware on the phone changed how it identified itself to the computer.

It’s likely that the V557 is close enough to a V551 that the hack half-works. However, from descriptions like yours, it sounds like the newer phones are expecting Unicode. Unfortunately, iSync doesn’t seem to support such easy flipping of the encoding.

The best bet would be to try cloning the settings from a phone other than the V551. Maybe another similar phone does Unicode (or whatever it is that it wants). I’d give it a shot, but I don’t have a V557.

UPDATE: Apparently this has been seen on some other recent Motos, and there is a key for encoding. Lee wrote in with the following…

Add this to your phone’s stanza:

<key>ServiceProperties</key>
<dict>
    <key>stringEncoding</key>
    <string>UCS2</string>
</dict>