I cannot believe I did not know about this until yesterday. You all probably know that you can search through contacts and recent calls by typing a string on a Windows Mobile smartphone keyboard. Type O-G-A and my full name shows up as part of the search results of people in your contacts list, for example. But, I didn’t realize this also works with Email. In the example illustrated above, I tapped the keyboard letters P-B. As you can see, the email messaging client found this two letter sequence in both the From and Subject lines and highlighted the string. I am kind of embarrassed that I didn’t know about this useful email filtering feature until now. I wonder when it first appeared? It works on both the Standard (non-touch) and Professional (touch) Editions of Windows Mobile.
Author: todd
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Back to Basics: Email Key Sort
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Back to Basics: Which Idiot at Microsoft Decided Anniversary Events Should Alarm at Midnight?
Windows Mobile smartphones (Standard Edition) can be actually powered down. However, Pocket PCs (Professional & Classic Editions) are not really off unless the battery is pulled out. So, if you have an anniversary event (birthday, wedding anniversary) set in contacts, it wakes up at midnight and sets of the audible alarm (if that is turned on which is usually the case). I’d like to know which braindead idiot at Microsoft decided this is a desirable behavior.
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Google Translate for iPhone
I wonder how much of Google’s iPhone focused web-apps will work directly on Android based phones? In any case, Google Translate for iPhone looks great in my quick tests (with my limited knowledge of anything beyond English, and some would say, even there…). Just head over to……on your iPhone or iPod touch. It redirects you to google.com/m/translate. The first URL results in the desktop page if you try it on a Windows Mobile smartphone. The second, direct, URL just throws a WiMo smartphone to Google’s simplified mobile home page. Once again, Windows Mobile gets no web-love. Sigh. Glad I bought an iPod touch to see the cool stuff Windows Mobile users are missing out on.
You can read the announcement for this new iPhone web service on Google’s blog at…
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Watch NBCOlympics.com Video Clips on Your Phone (iPhone too!)
Everyone probably knows about the Microsoft Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics.com site. But, did you know you can access its information AND videos on your smartphone too? Yep, head over to…I tested video playback on my iPod touch and found that it works fine. So, iPhone users will not be left out of the Olympics this summer.
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HTC S710 (Vox) Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Firmware Update
I noticed there was an update for my HTC S710 (Vox) Windows Mobile smartphone on the HTC Support site. The upgrade does NOT move the phone to 6.1. However, based on the changes in version numbers, the update may be fairly important. My ROM version went from 1.15.405.2 to 1.34.405.1. The radio version went from 4.1.13.37_02.83.90 to 4.1.13.54_03.10.90. Windows Mobile itself remained at version 6.0 (not 6.1).
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WordPress for iPhone Changed the Way I Blog
It isn’t often that a mobile software tool completely changes the workflow of something I’ve done for a long time or changes the way I think about performing a desktop task. But, the free WordPress for iPhone app has managed change the way I create blog items and the way I think about my blogging workflow.My typical workflow for writing about smartphone software or web services used to work like this: I would write a note about the topic using something like Word Mobile or Word Excel on my Window Mobile smartphone. Then, I would use Ilium Software’s free (and still awesome) Screen Capture utility to capture a screen. Then, I would either email the BMP image file (not a good idea because BMP files are relatively large and I am on a relatively slow EDGE network) or wait until I get back to my desktop and copy the files from the smartphone to the PC using ActiveSync. Then, I’d convert the BMP file to a GIF or JPG file to reduce the file size, upload it to this blog, and finally start writing the blog entry.
WordPress for iPhone on my iPod touch has simplified this Rube Goldberg-like process to this: Capture a screen on the iPod touch, write a blog entry using WordPress for iPhone, attach the screen shot, post it to my blog.
Sometimes, there is another step or two added to this. For example, this blog entry and the one that preceded it both started on my iPod touch. However, I saved the starter blog entry and the screen shot as a draft instead of publishing right away. Then, I moved to a desktop computer and finished writing the blog there since it is easier to type with a full keyboard.
This has really made blogging here much simpler and faster. And, it is probably why you may have noticed that I post more items about the iPhone/iPod touch here than I did in the past. Now, if only there were a WordPress for Windows Mobile, I would be a lot happier since typing on a Windows Mobile physical thumb keyboard is still a lot easier and faster than typing on the iPod touch’s on-screen virtual keyboard.