MobileViews Blog

Category: Pocket PC/Phone Edition

Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition

  • MobileViews Podcast 379:Reminiscing 25 years of Windows CE/Mobile/Phone with Jason Dunn


    Jon Westfall was unavailable for this podcast. Fortunately, our mutual friend Jason Dunn was available as a guest co-host to reminisce about Windows CE/Mobile/Phone as it nears its 25th launch anniversary (November 1996).

    Unfortunately, something weird happened during the recording process, however. The Audio HiJack audio-flow template that I’ve used to record hundreds of previous podcasts only recorded what Jason said. The good news is that I mostly asked questions and provided a few discussion prompts. Moreover, Jason is an excellent extemporaneous speaker. So, you can guess what I said. I removed the blank audio spaces (silences) during the segments I spoke.

    Way back in Nov. 2010, Jason and I discussed the then new Windows Phone 7 which made a clean break from Microsoft’s older mobile devices and didn’t maintain app compatibility with Windows Mobile 6. Today, we’re looking back even further to Windows CE 1.0 as well as doing a catch-up conversation since his last visit to the podcast in October 2016!

    Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

  • Mini-Podcast 11: HTC Touch Pro2 Voice Notes Recording Sound Quality Sample

    The T-Mobile HTC Touch Pro2 is a Windows Mobile 6.1 touch screen smartphone. It comes bundled with a voice recording app called, reasonably enough, Voice Notes. I used it to record this brief (1 minute 10 seconds) Mini-podcast 11 to give you an idea of its recording sound quality. I think it sounds reasonably good although there is noticeable audio compression that gives it a kind of AM radio sound quality to it.

    This mini-podcast was recorded in a reasonably quiet room. I’ll test recording a mini-podcast outdoors to see if the Touch Pro2 might be a useful tool for on-the-spot interviews/conversations for future podcasts.

    – You can listen to the podcast right now from your web browser by using the embedded player above.
    – You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or this RSS feed.
    – You can also point your smartphone’s browser at mobiletoday.podbean.com to listen to or download the MP3 file over the air to your phone.

  • Podcast 27: Celio Redfly Terminal for Windows Mobile – Conversation with Colin Kelly Jr.

    Although I’ve been a vocal critic of the Celio Redfly dumb terminal device for Windows Mobile smartphones (I own the original C8 model), Celio’s Marketing Communications Manager, Colin Kelly Jr., was gracious enough to accept my invitation to talk about Celio’s various Redfly products for this podcast. We discussed a couple of upcoming products too including:

    – Redfly Mobile Dock
    – Redfly for BlackBerry
    – Redfly for Android

    The podcast is 40 minutes and 30 seconds long.

    – You can listen to the podcast right now from your web browser by using the embedded player above.
    – You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or this RSS feed.
    – You can also point your smartphone’s browser at mobiletoday.podbean.com to listen to or download the MP3 file over the air to your phone.

  • Testing ShoZu with an iPod touch


    Hope this works

    Posted by ShoZu

    Everything above the line above this sentence was created and sent from the ShoZu photo and video web service that claims to add value by being able to post media from mobile devices to numerous other media web services and blogs. It half-worked posting a photo from my iPod touch to this blog. But, the image doesn’t display at all here. It worked ok with Flickr, however. Check my MobileAppsToday.com blog for more details on the showdown with ShoZu.

  • Back to Basics: Never Use Windows Mobile Messaging Automatic Email Settings

    Google’s IMAP4 email service was so slow that it drained my Dash’s batteries 4% everytime it checked for mail. So, I removed it from the Dash’s Messaging (email) app last year. I decided it was time to check again. But, instead of the Dash, I decided to try using a TyTn (Windows Mobile 6 with a recent update from HTC) touch screen smartphone. Just for fun, I decided to say yes when asked by Messaging’s account setup if I wanted to have Windows Mobile to check if it knew how to configure the account automatically. I have never seen this thing actually find settings. So, I figured it would fail as usual and then move on to the manual configuration windows. I was shocked when Messaging reported it had found settings and had applied them to the account.

    However, when I had Messaging try to get mail from Gmail, I knew right away that another miserable Windows Mobile failure was in progress. It was grabbing hundreds of email messages (or so it said) but not displaying anything. After spending many minutes going through this process (I had to grab a power supply so the TyTn wouldn’t power down or drain its batteries), absolutely nothing was in the inbox list despite the fact that I had mail as recently as a few minutes previous to starting the Messaging process. Why did this happen? Because Windows Mobile Messaging is clueless about Gmail’s IMAP4 service and configured it for POP3. Moreover, Windows Mobile Messaging’s POP3 interface is broken. It has been broken from the first day it rolled out of a Visual Studio on someone’s desk and remains broken today.

    The moral to this story is NEVER NEVER NEVER bother to use Windows Mobile Messaging’s feature to auto configure and email account. It has never actually found anything for me until today. And, now that is has finally found something, it turns out it didn’t actually know how to configure the so-called “known” mail service correctly.

  • RedFly Windows Mobile Companion Now $399. Still Too Expensive IMHO

    Back when Windows Mobile was Windows CE (Windows Mobile is actually a shell on top of the previous Windows CE 5 generation), the Handheld PC was referred to as a PC Companion. Celio’s RedFly turns the tables on this old concept by looking like a mini-notebook PC but is actually an unintelligent companion to your Windows Mobile smartphone. At $499 it was much more expensive than your subsidized Windows Mobile smartphone. But, with a price drop to $399, oh wait, it is still much more expensive than your subsidized smartphone. And, what do you get for $399 (plus shipping and maybe tax)? A bigger screen and QWERTY keyboard, basically. Yes, WiMo’s Internet Explorer is no longer a pinhole view of the web. But, it is still can’t deal with AJAX or other complex Javascript-ed sites. It still renders many non-AJAX sites incorrectly. It is still basically Internet Explorer 4 with a few tweaks.

    Don’t get me wrong, though! Conceptually, I think the RedFly is a good idea. I just think it is way overpriced when I can buy full-blown netbook like the Acer Aspire One for $379 get gigabytes more of storage, multicard reader, and full-blown versions of apps like the Firefox and OpenOffice. And, if I move from a WiMo phone to a Nokia, Apple iPhone, or one of the Google Android boxes, I haven’t wasted $399.

    If the RedFly were priced somewhere in the $175 to $225 price range, I think it would be interesting to me as a possible purchase. At $399? Well, let’s just say I’m ordering an Acer Aspire One later today.