Ilium Software Turning 11 Years Old (free stuff and sales to follow :-)
Thu, 29 May 2008 23:06:45
I can probably count the number of commercial apps I have kept up to date from 1997 on one hand. Let’s see: Microsoft Office (ok, that is cheating a little since that is one hand by itself), JASC (now Corel) PaintShop Pro, and, hmm, that might actually be it. If you know me or have […]

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Tech Twitter-ing/Tweeting at toddogasawara
Wed, 28 May 2008 22:58:30

As a boutique blogger (i.e., low traffic personal blog site - MobileViews :-), my blogs tend to be more like a personal note taking service. Basically, I write about stuff that interests me or annoys me (tech related stuff, of course). If other people find it interesting too, great. Otherwise, blogging is way to quickly note things down that […]

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Frank Updated His TyTn II to Windows Mobile 6.1
Tue, 27 May 2008 17:31:40
My old friend Frank McPherson appears to have had a bit of problem with his TyTn II (I’ve been having my own issues with my Dash). In his case, part of the solution was to upgrade to the just released Windows Mobile 6.1 for the TyTn II. You can check out his May 25, […]

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Is Solar Power Practical for Apple Mobile Devices
Mon, 26 May 2008 18:23:05
MacRumors has an interesting report about an Apple patent filing for solar power technology… Solar LCD Powered iPods, iPhones, and Laptops I wonder how practical this is given that most iPods and iPhones seem to be in light blocking cases of some kind and Macbooks are generally used indoors? Any solar energy experts out there have any […]

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Alton Towers Theme Park: PDA’s Banished To Oblivion This Half Term
Sun, 25 May 2008 10:38:47

Just read about this on Slashdot and went to see the site myself… PDA’s Banished To Oblivion This Half Term While I can appreciate the reason for the apparently opt-in ban, it doesn’t make sense to me. I think it is a good idea for kids and parents to all carry phones to keep in contact when […]

So, How is Craigslist Mobile Mobile-Friendly?
Thu, 22 May 2008 20:50:14

I just read somewhere (sorry, I can’t recall the reference) that Craigslist is the most viewed site on mobile devices. From what I can figure, this is the address for their mobile site… mobile.craigslist.org But, no, this is the site for the town Mobile, Alabama. So, why is it so hard to find Craigslist mobile friendly site? Does it exist or do mobile users simple use the deskop formatted site? Clicking on any […]

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TwitPic: Send a Photo to Twitter From Your Phone
Wed, 21 May 2008 22:11:34

TwitPic is a free web service that lets you attach a photo web link to a Twitter tweet. Here’s how you do it, head over to TwitPic and sign-in with your normal Twitter account name and password. Then, click on Settings and add the special email address it shows you to your cameraphone’s email contacts […]

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Windows Mobile Voice Command, Alarms, and Bluetooth
Tue, 20 May 2008 21:57:36
The T-Mobile Dash running Windows Mobile 6 has one really annoying bug: Once you set the phone to vibrate profile, event notifications always vibrate even if the profile is set back to normal. However, there is a workaround if you use a Bluetooth speaker or headset. The Dash comes with Voice Command in firmware. If […]

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Fedora 9 Linux Live USB Portable Desktop
Mon, 19 May 2008 20:53:32
Just read this article over on Information Week about Fedora 9’s (Linux) USB Live feature that lets you store your preferred desktop on a 2GB USB flash drive. This desktop is not from your own Fedora desktop. Instead it is a prepackaged image that Red Hat calls CustomSpins. Red Hat’s Fedora 9 Loads Portable Desktop On […]

kwiry: Text or Email a Topic to it and Retrieve Search Results on the Desktop
Thu, 15 May 2008 22:44:23
I usually don’t mention a service I haven’t tried yet. But, I’m almost ready to hit the sack and don’t want to start playing with anything just now. And, yet, this service seemed interesting enough to blog it as a kind of reminder to myself to try it out tomorrow. kwiry (which I suppose is pronounced […]

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iPod Sleep Issues?
Thu, 15 May 2008 22:07:35
I sometimes use my iPod video’s Sleep Timer. One nice side effect I found is that the Logitech speakers I use also turn off it is on battery power (vs. plugged into a wall socket) after the iPod shuts down. One oddity, though, is what happens the next time I turn the iPod on, it […]

