MobileViews Blog

Category: Mobile Devices

  • Canon PowerShot A710IS (6X Optical Zoom w/Image Stabilization)

    Canon PowerShot A710IS and S1 IS

    The Canon PowerShot A710IS has been available since last fall. You can see it on the left compared to the Canon PoweShot S1 IS (current version is S5, btw). Although it only has a 6x optical zoom (with image stabilization) compared to the 10x for the S1 (and 12x for the S5), its smaller size won me over. I think it may tend to shoot a bit overexposed compared to the Panasonic Lumix TZ3 I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. But, for the most part, I am very pleased with the A710IS. And, I really like the fact that it runs on two standard AA batteries (vs. the proprietary batteries needed by the Lumix). I wanted to have an Amazon affiliate link to it. But, guess what, Amazon is no longer directly carrying it. I suspect Canon (or Amazon) may be pushing the Canon PowerShot TX1 camera with 10x zoom and near-HD video recording. If you can find a A710IS, is will probably be heavily discounted. And, you can probably expect a new model to replace it this fall. But, if you find it at a good price, you might want to consider it.

    Sample A710IS Macro photo below…
    Testing Canon A710IS Macro

  • Video of Silverlight Running on Windows Mobile

    Eric Griffin’s MSDN blog has an item linking to a…

    Kool Video of Sliverlight on Windows Mobile

    This is just a demo of an early port that is not available to we outsiders. But, it is interesting to see what is in the development queue.

  • What Do You Want in a Windows Mobile SDK FAQ?

    If you have an important Windows Mobile SDK question that you think should be answered in a FAQ, head over to Microsoft’s John Kennedy’s MSDN blog and post it to his blog item titled:

    Windows Mobile SDK: Questions Please!

  • Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Windows Mobile

    Years ago when I was beta testing Office 2003, I tried out Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 and liked it a lot. Unfortunately, much of Microsoft is not in tune with Windows Mobile and there was no way to sync up BCM with a Pocket PC or Smartphone (which had just come out during beta testing). So, imagine my surprise when I read the contents of this blog post with the bone dry subject title…

    First Half of Year 2007

    Among other things, the post has download links for BCM for both the Pocket PC and the Smartphone… For free… And, both versions support Windows Mobile 6. Nice…

  • More Opera Mini: Why Can’t PIE Render This Well?

    Opera Mini Beta 4

    I played a bit more with Opera Mini Beta 4 on a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC. Of course, it took a little bit of work since Java always gets confused about the status of the network connection. I had to go into WM’s memory manager and terminate the Java midlet manager, restart it, and launch Opera to get it to work (faster than a soft reset). I headed over to this website which correctly ID-ed it as a mobile device and through me into the mobile friendly viewing mode. Fortunately, the plug-in has an option go to the full site view. I couldn’t get the spiffy feature described by Opera to provide an experience similar to the iPhone’s full page view with the option to zoom to a section of the page. However, the default view was pretty good. In fact, it is so much better and seems to render so much faster than Pocket Internet Explorer (AKA IE Mobile), you have to wonder what is going on at Microsoft that they couldn’t have solved this problem long ago.

    If Java didn’t make Opera Mini so annoying to start up, I’d definitely use it more often. As it is, I  need to make sure I have a couple of minutes to terminate the midlet manager and go through hoops to get it running (or a soft reset). That is not a lot of fun.

  • Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums (Web Newsgroups)

    Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums

    If you have a bunch of questions about Windows Mobile and I, cough cough, have not seen or responded to them because they are buried in a comment somewhere in this blog, you might want to check out the relatively new (I think)…

    Microsoft Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums

    I prefer the good old client-based NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) based newsgroups (sometimes incorrectly referred to as USENET newsgroups) because they are fast to scan and respond to. But, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer a web-based newsgroup, check of Microsoft’s forums for WM users linked above. I’m popping over there now and then myself to answer a question or two.