Category: Smartphone

One of Windows Mobile 6’s more interesting new features (and it doesn’t have many) is the ability to encrypt data on a storage card. Ah, but pay close attention to some gotchas in these two blog entries from Microsoft Windows Mobile staffers…

Jason Langridge’s WebLog – MR Mobile!: Storage card wipe and encryption – What’s the deal?

Windows Mobile Team Blog (Scott): Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption FAQ

The scarier info comes from the FAQ above. Why scary? Consider this… If you forget your PIN, the only way to recover is from an escrowed recovery PIN stored on an Exchange Server. But, what if you don’t use Exchange Server? Ah, you see the problem there.

What if the Windows Mobile device is hard reset? Um, basically the response is tough luck.

The moral to this story? If you choose to use storage card encryption, make sure you understand all possible consequences and create manual policies and procedures to make sure you can get access to data on storage cards used in devices under your control.

I just read on PocketPCThoughts.com that HP is no longer providing Microsoft Outlook with Windows Mobile devices. You might be thinking that you can simply buy the most inexpensive version of Office 2007 to deal with this issue. But, think again. Head over to the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 edition page and look at what it includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. No Outlook in that package. While only HP has gone down this no-Outlook-with-devices path so far, they do sell a good sized percentage of Windows Mobile devices in the US. One can assume that Dell and other Windows Mobile vendors will not be far behind.
Your next thought may be that it might be good to sync with a bunch of Google web apps. Unfortunately, while Google has a decent calendar, it does not have a contacts solution. Yahoo!, on the other hand, has decent contacts, calendar, and notes web apps. It even provides a free IntelliSync (now owned by Nokia) utility to sync with its apps. Unfortunately, I had such poor experiences with it years ago that I am afraid to try it again. Yahoo! has been aggressively pursuing mobile users recently. So, I hope they take this opportunity to create a good mobile sync scenario.

Microsoft is only focusing on Enterprise users with Exchange Servers. But, that leaves out a lot of consumers as well as double digit percentage enterprise users who do not have Exchange Servers. The importance of the desktop OS has been less and less important over the years as we increasingly find ourselves dependent on web-based applications. Even Microsoft’s own confusing Live brand web services acknowledge this trend. So, why are our mobile devices still often tied to a PC-bound Outlook client? What we need is a good non-Exchange Server web-based sync solution that can sync with any mobile device: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, Apple iPhone, whatever.

Quick, what is the difference between Windows Mobile Standard and Windows Mobile Professional? Had to think a moment, huh? What? Still need more time. Yeah, that was a great renaming move. But, hey, there’s more to confuse you beside branding changes. There are now 5 possible Pocket PC (oops, “Professional”) screen formats and 3 possible Smartphone (oops, “Amateur”…wait, that’s not right either, “Standard”) screen formats. Microsoft’s Mike Calligaro explains it in all its gory detail in a blog item titled…

320×320 Revisited

The article focuses on the 320×320 format introduced for Windows Mobile 6 (based on Windows CE 5… Got a headache yet?) but has a great table placing all the screen possibilities in perspective.

I just saw a comment about the Windows Mobile 6 SDK post ask what’s the difference between Windows Mobile 5 and 6?I guess the official statements can be found on the Microsoft web pages at…

Introducing… Windows Mobile 6

…and…

Microsoft Reveals New Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Software

My irreverent answer is “1” (6 – 5 = 1). My slightly less irreverent response is: Not much unless you have access to Exchange Server for email (I don’t). I am, however, interested to hear what the Windows Mobile product group has to say to me and other Mobile Devices MVPs later this week to change my mind.

I should also note that there are differences from a developer’s point of view. Changes to the screen form factors and inner workings make a difference to them. From the end-user point of view, however, there is not much that makes you say “ooh, wow”.

Yahoo! announced the gamma release of…

Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 Goes Windows Mobile

You can find the Yahoo! Go site at go.yahoo.com

How far it Goes on Windows Mobile is debatable though. The interface looks pretty and slick at first glance. But, then you start to notice things like the soft-buttons at the bottom don’t work. And, wow, is it slow! Of course, this was tested on a relatively slow SDA Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. So, what about other devices?

When I tried to install it on an i-Mate K-JAM Pocket PC Phone Edition (WM5), I got a message saying that it was not available for that yet but to check back. So, I tried it on a Dell Axim X50v running Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition (I have the WM5 upgrade disk but never upgraded it). The message there pretty much said that device would never be supported.

If you have a supported device and want a pretty interface, try Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0. If you want a useful fast experience even at the relatively slow EDGE data rates, go back to http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/. Yahoo’s WAP text-based interface is fast and easy to navigate.

Ilium Software released a new version of their RSS newsfeed reader client NewsBreak 2.0 on March 6. As I’ve mentioned before, NewsBreak is one of the few 3rd party applications I leave permanently installed on my Windows Mobile Smartphone (it works on Pocket PCs too). So, this latest release was of special interest to me. I’m going to resist the urge to download podcasts and vidcasts since it would probably take too long to download large files over an EDGE connection. However, the new navigation labels do seem much more intuitive and easier to use. I’m sure I’ll discover new things about NewsBreak as I continue to use it (daily).