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Information Week says: Most Companies Don’t Have A Mobile Device Management Plan
Wed, 14 May 2008 22:31:02
I went on a rant a few months ago chiding Microsoft for their assumption that most of their Windows Mobile customers live in an IT Utopia where mobile devices are managed by dedicated highly trained IT mobile device support staff with exactly the right management tools. Well, according to this Information Week article… Trouble Ahead: Most […]

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Why I Switched from a Pocket PC Phone to a Smartphone
Tue, 13 May 2008 22:46:58
I’ve spent the last few days using either a K-JAM or TyTn Pocket PC Professional Edition (Phone Edition) device. If you scroll down to the last couple of blog entries, you will know why: My T-Mobile Dash smartphone (Standard Edition) went bonky, froze on my this past Sunday, and went into a repeating boot cycle […]

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Hard Reset My T-Mobile Dash
Mon, 12 May 2008 22:34:15

My T-Mobile Dash (HTC 620) couldn’t break out of its endless boot loop. So, despite my dislike of hard resets, I went ahead and reset the Dash. Here’s how you perform a hard reset on one of these things, btw. Press the left and right soft keys simultaneously While pressing the soft keys, press and hold the […]

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Sigh… My Dash Looks Very Sick
Mon, 12 May 2008 06:22:20
My T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 smartphone) started acting oddly about 6 weeks ago. I turn it off each night and it started taking a while to cold start in the morning. It started cycling through the boot process repeatedly every now and then about a month ago. It locked up last night (WiMo screen […]

Excellent Detailed Asus Eee PC 900 Reivew at EeeUser.com
Fri, 09 May 2008 21:55:39
EeeUser.com has an excellent detailed (really detailed) review of the Asus Eee PC 900 at… EeePC 900 in-depth review It is scheduled for release in the US on May 12 (next week Monday). After watching the Eee PC 4G, Eee PC 8G, and HP Mini-note released, I think I am ready to make a purchase of some […]

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Intermittent Problems are the Worst: SIM Problem?
Thu, 08 May 2008 21:54:27
My WiMo smartphone loses all connectivity every once in a while. Once in a while is defined as once every week or two. It has happened three times in the past month. I noticed that a SIM message was on my screen when it happened the other day. I opened the battery cover, pulled the […]

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CHDK Wiki: How to Hack A Canon PowerShot Digital Camera
Wed, 07 May 2008 22:09:16

I really tempted to try a CHDK Wiki Canon PowerShot digital camera firmware hack. But, a big streak of digital cowardice is getting in the way According to their FAQ, the changes are not actually written to the camera in a permanent way. The firmware hack can be reversed by simply removing the […]

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Windows Live for Windows Mobile Not Available Until May 15
Tue, 06 May 2008 20:49:36

Hmm, the Windows Live for Windows Mobile (Windows Live Hotmail, Contacts, and Spaces) download is unavailable until May 15. I wonder why???

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Associated Press Mobile News Network: iPhone vs. Windows Mobile Format
Mon, 05 May 2008 22:04:30

The Associated Press (AP) launched what many are calling a mobile news site for the iPhone. And, while that is true, the site… http://www.apnews.com/ …is actually smart enough to reformat itself for other mobile form factors too. The image on the left above is a screen capture from a TyTn Pocket PC Phone Edition while the image […]

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Yahoo Go 3.0 Beta Earns a Tentative Thumbs Up
Sun, 04 May 2008 21:16:14

I noticed that Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta became available for two of my Windows Mobile 6 smartphones (non-touch): The Dash and the the Vox. None of my professional edition (touch screen devices) are supported by this beta release. After bad-mouthing the Go 2.0 release and suggesting it go away if the Microsoft-Yahoo merger happened (which […]

Skyfire Beta: Ho-hum Browser Alternative
Sat, 03 May 2008 14:42:31

I received a text message about the Skyfire beta a few days ago. It had been so long since I applied for the beta that I couldn’t remember what Skyfire was. A visit the site reminded me. So, I clicked on the link in the text message and downloaded the CAB file for my Dash […]

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Google News for the iPhone/iPod touch with Associated YouTube Video
Fri, 02 May 2008 06:21:24
Google announced… Google News now available on your iPhone and iPod Touch The site’s URL is the usual http://news.google.com one. It auto-detects the iPhone/iPod touch. One interesting wrinkle described in the announcement is and, where available, relevant YouTube videos embedded with news stories. Nice.

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Microsoft Windows Mobile Connection Site for Mobile Industry People
Thu, 01 May 2008 22:42:42

The Microsoft Windows Mobile Connection site says it is a community site for anyone who sells mobile phones or works in the mobile industry. It looks like a social network for people in the Windows Mobile industry. It let me sign up with my Passport account even though I’m not affiliated with any mobile firm.

