MobileViews Blog

Category: Pocket PC/Phone Edition

Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition

  • Pocket & Phone SharpMT: Mobile Blogging

    I guess this is my mobile blogging topic week. Here’s another mobile blogging client…

    Pocket SharpMT and Phone SharpMT

    …are freeware mobile blogging applications for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones (with .Net CompactFramework 2.0). As you might guess from the MT part of the app name, this client works with the MoveableType API.

  • Ilium Software eWallet 5.0 Public Beta

    Ilium Software’s eWallet is a secure information storage application for Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Windows XP. It is much more than a simple password storage application. It is basically a small secure nearly freeform database application. 

    I’ve been using a Windows Mobile device since the 1.0 days in 1997 when it was still referred to by the kernel name: Windows CE. From those Handheld PC days to the current Pocket PC/Smartphone days, there has only been one 3rd party (non-Microsoft) application that has been resident on my daily working device: Ilium Software’s eWallet. So, I was very pleased to learn that after all these years, Ilium continues to develop, refine, and enhance this truly must-have Windows Mobile product. You can find information about the open beta of this new version linked below.

    eWallet 5.0 Public Beta

     

  • Spb Mobile DVD

    Spb Mobile DVD (US$24.95) doesn’t actually run on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. It is a Windows desktop application that creates video files (WMV or XVID) optimized for the small Windows Mobile devices’ screens.

    Spb Mobile DVD

    Although there are a lot of commercial and freeware/Open Source applications that can migrate DVD video to a computer, Spb’s entry into this crowded market focuses on simplicity. And, it definitely wins in that category. The only gotcha is that its wizard waits until the DVD menu appears before turning over control to the end-user. This means a long wait if the DVD has a series of previews (commercials) before the DVD menu appears. The wait  (which might be 10  minutes in some cases) is worth it though. Because, once there, a few clicks completes the migration process instructions. And, the actual process seems much faster than other video converters I’ve seen.

    The resulting video looked clear and smooth on my relatively slow i-Mate K-JAM Pocket PC Phone Edition (195MHz CPU). A definite thumbs up for this product from me.

  • Tips for using Windows Mobile QWERTY Keyboards

    A year ago (2005), the category of Windows Mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards was restricted to Pocket PC Phone Edition devices like the ones pictured below.

    Now,  however, we have Windows Mobile Smartphones like the Motorola Q and T-Mobile Dash that have QWERTY thumb keyboards too. If you’d like to get more use from your Windows Mobile QWERTY thumb keyboard, take a look at the article I wrote for Microsoft.com earlier this year:
    Mobile Typing: Two Thumbs Up!

  • ActiveSync Info for an Old Pocket PC

    Reader Phil Smith (in a comment to a previous blog item) asks: My wife has an HP IPAQ 1910 PDA, running the older version of ActiveSync that allows backups and restores. The battery died and it lost everything. Can you tell me what is the latest version of ActiveSync that includes backups and restores. Also, what is the extension on the backups. I have to hook up an old hard drive to find the backup and don’t know what to look for.

    I thought the response to this might be of enough general interest to merit its own blog item. So, here are my responses.

    • The most current production ActiveSync 4.2 actually provides Backup/Restore functions for pre-Windows Mobile 5 devices. It does not provide it for current generation Windows Mobile 5 devices though.
    • The extension for backup files created using ActiveSync’s Backup/Restore feature is .stg. In fact, unless you chose something different the default backup filename is backup.stg.
    • Click -> ActiveSync 4.2 web page for the current version. Veresion 3.8 seems to have disappeared from Microsoft’s site. So, if 4.2 doesn’t work for you, you can find version 3.6 here -> ActiveSync 3.6.

  • Google Spreadsheets Can’t Display Certain Excel Mobile Functions

    I wanted to take long close look at a spreadsheet on my Pocket PC the other day. So, I emailed it to my Gmail (Google Mail) account from where I could easily download the file to a PC that did not have ActiveSync on it (and on which I did not want to install it). When I opened my email in Gmail, I noticed that one of the options was Open in Google Spreadsheets. A column with text it in appeared but two columns containing date and time functions (e.g., =date(2006,11,18), =time(22,49,00)) were all empty.

    I manually typed in a date function to demonstrate to myself that Google Spreadsheets supported that function… and it does. I was able to view the Excel spreadsheet translated to HTML by Gmail as well as download and work with the file showing that Gmail itself left the data unmodified.

    It would have been nice to be able to email an Excel Mobile spreadsheet to myself at Gmail, work on it at any web enabled PC, and then mail it back to myself on my Pocket PC. But, oh well, perhaps Google will fix this in the future.