Author: todd

  • MobileViews ActiveSync QuickFAQ

    I revived another MobileViews QuickFAQ this evening. This time it is…

    MobileViews ActiveSync QuickFAQ

    Its first paragraph says it all: I hate ActiveSync problems. I bet you do too. This QuickFAQs page is here to help you with your ActiveSync problems so I don’t have to hear about them. &B-) FYI: Windows Vista Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) information coming soon…

  • MobileViews Excel Mobile Quick FAQs

    One of the more popular Quick FAQs pages on the old MobileViews.com site was the one for Pocket Excel/Excel Mobile. I went back into my archives to start bringing back the MobileViews Quick FAQs section. You can find a list of Excel functions and other useful information about Pocket Excel (Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition and older) and Excel Mobile (Windows Mobile 5 and newer) linked below as well as in the sidebar:
    Excel Mobile Quick FAQs

    Let me know if you find these Quick FAQs useful again.

  • American Power Conversion (APC) Mobile Power Pack

    APC Mobile Power Pack
    I’ve been using the APC UPB10 Mobile Power Pack for three months. It costs around $60 (I bought mine from a local big box store) and can recharge most devices that can be charged from a USB source. The Mobile Power Pack comes with USB cable to recharge itself from either a PC’s USB port or an A/C outlet. However, I had to supply the cables to charge my devices (not a problem). The Mobile Power Pack has a standard sized USB plug at its top. I tested it with a T-Mobile SDA (Windows Mobile Smartphone), i-Mate K-JAM (Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition), and a 5th generation iPod (video). In fact, I recharged all three using the Mobile Power Pack without needing to recharge the Pack itself. The LCD display stripe you see lit up in the photo tells you what the Pack’s charge level is. A fully lit line indicates a fully charged pack.

    The unit is small, thin, and light making it perfect for travel. I only wish its own A/C adapter transformer were smaller and had a folding plug. Other than that, this product gets a mobile thumbs up from me.

  • Microsoft SyncToy + Windows Mobile = No Luck

    Microsoft SyncToyMicrosoft updated their SyncToy PowerToy to version 1.4 last November. But, I only got around to trying it this evening. SyncToy’s function is to synchronize files in two different folders. One obvious use is to sync files from a digital camera’s storage card to a PC’s hard disk. Another, one would think (at least I did),would be to sync from a Smartphone’s or Pocket PC’s. Unfortunately, SyncToy can’t see beyond the Mobile Devices folder of a synced Windows Mobile device during the Folder Pairing process. So, you can’t use it with a Pocket PC or Smartphone synced with the PC. Too bad. Perhaps, the company that wrote SyncToy and the company that designed Windows Mobile should talk to each other. Oh wait, never mind…

  • Yahoo! oneSearch Mobile

    Yahoo! oneSearchYahoo! seems to be trying to provide more than one way for us to use their services from a mobile device. The client software for Yahoo! Go provides an attractive interface but was very slow on my Pocket PC and wasted too much screen real estate IMHO. Recently, it looks like they took the content from wap.oa.yahoo.com mobile web portal and moved it to…

    m.yahoo.com

    This mobile web portal has the same lightweight and lightning fast mostly-text interface from the wap design and added the oneSearch feature that provides a mixed result page that reminds me of Google’s SearchMash site. oneSearch returns results categorized as Web (all of the web), Mobile Web (results of pages that look good on a mobile device), and Web Images.

  • Migrate Your Windows Live RSS Feeds to Ilium NewsBreak

    Remember all the ugliness a few weeks ago when some people lost their Google RSS feeds because of some glitch on Google’s servers? Interestingly enough, if you use Microsoft’s Windows Live web page as your RSS feed collector, you can avoid this by using a somewhat hard to find Live feature. And, as a side benefit, this procedure lets you migrate all your Windows Live RSS feeds to Ilium’s NewsBreak RSS/Podcast feed reader for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones.

    Microsoft LiveHere’s what you can do.

    • Start Windows Live and, if needed, login to your personal page
    • Click on the Add stuff link near the top left of the page
    • Click on the Advanced tab
    • Take a look at the last line of the box that just opened up. Find the line that reads Click here to export your feed subscriptions to OPML.
    • Click on the word here in that line
    • A new window or tab will open up at this point and show you the OPML XML code containing all of the feeds in all of your Windows Live page tabs.
    • Click File
    • Click Save As
    • Save the OPML XML code to a file on your PC

    Assuming you have Ilium Software’s NewsBreak 2.0 installed on your Pocket PC or Smartphone, sync your device with your PC. Then, copy the OPML file you created using the steps above over to your Windows Mobile device. Now, start up NewsBreak and use its New Channel Wizard to import the OPML file. NewsBreak doesn’t have a check all option in this wizard. So, if you have a lot of feeds in Windows Live like me, it might take a little while to check off all the feeds for NewsBreak to use. But, this is not too painful. You might want to use NewsBreak’s option to store the feed data on your storage card after this. But, otherwise, that’s it. You not only have a backup of your Windows Live RSS feed collection, you also have a portable version on your Windows Mobile device.
    Ilium Software NewsBreak 2.0 Import Screen