MobileViews Blog

Author: todd

  • 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.

  • Call History Left-Right Nav Key Use

    Try this on a Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone or Pocket PC (Standard or Professional Editions). Bring up your Call History list. Navigate to a call to/from a person who you know to have multiple phone numbers in your Contacts list. Then press the Left or Right navigation. It should rotate through the phone numbers for that contact. You can settle on one of the alternate numbers and call it instead of the number originally called from.

    It worked on WM6 devices but did not seem to work on a WM5 Pocket PC Phone Edition.

  • Pseudo-Sync Word Mobile & Word Excel with Google Docs

    Google Docs

    I’ve had issues with ActiveSync and WMDC in the past like many other people. So, I’m always looking for ways to avoid using AS (in Windows XP) and WMDC (in Windows Vista). If you are of a like opinion, you might find Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Docs might be a big help in moving Word Mobile and Excel Mobile files around.

    Just mail the Word or Excel file to your Gmail account. It will auto-recognize the file type and give you the option to open the file in Google Docs. There is a brief period needed to transform the file to HTML. After that is done, you can edit the file in a Google Docs web app. If you want it back on your Pocket PC or Smartphone, just email it back to an address your Windows mobile device knows about.

    Google Docs doesn’t understand every Word or Excel formatting feature. But, if you keep your file formatting simple, you should be able to get a lot of mileage using your Windows Mobile device with Google Docs. And, you don’t need ActiveSync or WMDC at any point.

    BTW: Google can display PowerPoint files on the web too. Editing is supposed to be in the works, but I don’t know when that feature will be available.

  • HTC Advantage Flash Photos

    HTC Advantage 7500 flash photo

    A number of Windows Mobile camera phones have so-called camera flashes. But, that is a misnomer for the ones I’ve seen so far. They do not flash for a brief period to light up a photograhpic subject like real camera flashes. Instead, they light up and stay lit up until you manually turn off the light. In effect, they are flashlights. These camera flashlights do not have much of an effective distance. They do not do much good on objects more than a foot or two away. They can be useful sometimes, however. The photo on the left was taken in a relatively well lit restaurant using available light. The photo on the right was taken a moment later with a HTC Advantage 7500’s Pocket PC Phone Edition’s flash turned on. I think I instintively moved the Advantage a bit closer to get the light to shine as best as possible on the ice cream.

  • Yahoo! Go 2.0 for Windows Mobile

    Yahoo! Go 2 Wide Beta Release

    The earlier releases of Yahoo! Go 2 for Windows Mobile only worked on a small number of devices. However, if you visit the new…

    Yahoo! Go 2.0 page for Windows Mobile devices

    … you will find a huge number of supported Windows Mobile PDAs and Smartphones. I installed it on a Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (Pocket PC) and a Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. The over-the-air installation directly to the device using the direct installation site…
    http://us.get.go.yahoo.com

    …went smoothly. The initial application startup was very slow. I suspect it is because Yahoo! Go attempts to cache as much as possible before displaying the initial screen. What they should do is cache 2 or 3 of the most used initial features (probably email, maps, and news), display the screen, then continue caching other content. The app seemed much faster than previous beta releases. However, they retain the same non-intuitive (from a Windows Mobile user point of view) GUI interface. Menus are navigated from the bottom-up instead of the top-down menus that most WM apps use. The side-scrolling menu on a Pocket PC is even more puzzling because choices are relative rather than direct: If you tap an icon 2 icons away from the center icon under focus, the menu just moves 1 icon in the direction your tap occured instead of selecting the icon you actually tapped.

    The mostly text http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ web site is much faster to use and as a lot more content available. But, Yahoo! definitely deserves brownie points for making their app available in native binary form for pretty much every modern Windows Mobile devices out there.