Here’s a little oddity I noticed just a few weeks ago. The Windows Mobile Pocket PC can display a calendar in year view (something not available on the Smartphone AKA Standard Edition). However, while all 12 months are displayed if the Pocket PC is in portrait mode, only 8 months are shown in landscape viewing mode. You can scroll left or right to see the other 4 months. But, still, this seems lame.
Just read the announcement in Jason Langridge’s (Microsoft’s Mr. Mobile) blog about the release of…
Microsoft Office Mobile 6.1: Upgrade for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats
This upgrade lets you work with (read and write) Office 2007 generated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. The upgrade is only for Office Mobile on Windows Mobile 6 devices. So, if you have an earlier generation device, this upgrade is not for you. Note that this upgrade is relatively huge at 6MB. However, the system requirements section says this space can be on a storage card. So, presumably, you can install this on a flash card instead of using up system memory.
The download page also mentions that it is possible to buy Office Mobile 6.1 if your device does not already have it. But, the link provided there just leads to a general Office Mobile information page at this time. I don’t see any link or graphic indicating this purchase can be made today.
Did you know there are 53 weeks in a calendar year? Yep, according to Windows Mobile, that is the case for certain years. This is one of the oldest bugs and has been around since the Windows CE days. So, if you use week numbers for project planning, don’t use the Windows Mobile week numbers as your definitive guide.
NPR launched NPR Mobile at http://m.npr.org/. This mobile friendly site lets you either call in (voice phone) to listen to a show (not recommended IMHO) or listen to an audio stream (great if you have an unlimited data plan or WiFi). I tried it over a relatively slow EDGE network. It took a while for the audio stream to sync up, buffer, and then start playing. But, once it did, the sound quality was good and I didn’t run into any oddities. Navigating through the large and rich NPR site was quite easy on a WiMo6 T-Mobile Dash smartphone.
If put our faith in the results of Google Trends (now updated daily), then we in the U.S. apparently don’t care enough about Windows Mobile to search for it in Google compared to the rest of the world. If you take a look at…
Google Trends results for Windows Mobile
…you’ll find that the U.S. does not even show up in the top 10 world regions (countries) searching for the term Windows Mobile. San Francisco does show up at #4 in the cities list, however. However, if you limit the search region to the U.S., Redmond (home of Microsoft’s main campus) shows up as the #1 city followed by Seattle, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco again in position #4. Huh? Shouldn’t S.F. be #1 for the US if it is #4 worldwide? And, in less that 12 hours, the city rankings changed completely with S.F. dropping out altogether. Personally, I think that Google Trends is not quite firing on all cylinders.
I just read about the MSN Video Beta. So, I figured that surely Microsoft enabled it to work with Windows Mobile smartphones to counter YouTube (which doesn’t play well with WiMo). So, I pointed a Pocket PC Phone Edition at http://next.video.msn.com/ and, well, it turns out I figured wrong. Once again, WiMo users are shut out of a Microsoft product. Not even the login link on the beta page works with WiMo.
And, where is Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility for WiMo anyway? Or, SkyDrive, or multi-page live.com?