MobileViews Blog

Category: Smartphone

Windows Mobile Smartphone

  • Migrate Your Windows Live RSS Feeds to Ilium NewsBreak

    Remember all the ugliness a few weeks ago when some people lost their Google RSS feeds because of some glitch on Google’s servers? Interestingly enough, if you use Microsoft’s Windows Live web page as your RSS feed collector, you can avoid this by using a somewhat hard to find Live feature. And, as a side benefit, this procedure lets you migrate all your Windows Live RSS feeds to Ilium’s NewsBreak RSS/Podcast feed reader for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones.

    Microsoft LiveHere’s what you can do.

    • Start Windows Live and, if needed, login to your personal page
    • Click on the Add stuff link near the top left of the page
    • Click on the Advanced tab
    • Take a look at the last line of the box that just opened up. Find the line that reads Click here to export your feed subscriptions to OPML.
    • Click on the word here in that line
    • A new window or tab will open up at this point and show you the OPML XML code containing all of the feeds in all of your Windows Live page tabs.
    • Click File
    • Click Save As
    • Save the OPML XML code to a file on your PC

    Assuming you have Ilium Software’s NewsBreak 2.0 installed on your Pocket PC or Smartphone, sync your device with your PC. Then, copy the OPML file you created using the steps above over to your Windows Mobile device. Now, start up NewsBreak and use its New Channel Wizard to import the OPML file. NewsBreak doesn’t have a check all option in this wizard. So, if you have a lot of feeds in Windows Live like me, it might take a little while to check off all the feeds for NewsBreak to use. But, this is not too painful. You might want to use NewsBreak’s option to store the feed data on your storage card after this. But, otherwise, that’s it. You not only have a backup of your Windows Live RSS feed collection, you also have a portable version on your Windows Mobile device.
    Ilium Software NewsBreak 2.0 Import Screen

  • MobiBlogr: Mobile Blog Cient for Windows Mobile

    Here’s an interesting free mobile blogging client for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones.

    MobiBlogr

    And, yes, it looks like the letter “e” has suffered another casualty here. The actual download is a bit difficult to find. So, here’s a direct link to it.

  • Just Click the Power Button to Turn on a Windows Mobile Smartphone

    Every now and then I read or hear a comment somewhere that you have to “press and hold” a Windows Mobile Smartphone power button to turn it on. While this may be true for some models, it is not true for the Smartphone models I’ve tried over the years. For example, I’ve heard this specifically about the T-Mobile SDA that I use. But, that is not the case for the SDA. If you currently press and hold your Smartphone power button for a long time waiting for it to turn on, try this instead: Press the power button down, let it go, and just wait for a minute. It takes a while, but you should see the power light blink, and then LCD should power up shortly thereafter. Smartphones seem to take forever to start up. So, you still need to be patient regarding that part of the boot process. But, you should not need to press and hold the power button itself for a long time.

  • Speed Up Windows Mobile By Deleting Its Internet Explorer Cache

    Most people name ActiveSync (Windows Mobile Device Center on Windows Vista) as the most annoying aspect of working with a Windows Mobile Pocket PC (Phone Edition) or Smartphone. The second most annoying aspect is Windows Mobile Memory Management (or lack thereof). This of course always brings up the “X” button that doesn’t actually close the application as it does in Windows XP/Vista. It just hides the display and shows you the previously used application or screen. But, I’m not going there today. Instead, I’ll  mention something else.

    If you use your Windows Mobile Internet Explorer, you may notice your device becoming more and more sluggish overall after a time. Like its desktop counterpart, Windows Mobile IE caches web pages as you surf the web. This cache can grows to take up a couple of megabytes of memory on your system which doesn’t have much memory to begin with. The solution is to pop into Windows Mobile IE’s options menu and delete the cache every now and then. If you use WMIE a lot, you might want to do this at least once day. I tend to empty the cache about once a week.

  • Duplicate Outlook Contacts and Appointments

    Reader M.L. writes: Am using Activesync4.5 and when I re-sync my Moto Q, I get duplicates in my contacts & calendars. There is no info on how to avoid this on the Activesync 4.5 “help & How-to” pages.

    First, aargh! I hate it when that happens. And, yes, it happens to me too. Not all duplicates are caused by ActiveSync, but it sure does create its share of Outlook headaches. And, if you live in the US and applied the Windows Mobile Daylight Savings change patch in March, take a look at birthdays in your calendar. Some of them may stretch across two days now.

    I tend to be extremely cautious with my PIM data since I’ve been managing this data for over 10 years now (after getting my first Windows CE Handheld PC — an HP 320LX that still works!). So, I backup my Outlook data and then manually remove dups from Outlook before syncing with a Windows Mobile device. However, there are techniques and tools that you may want to evaluate for use. Here are a pair of references that may help.

    Sperry Software article: Prevent and Remove Microsoft Outlook Duplicates

    Outlook Duplicate Items Remover 1.2

  • Backup Outlook 2007 Data Files in Windows Vista

    My main Outlook data still lives on a Windows XP PC. So, I had to take a look at my Windows Vista box to check on how Outlook behaves over there. It turns out that the steps I described for Outlook 2003 running under Windows XP remains the same for Vista with Outlook 2007. Outlook did not get the new Ribbon interface that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint got in their 2007 versions. So, the menus are pretty much the same between Outlook 2003 and 2007.

    One thing you might be thinking, though, is why not just use Vista’s powerful search function. Um, yeah. Go ahead, try it. Click Start->Search and then type “Outlook”. Now, extend that string to “Outlook.pst”. Not very helpful, is it? Unfortunately, Vista’s search is powerful but not smart (Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight is very smart by comparison if you want to see how a smart search should work).

    The main thing to remember is to sync your Windows Mobile device to Outlook regularly (at least once a day) and backup your Outlook data to an external storage device regularly too (at least once a week).