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Microsoft LifeCam VX-7000 Webcam Took Pretty Good Conference Videos
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:36:33

I bought a Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 notebook webcam last year (device on the right in the photo above). Its video and audio quality is good. However, the mounting clip is awful. It fits on the top of most notebook LCD lids, but is otherwise useless. So, I bought the newer Microsoft LifeCam VX-7000 notebook webcam […]

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Starbucks WiFi Changes
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:58:12
This is a bit dated. But, since I tend to use WiFi at Starbucks now and then, I wanted to make a note for myself to remember where I read this Starbucks blog item about its WiFi hotspot program since they don’t seem to have permalinks for individual blog items. Check out the March 25, […]

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HYmini Handheld Wind/Solar Generator: Does it Actually Work?
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:40:07

The Hymini is a handheld wind power generator. There is also an optional solar panel that can be used with it. The company behind both products claims in recharge personal electronic products such as cell phones and MP3 players. The devices look reasonably priced. The wind generator is US$49.95 and the solar panel is $24.99. […]

Emeril Lagasse’s Mobile Friendly Site
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:24:42

I had a Banana Foster Cream Pie for dessert as part of my lunch the other day and didn’t know what it was. Searching for the term on the web led to famed TV chef Emeril Lagasse’s website. And, what do you know, it has a mobile friendly version. This was important since I was […]

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Ubuntu 8.04 is Out But Waiting for 8.10 (Ibex)
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:22:51
I was just reading the article about the release of Ubuntu Linux 8.04 over on Arstechnica… The Heron has landed: Ubuntu 8.04 officially released …and this comment caught my eye: The next major version is Ubuntu 8.10, which is codenamed Intrepid Ibex and is scheduled for release in October. During the Intrepid Ibex development cycle, the focus […]

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So Long Spot Watches, We Hardly Knew You
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:45:12
Wow, just read this over on Engadget… SPOT watches, R.I.P.: 2004 - 2008 I still use my Suuntto n3i Spot watch everyday and subscribe to the service that lets me sync with Outlook’s calendar. According to Engadget the data service will continue on for my watch. I sure hope so since Microsoft just auto-renewed the service and […]

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Microsoft Research Shift: Finger Touch Technique for Pocket PCs
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:23:39

This video demo comes from Microsoft Research. It illustrates how a Pocket PC designed to be used with a stylus can be used with a larger finger touching the screen using a technique they call Shift(not to be confused with the HTC Shift UMPC device). Looks like a good workaround for those […]

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Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile
Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:22:10

Quick! Name a web service that is as flaky as a bowl of breakfast cereal that doesn’t seem to generate hate even though it seems to be down half the time. Did you say Twitter? I learned about Tiny Twitter from Mobility Site’s Jack Cook. There are versions for Windows Mobile (native code) and Java-enabled […]

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Windows Mobile’s Weak Week View
Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:04:53
What happens when a bunch of Windows Mobile enthusiasts (my fellow Windows Mobile MVPs) get together? Well, there’s a lot of talk about mobile devices (no surprise). And, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Windows Mobile calendar gets a lot of discussion time since it is probably one of the most used applications on a […]

My Google Docs Offline Feature Got Turned On
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:01:20

I noticed that my Google Docs offline feature was turned on today. Google Gears took what seemed like less than a minute to synchronize files. There’s an icon on my desktop to quickly access files in offline mode.

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FYI: OpenDNS and T-Mobile Hotspots Don’t Mix
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:56:57

I don’t use T-Mobile Hotspots often. However, I have been using it while in Seattle this week. It was the first time I used the Hotspots since switching my Macbook to OpenDNS supplied DNS servers. Unfortunately, you can’t get to T-Mobile’s proxy on the inside of their network (makes sense) when using OpenDNS servers. So, I removed the OpenDNS DNS entries for now. I should have created a new profile but was in a rush to get things working and didn’t think that far ahead :-)

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IronRuby Meetup at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:14:30

Just a quick note that I attended an informal meetup to discuss Microsoft IronRuby during the first day of the Microsoft MVP Global Summit in Seattle. You can find my blog post about it on the O’Reilly ONLamp Port 25 blog…

IronRuby Meetup at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit

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Adobe Media Player: Does the World Really Need Another Branded Media Player?
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:16:54

I dunno. Does the world really need another branded media player?

