MobileViews Blog

Year: 2007

  • Information Week’s Smartphone Browser Shootout

    Information Week has an article comparing a bunch of smartphones’ browsers at…

    Smartphone Browser Shootout: Palm, BlackBerry, HTC Vs. iPhone

    It’s quite a long article (6 web pages), so I’ll save you some reading and tell you the conclusion is a lot of fawning over the Apple iPhone and a bit of dissing the Treo (Palm OS version), Blackberry, and T-Mobile Wing entrants. Don’t neglect to read the comments at the bottom of one of the pages (the same comments are at the bottom of each web page). They are quite interesting themselves.
    Although I don’t haver an iPhone, I am a huge admirer of it myself. But, is its browser that much better than everything else? I think it may be. I can’t speak for the non-Windows Mobile devices. But, I’ve been a huge critic of Mobile Internet Explorer for years. It has essentially not made any progress in being able to view “normal” sites (sites not reformatted for mobile devices) or even https secure sites well. Microsoft needs to take a hard look at its mobile browser if it wants to stay in the game.

  • Word Mobile File Name Truncation

    Ever notice that Word Mobile truncates file names it creates from the first line of text? Word automatically creates a filename based on the first line of text. Unfortunately, it truncates the name to the first 21 characters of the line (and adds a .doc suffix). This may seem like a lot compared to the good ol’ 8 character DOS file name length, but seems pretty short for a 21st century system. You can, of course, change the filename to avoid name collision. But, I would have preferred having at least 64 or even 128 character file names since I do a lot of writing using Word Mobile which is later copied over to my desktop.

  • MobileViews Facebook Group

    Facebook MobileViews group

    I have no idea what to do on or with my Facebook account (now two days old). But, I created a MobileViews group there anyway. So, if you have a Facebook account, drop by the group (click on the link in the previous sentence) or use Facebook’s mobile friendly website on your phone or PDA and search for a group named mobileviews.

    m.facebook.com

  • everythingiPhone Wiki: An iPhone Website You Can Contribute To

    everythingiPhone wiki

    I don’t have an iPhone. I think what I really want is just an “i“… everything except the Phone part of the iPhone. That said, the iPhone is definitely a cool device. If you have a hankering to contribute to a website focused on it, here’s one to take a look at…

    everythingiPhone

    It is built using the Wetpaint Wiki web service. So, I logged in with my Wetpaint account and, yep, I was allowed to edit pages that weren’t locked.

  • How to you Feel About Windows Mobile Upgrades?

    I was just reading Jason Langridge’s blog (Microsoft’s Mr. Mobile) about a bunch of devices that have had announcements about the availability of an upgrade from Windows Mobile 5 to 6. One of the announcements was for the very cool HTC TyTn. But, apparently the upgrade is only available to HTC e-Club members who claimed someplace in or around the EU as their homebase. If you joined as a US-based member, no update is available. I’m guessing it has something to do with FCC clearances or some other such red-tape type reason. Fair enough.

    But, it made me wonder what people think about regarding Windows Mobile devices and whether or not an upgrade is available. For example, I bought a T-Mobile Dash after the WM6 upgrade was announced for it. But, there is little hope for a WM6 upgrade for my i-Mate K-JAM. And, there is no hope for an upgrade for my T-Mobile SDA. Dell used to be pretty good about providing an upgrade path for at least one generation. HP was pretty spotty. For example, the iPAQ 2215 (the last iPAQ I bought with no plans to ever buy another HP iPAQ device) never had an upgrade path.

    If your device is less than, say 24 months from its release (not necessarily when you purchased it), do you expect an upgrade path for it? Just wondering.

  • imity Pocket Radar?

    Anyone try this imity Pocket Radar? It is a kind of mobile social networking tool that uses Bluetooth on phones to identify nearby people with like interests. Unfortunately, its website does not seem to have any information about which devices (phones) are supported by this J2ME app. And, I’m too lazy to email them this evening 🙂

    It was released as an Open Source project. So, perhaps when I’m not feeling so lazy, I’ll wander over to Google Code and check it out.