MobileViews Blog

Category: Smartphone

Windows Mobile Smartphone

  • 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.

  • Back to Basics: Unfocused Smartphone Browser Text Boxes

    Yahoo! mobile login screen

    Pocket PC (Classic/Professional Edition) users probably don’t notice any browser text box focus issue because they simply tap text boxes with their stylus and force it into focus. Smartphone (Standard Edition) users, on the other hand, probably have run into the following issue: Browse a web page with a text box entry (say a login screen). Focus on a text box (or so you think) and then start typing out a username or password. All of you sudden you notice that the first letter is not in the text box although subsequent characters are. What happened?

    It turns out that focusing on (navigating to) a text box is not sufficient. You need to press your Select button to actually bring the text box into full focus. Actually, tapping on any key does this but the key itself (if it is a printable character) does not show up. That is why the first character frequently is missing in these text boxes.

    So, the simple behavior to adopt is to tap the select button once you navigate to a browser text box before typing in any text.

  • Wired Vaporware 2007: Windows Mobile 6 for Samsung BlackJack

    Windows Mobile 6 for Samsung BlackJack came in on Wired’s Vaporware 2007 list at #6. Wired writes: A buggy black-market upgrade for AT&T BlackJacks surfaced this summer, but it’s a far cry from the real deal. Meanwhile, owners of the original BlackJack are stuck in version-5 limbo after seeing their WM6 dreams go up in vapor. Sorry Blackjack owners. Welcome to the uneasy and unpredictable world of Windows Mobile upgrade roulette.

  • YouTube Demo: Windows Mobile Live Search vs. Google Maps for Windows Mobile Zoom Feature

    Microsoft announced an updated version of Live Search for Windows Mobile…

    Live Search for Mobile Updated

    So, I decided to compare its new Zoom feature to Google Maps for Windows Mobile. You can see the somewhat blurry (sorry about that) but informative (I hope) video on YouTube at..
    Windows Mobile Live Search vs. Google Maps for Windows Mobile Zoom Feature

    Can you guess which one has a better map zoom interface? Watch the video and find out. It is just 2 minutes and 43 seconds long.

    FYI: You can download the new Live Search for Windows Mobile directly on your Windows Mobile device by pointing it at: m.live.com

  • Word Mobile vs. Word Mobile

    Smartphone Word vs. Pocket PC Word

    I should actually place this blog item in a category named something like Preparing for Back to Basics.

    Word Mobile didn’t exist for the Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) until Windows Mobile 6 devices rolled out earlier this year. For some reason I expected to it be the same as or very similar to Word Mobile for Pocket PC (AKA Classic and Professional Editions). One of the first things I did after getting my hands on both types of Windows Mobile 6 devices was to compare the menu structures for Word Mobile on the both editions. Although it may look like the Smartphone (Standard Edition, non-touch screen) Word Mobile has as many features as the Pocket PC Word Mobile from the diagrams above, they really do not even appear to share the same codebase let alone functionality. The reason the Smartphone Word Mobile menu has so many option branches is because of its modal nature. That is to say that Word Mobile on the Smartphone resembles vi from UNIX/Linux that it does Microsoft Word. So, there are two distinct mode branches that simply creates menu complexity rather than provide features. Word Mobile on the Pocket PC, on the other hand, has a much richer feature set and its branches represent unique functions rather than modal branching.