MobileViews Blog

Year: 2007

  • Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption

    One of Windows Mobile 6’s more interesting new features (and it doesn’t have many) is the ability to encrypt data on a storage card. Ah, but pay close attention to some gotchas in these two blog entries from Microsoft Windows Mobile staffers…

    Jason Langridge’s WebLog – MR Mobile!: Storage card wipe and encryption – What’s the deal?

    Windows Mobile Team Blog (Scott): Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption FAQ

    The scarier info comes from the FAQ above. Why scary? Consider this… If you forget your PIN, the only way to recover is from an escrowed recovery PIN stored on an Exchange Server. But, what if you don’t use Exchange Server? Ah, you see the problem there.

    What if the Windows Mobile device is hard reset? Um, basically the response is tough luck.

    The moral to this story? If you choose to use storage card encryption, make sure you understand all possible consequences and create manual policies and procedures to make sure you can get access to data on storage cards used in devices under your control.

  • Audacity Personal DVR for Pocket PC (freeware)

    Every so often I think about starting a podcast or videocast. This lasts about as long as it takes me to remember how much work it takes to put one together on a regular basis :-)  If I create a mobile themed podcast someday, it would seem appropriate to actually record it on a mobile device once it a while. Here’s a freeware tool for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs that might make this task a little easier.
    Audacity Personal DVR for Pocket PC

  • We Need a Good Non-Microsoft Windows Mobile Sync Solution

    I just read on PocketPCThoughts.com that HP is no longer providing Microsoft Outlook with Windows Mobile devices. You might be thinking that you can simply buy the most inexpensive version of Office 2007 to deal with this issue. But, think again. Head over to the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 edition page and look at what it includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. No Outlook in that package. While only HP has gone down this no-Outlook-with-devices path so far, they do sell a good sized percentage of Windows Mobile devices in the US. One can assume that Dell and other Windows Mobile vendors will not be far behind.
    Your next thought may be that it might be good to sync with a bunch of Google web apps. Unfortunately, while Google has a decent calendar, it does not have a contacts solution. Yahoo!, on the other hand, has decent contacts, calendar, and notes web apps. It even provides a free IntelliSync (now owned by Nokia) utility to sync with its apps. Unfortunately, I had such poor experiences with it years ago that I am afraid to try it again. Yahoo! has been aggressively pursuing mobile users recently. So, I hope they take this opportunity to create a good mobile sync scenario.

    Microsoft is only focusing on Enterprise users with Exchange Servers. But, that leaves out a lot of consumers as well as double digit percentage enterprise users who do not have Exchange Servers. The importance of the desktop OS has been less and less important over the years as we increasingly find ourselves dependent on web-based applications. Even Microsoft’s own confusing Live brand web services acknowledge this trend. So, why are our mobile devices still often tied to a PC-bound Outlook client? What we need is a good non-Exchange Server web-based sync solution that can sync with any mobile device: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, Apple iPhone, whatever.

  • Windows Mobile Screen Formats

    Quick, what is the difference between Windows Mobile Standard and Windows Mobile Professional? Had to think a moment, huh? What? Still need more time. Yeah, that was a great renaming move. But, hey, there’s more to confuse you beside branding changes. There are now 5 possible Pocket PC (oops, “Professional”) screen formats and 3 possible Smartphone (oops, “Amateur”…wait, that’s not right either, “Standard”) screen formats. Microsoft’s Mike Calligaro explains it in all its gory detail in a blog item titled…

    320×320 Revisited

    The article focuses on the 320×320 format introduced for Windows Mobile 6 (based on Windows CE 5… Got a headache yet?) but has a great table placing all the screen possibilities in perspective.

  • Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000: OK, the clip kind of works

    I took another whack at the LifeCam NX-6000 earlier today. I sort of shoved it on the top of a Dell D600 notebook LCD lid and found that the clip slides out a bit (Did I mention there is no useful printed documentation for this thing?). It sort of sat on the cover at an somewhat odd but mostly workable angle. I had to move the LCD cover around a bit to frame objects (me) correctly.

    One other thing became apparent as I played with it for a bit. The NX-6000 becomes pretty hot to the touch after using it for a few minutes. This surprised me. Of course, this is the first webcam I’ve bought in 4 years or so. Do all current generation webcams heat up?

  • Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000: Who Designed the Useless Clip?

    Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 front view Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 notebook clip I bought the relatively new Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 Webcam designed for use with notebook PCs on a whim last week. The 2 megapixel camera and USB microphone components seem to work well. The image is quite a bit better than Intel 0.3 megapixel webcam I bought years ago. There is one little problem with the NX-6000 though. The clip that was presumably designed to clip on top of the LCD lid of a notebook is a fixed size. There isn’t any width adjustment I can see or feel. So, unless your notebook lid is an exact fit for the NX-6000’s clip, the webcam won’t sit on top of your notebook. I can tell you for sure that the clip is way too narrow to use with a Dell Latitude D600 notebook. And, I suspect it will be way too narrow to use with the D620 notebook that will replace it.

    And, why is it that the so-called business notebook models have fewer features than the consumer models? No webcam. No Firewire port. No SD card reader, etc.? But,that is for a different blog rant.