Category: Smartphone

If you have an important Windows Mobile SDK question that you think should be answered in a FAQ, head over to Microsoft’s John Kennedy’s MSDN blog and post it to his blog item titled:

Windows Mobile SDK: Questions Please!

Years ago when I was beta testing Office 2003, I tried out Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 and liked it a lot. Unfortunately, much of Microsoft is not in tune with Windows Mobile and there was no way to sync up BCM with a Pocket PC or Smartphone (which had just come out during beta testing). So, imagine my surprise when I read the contents of this blog post with the bone dry subject title…

First Half of Year 2007

Among other things, the post has download links for BCM for both the Pocket PC and the Smartphone… For free… And, both versions support Windows Mobile 6. Nice…

I played a bit more with Opera Mini Beta 4 on a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC. Of course, it took a little bit of work since Java always gets confused about the status of the network connection. I had to go into WM’s memory manager and terminate the Java midlet manager, restart it, and launch Opera to get it to work (faster than a soft reset). I headed over to this website which correctly ID-ed it as a mobile device and through me into the mobile friendly viewing mode. Fortunately, the plug-in has an option go to the full site view. I couldn’t get the spiffy feature described by Opera to provide an experience similar to the iPhone’s full page view with the option to zoom to a section of the page. However, the default view was pretty good. In fact, it is so much better and seems to render so much faster than Pocket Internet Explorer (AKA IE Mobile), you have to wonder what is going on at Microsoft that they couldn’t have solved this problem long ago.

If Java didn’t make Opera Mini so annoying to start up, I’d definitely use it more often. As it is, I  need to make sure I have a couple of minutes to terminate the midlet manager and go through hoops to get it running (or a soft reset). That is not a lot of fun.

If you have a bunch of questions about Windows Mobile and I, cough cough, have not seen or responded to them because they are buried in a comment somewhere in this blog, you might want to check out the relatively new (I think)…

Microsoft Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums

I prefer the good old client-based NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) based newsgroups (sometimes incorrectly referred to as USENET newsgroups) because they are fast to scan and respond to. But, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer a web-based newsgroup, check of Microsoft’s forums for WM users linked above. I’m popping over there now and then myself to answer a question or two.

As far as I can figure Microsoft Voice Command is now in the firmware of Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition (Smartphone) and Professional Edition (Pocket PC Phone Edition) devices. You might recall that my friend Frank McPherson and I had couple of give-and-take blog commentaries on opposing sides of its usefulness (Frank’s Pro, I’m not so keen on it). I guess voice dialing would be useful if it worked consistently. But, where I live, we have a lot of ethnic names (like mine!) that it seems to get confused with. And, I’m not sure how useful mild shouting application commands is compared to just clicking a button or two (especially on Smartphone with a thumb keyboard that can be dealt with one hand). But, if you would like to get the most out of Microsoft Voice Command, head over to Microsoft’s tutorial at…
Microsoft Voice Command Tutorial

I installed the beta release of Opera Mini 4 on a K-JAM Pocket PC Phone Edition (Windows Mobile 5) this evening. I downloaded to a PC and copied the files over to the K-JAM using ActiveSync. Opera Mini is a Java Midlet. So, I used the Midlet Manager to fire up Opera Mini. It went through a lengthy but simple configuration and used my WiFi connection (I don’t have a SIM in the K-JAM) to get to the Interent.

I visited a couple of sites that are not formatted for mobile devices and found that Opera did a pretty good job of rendering the pages to fit both the portrait and landscape screen modes. It got a bit grumpy when I turned off WiFi and didn’t want to surf the net after turning WiFi back on. I had to shut down the Midlet manager and fire it up again to let Opera figure out how to get back to the web.

My main beef is not with Opera but with the general state of Java apps on mobile devices. They always look out of place and don’t conform to the Windows Mobile interface conventions I’m used to.

That said, Opera Mini adds enough value (browsing non-mobile friendly sites on a Windows Mobile device) that I’m keeping it on the K-JAM for a while to test drive it a bit more. I might even install it on the Dash to see how it looks on a smartphone.