MobileViews Blog

Category: Smartphone

Windows Mobile Smartphone

  • 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.

  • Microsoft’s Loke uei Tan Demos HTC Snap’s Quick Photo Taking Ability

    Anyone who has ever used pretty much any cameraphone has experience the huge delay between bringing the camera app up, pressing the “shutter” button and actually taking the photo. However, based on this brief video demo by Microsoft’s Loke uei Tan, it looks like HTC has solved this issue in the upcoming HTC Snap (Standard Edition – no touch screen).

    I giving a lot of thought to replacing my T-Mobile Dash with either the HTC Snap or HTC TouchPro2. Hmm.

  • T-Mobile Dash 3G Available on July 1?

    dash3g_fromtmonews
    Photo fragment courtesy of TmoNews

    If you look at the photo of the T-Mobile product information sheet on TmoNews…

    Visual Voicemail Coming!

    …you’ll note that the T-Mobile Dash 3G (which presumably replaces my personal favorite Windows Mobile non-touch screen smartphone – the T-Mobile Dash) has a launch date of July 1. I have to admit that I’m torn between buying the Dash 3G and the TouchPro2 (Windows Mobile touchscreen device). I guess I have a month or two before I need to make that decision.

  • Google Sync Error on Windows Mobile Smartphone

    Google Sync is working fine (so far) with my iPhone. And, I thought it was working ok with my HTC Vox (Windows Mobile Standard Edition). However, it is not working ok with the Vox today. ActiveSync reports 108 calendar items need syncing (seems a bit high since it synced ok just a day or two ago) and then fails after syncing exactly 44 items during each attempt..

    The support code reported is: 0x80004005

  • T-Mobile Dash Batteries Seem to Have Short Lifespans

    My first T-Mobile Dash battery went bad after about a year of use. This was around last March or April (2007). I bought a new replacement battery through T-Mobile around that time. Today, I noticed that my battery was at 2% charge after turning it on. I had fully charged the battery the night before and turned off the phone after the battery was charged. I fully charged the battery after noticing this and then used it like I normally do. The battery was down to about 50% at the end of the day (night). Normally, the battery is between 70 and 80% capacity after a 14 hour or so period.

    This sudden drop in charge capacity is very similar to what I saw in the original battery when it started to go bad. However, this time the second battery went bad in less than 7 months of use. That seems awfully short to me. I’m not going to buy a third battery, however. My T-Mobile G1 (Google Android) phone should arrive sometime next week. So, I’ll either switch to a different phone or muddle along with awful battery life for another 10 days or so.

  • 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.