MobileViews Blog

Category: Windows Mobile

Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and Smartphone

  • Back to Basics: Soft Reset

    Have you ever found your Windows Mobile smartphone (Standard or Professional Editions) in a state best described as frozen? This can happen in several ways. The most common experience on a non-touch Standard Edition device is that it becomes so slow that I can’t seem to get any action to work on it. Can’t dial, can’t launch an application, can’t even navigate. Recently, my HTC Advantage touch screen device (Professional Edition) has refused to turn on once in a while (perhaps 3 to 4 times in the past month).

    Personally, many of my apparent freeze ups are usually related to some kind of Internet Explorer related memory management problem. The usual problem is that the cache gets large and slows the entire device down. A little patience while slowly navigating to the IE option to clear the cache usually resolves the problem. However, when my Standard Edition seems completely frozen to the point where the on/off button does not work, I usually end up pulling the battery out, put it back in, and turn on the phone. I’ve never had a problem with this procedure. But, your mileage may vary. So, proceed with caution.

    Pulling the battery out and putting it back in amounts to a kind of hardware soft reset. The difference between a soft reset and a hard reset is that a hard reset puts your device back in the state it was at the factory. Data, configuration information, and applications added after you received it will disappear. A soft reset restarts the system but leaves data, configuration, and software alone.

    Pocket PC/Professional Edition touch-screen devices have a recessed dedicated soft-reset button somewhere on its chassis. The location differs from model to model. The button is usually very small and fit to the point of the stylus that came with the device. Ballpoint pen and other larger tips will not work. Pressing the reset on the HTC Advantage has brought it back to life each time. But, I’m not a huge fan of using this button. The reset on my old Compaq iPAQ 3650 actually wore out because I had to use it so much on that box. There are free soft-reset software utilities available. But, these don’t help if your unit is completely unresponsive.

  • Book: Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1

    I just read Rob Tiffany’s (a Technical Product Manager in the Microsoft Windows Mobile group) blog and noticed he has a new book out (with a very long title :-)…

    Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1

    If you need to use SQL Server held data with your WiMo smartphone. This book might be a good place to start looking (haven’t read it myself, btw).

  • Microsoft Releases iPhone Clone in 2009?

    The Inside Microsoft blog has a very interesting entry titled…

    Windows Mobile 7 To Focus On Touch and Motion Gestures

    …with what looks like dozens of Windows Mobile 7 screen captures. From the looks of it Microsoft discovered the Apple iPhone and is trying to catch up to it by 2009 (Windows Mobile 7’s projected release according other blogs discussing it). The problem (for Microsoft) is that Apple will have probably moved on to other new concepts by then. Too little too late, I think.

  • Zoho Creator Mobile: Simply Amazing

    Zoho Creator Mobile
    I wanted my first 2008 blog entry here to be a positive one. Well, I’ve got a lot of positive things to say about…

    Zoho Creator Mobile

    …which is part of the Zoho suite of web applications that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, note taker (somewhat like OneNote), wiki, and numerous other web based business ready applications. Zoho creator lets you quickly create web-fied database applications. The mobile aspect of this web service was announced back on November 19, 2007. But, thinking it would take forever to configure a test database for testing on a mobile device, I didn’t take a look at it until now. I definitely should have taken a look at it back in November. I probably could have increased my mobile productivity significantly if I had done that.

    Here’s what I did this evening. I already have a Zoho account. So, I logged in on a Windows-based PC and went into the Zoho Creator module. I was surprised to see that there was a simple drag-and-drop box area on the creation phase that said I could drop a number of client-side data objects including a selection from a live Excel spreadsheet. I opened a spreadsheet containing possible topics for my blogs, selected the range of entries in it, and then pasted it into the Zoho Creator web box. The pasted data looked like a textual mess. “This can’t possibly work,” I told myself. However, when I moved on to the next step, Zoho Creator had correctly identified the header information and associated rows and columns. I wanted to add a new field (column) to the data to test the drop-down box selection feature. And, yep, Zoho Creator let me quickly (within seconds) add a field with pre-defined selection options for the drop-down menu. I saved these changes and moved over to a Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone (Standard Edition) and went to the Zoho Creator Mobile site to see what it looked like there. You can see part of the record entry screen in the figure above.

    After filling out a few (but not all) of the fields, I saved what I had and moved back to the desktop. Back on the desktop, I filled out a few more fields and saved the result. Back on the Smartphone, I took another look at the record and saw the updated information.

    I turned on my iPod touch and went to the Zoho Creator Mobile site to verify that it worked with the Safari browser which, of course, it did (the Safari browser is far more capable than the Windows Mobile Internet Explorer browser). This is a huge win for iPhone and iPod touch users since it lets us easily enter and retrieve data that is instantly available on PC or Mac (or Linux box for that matter).
    BTW, Zoho Creator is not a one-way data ticket. It can also export its data in variety of ways. I chose to export the data back to an Excel spreadsheet including the newly added column (field). This process worked fine. I’m really impressed by Zoho Creator Mobile and will probably use it quite a bit in the near future. The entire Zoho Office suite is far ahead of anything Microsoft or Google have to offer in terms of web services. Zoho even one-ups Google by supporting the Google Gears offline feature that Google Docs doesn’t provide yet.

  • WifiRouter 0.80: Use a Windows Mobile Phone as a WiFi Router?

    Wow, I didn’t mention anything related to Windows Mobile in this blog this week. So, here’s an interesting freeware utility for Windows Mobile to close out this WiMo-less (so far) week.

    WifiRouter 0.80

    Here’s how its author, Jorrit, Jongma, describes it: WMWifiRouter is a tool to use your Windows Mobile 6 (possibly 5) as a WiFi < -> GPRS/UMTS/HSPA router. It’ll allow you to use WiFi capable devices to connect to the internet through your phone’s data connection.

  • Zune Diagnostics Tool? What About an ActiveSync/WMDC Tool?

    Microsoft released a Zune Diagnostics tool yesterday and a Zune media collection reset tool earlier this month. That’s great. But, what about a Windows Mobile ActiveSync/WMDC diagnostics tool? Windows Mobile users (including me) having been asking for one for years. In my case, I’ve asked various generations of ActiveSync product team members face to face with nothing to show for it after 11 years of groveling. Sheesh.