Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition
The Windows Mobile Pocket PC (I refuse to refer to it as “Professional Edition”) defaults to displaying on the next upcoming appointment on its Today screen. Did you know you can change this? Here’s how…
If you head back to the Today screen, you should see a list of appointments for the current day and often spilling over to the next day’s appointments.
One of Windows Mobile 6’s more interesting new features (and it doesn’t have many) is the ability to encrypt data on a storage card. Ah, but pay close attention to some gotchas in these two blog entries from Microsoft Windows Mobile staffers…
Jason Langridge’s WebLog – MR Mobile!: Storage card wipe and encryption – What’s the deal?
Windows Mobile Team Blog (Scott): Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption FAQ
The scarier info comes from the FAQ above. Why scary? Consider this… If you forget your PIN, the only way to recover is from an escrowed recovery PIN stored on an Exchange Server. But, what if you don’t use Exchange Server? Ah, you see the problem there.
What if the Windows Mobile device is hard reset? Um, basically the response is tough luck.
The moral to this story? If you choose to use storage card encryption, make sure you understand all possible consequences and create manual policies and procedures to make sure you can get access to data on storage cards used in devices under your control.
Every so often I think about starting a podcast or videocast. This lasts about as long as it takes me to remember how much work it takes to put one together on a regular basis :-)Â If I create a mobile themed podcast someday, it would seem appropriate to actually record it on a mobile device once it a while. Here’s a freeware tool for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs that might make this task a little easier.
Audacity Personal DVR for Pocket PC
I just read on PocketPCThoughts.com that HP is no longer providing Microsoft Outlook with Windows Mobile devices. You might be thinking that you can simply buy the most inexpensive version of Office 2007 to deal with this issue. But, think again. Head over to the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 edition page and look at what it includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. No Outlook in that package. While only HP has gone down this no-Outlook-with-devices path so far, they do sell a good sized percentage of Windows Mobile devices in the US. One can assume that Dell and other Windows Mobile vendors will not be far behind.
Your next thought may be that it might be good to sync with a bunch of Google web apps. Unfortunately, while Google has a decent calendar, it does not have a contacts solution. Yahoo!, on the other hand, has decent contacts, calendar, and notes web apps. It even provides a free IntelliSync (now owned by Nokia) utility to sync with its apps. Unfortunately, I had such poor experiences with it years ago that I am afraid to try it again. Yahoo! has been aggressively pursuing mobile users recently. So, I hope they take this opportunity to create a good mobile sync scenario.
Microsoft is only focusing on Enterprise users with Exchange Servers. But, that leaves out a lot of consumers as well as double digit percentage enterprise users who do not have Exchange Servers. The importance of the desktop OS has been less and less important over the years as we increasingly find ourselves dependent on web-based applications. Even Microsoft’s own confusing Live brand web services acknowledge this trend. So, why are our mobile devices still often tied to a PC-bound Outlook client? What we need is a good non-Exchange Server web-based sync solution that can sync with any mobile device: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, Apple iPhone, whatever.
Quick, what is the difference between Windows Mobile Standard and Windows Mobile Professional? Had to think a moment, huh? What? Still need more time. Yeah, that was a great renaming move. But, hey, there’s more to confuse you beside branding changes. There are now 5 possible Pocket PC (oops, “Professional”) screen formats and 3 possible Smartphone (oops, “Amateur”…wait, that’s not right either, “Standard”) screen formats. Microsoft’s Mike Calligaro explains it in all its gory detail in a blog item titled…
The article focuses on the 320×320 format introduced for Windows Mobile 6 (based on Windows CE 5… Got a headache yet?) but has a great table placing all the screen possibilities in perspective.
Reader Patrick (PHH) says:
WMDC imports all my Word and Excel files (I have over 1200 on my pda) in ppc format (pws and pxl). I thought it was the fault of Office XP vs Vista (I could read those files fine on Office XP installed on an XP pc)and that when I bought Office 2007 I’d be able to read the ppc files on my PC. No such luck.
It will import rtf files directly, so I’ve translated literally hundreds of doc files into rtf format; however I don’t see any workaround for the spreadsheet files. I even tried openoffice on my Vista machine. It won’t read those files either.
I’m running ppc 2003 on an iPAQ 2755. Have been using them FINE for over a year on XP and using various versions of ActiveSync.
I’m close to paying the computer shop that built my machine for me to revert to XP from on my brand new machine unless I can get some answers.
Is there any way to get Microsoft to talk about these problems for brand new software?
Patrick: Welcome to the wonderful world of poor initial design decisions! The original Windows CE Handheld PC designers decided to create unique Word and Excel file formats a decade ago. When Mobile Office components came to the Pocket PC, they kept the same broken design that required a translation before the files could be read on the desktop. This led to all kinds of problems for Windows CE/Mobile users for years. This finally changed in Windows Mobile 5 based Pocket PCs. But, that was too late for your aging Windows Mobile 2003 based iPAQ.
I’m not syncing old 2003 or 2003 2nd Edition Pocket PCs with my Vista box. So, I can’t test your situation at the moment. However, it looks like Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) actually reverts back to ActiveSync 3.8 code when old legacy devices are partnered. This means that there should be an option that becomes visible when you sync an old device that lets you check or uncheck the Office Mobile translation feature (it is turned off by default since Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices use native DOC and XLS [but not DOCX and XLSX] file formats).
You might also want to consider upgrading two or three generations and move up to a WiMo 5 or 6 generation device.