Adobe Media Player

OK, it is a content aggregator. But, doesn’t Joost do this too? Whatever happened to Joost anyway? It was a big deal a year again. Now, no one talks about it.

The HTC Shift: So Close and Yet So Far
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:29:18

My old friend and fellow Mobile Devices MVP Arne Hess (the::unwired) brought an HTC Shift ultramobile running both Windows Vista and Windows Mobile to the MVP Summit this past week. You can see it above sitting beside my Dash smartphone and on top of my Apple MacBook. The Shift’s unique design using both Windows Vista […]

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Gerado Dada Points to Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard Edition Video Demo
Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:01:54
Gerado Dada points to a sleep inducing Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard Edition (produced by marketing) video demo at… Windows Mobile 6.1 Video Demo (Standard Edition) Note that what is shown only applies to the non-touch Standard Edition devices. Professional Edition does not have any dramatic visible changes with Windows Mobile 6.1 on it.

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Last Day of the MVP Summit
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:21:18

It’s the last day of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Summit. It was great syncing up in person with the other Windows Mobile MVPs and Microsoft Windows Mobile team. Lots of good information was exchanged this week. This morning we have two keynote presentations by Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie to look forward to. […]

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Redfly for $500, I Dunno
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:00:10

A friend and fellow Mobile Devices MVP has a pre-production Redfly Windows Mobile Companion. At $199 this would be a killer product. At $499, I don’t think so. It would make more sense for me to buy an Asus Eee PC even if it couldn’t connect to a mobile phone network.

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The Dash’s Battery Died Faster Than Any Other Phone Battery I’ve Used
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:04:34
I’ve had my T-Mobile Dash for about a year now. I don’t switch phones very frequently although I often do have a couple of phones to play with. Why? I usually find a specific phone I like a lot and stick with it for a while. The Dash is a great phone and I haven’t […]

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Northwest Airlines Mobile Friendly Site - Any Other Airlines?
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:12:59

I rarely travel these days (having spent the 1990s traveling once a month or so). So, I always need to check what is going on with airlines and other travel entities. Northwest has a mobile friendly website at… wireless.nwa.com Since I’m too lazy to go check the other airlines’ sites, let me know if what other airlines […]

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Definitely Need a ChargePod
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:16:30

Fellow MVP Sven Johannsen pointed me to the Callpod Chargepod (Amazon affiliate page) multi-device charger (manufacturer page). I’m traveling to Seattle to attend the Microsoft MVP Global Summit and wish I had known about this thing earlier. The sad thing, though, is that charging six devices at once is not quite enough But, […]

Dell Says it Will Join the Sub-notebook Fray (Bring Back Windows 98SE!)
Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:04:31
Looks like Dell is playing the me-too catch-up game (from Information Week)… Dell Gears Up To Enter Mini-Notebook Market The first question is what price will the Dell entry be set at and what features will be available. Asus gambled and took the early mind-share. HP seems to have raised the bar (feature-wise) — although some claim […]

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Evernote: Notes on your Desk and Phone without Syncing
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:11:28

Anything that lets me avoid depending on ActiveSync or WMDC is a good thing. So, I was pretty excited to try Evernote’s desktop (Windows and Mac) client, free web service, and Pocket PC client that lets me access my notes everywhere without depending on ActiveSync. You can read my commentary about it on the O’Reilly […]

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More HP 2133 Mini-Note Reviews: Brighthand and PC World
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:41:42
I’m still debating whether to buy the Asus Eee PC 900 (unreleased) or the soon-to-be-available HP 2133 Mini-Note. Here are two more good reviews for anyone else considering the HP Mini-Note. Brighthand’s review… HP 2133 Mini-Note Review …includes some interesting benchmarks against other sub-notebooks as well as a video comparing an Asus Eee PC running Windows XP […]

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jkOnTheRun has a Detailed Hands-On Review of the HP 2133 Mini-Note Eee PC Competitior
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:39:14
I’m still trying to figure out which mini-notebook to buy. The Everex Cloudbook was eliminated a while back based on initial negative reviews. The FlipStart looked interesting. But, it looks like its firesale price was because it is discontinued. I actually bought an OLPC XO. But, while it probably meets the needs for which it […]

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The iPod touch Paradox: It is Easier to Control a non-touch iPod by Just Touch
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:03:16
The funny thing about the iPod touch is that I use it for everything except listening to music and podcasts. Why? Touch devices like the iPod touch and Pocket PC are two-handed devices. Both require you to cradle it one hand and manipulate it with the other. Non-touch iPods, like non-touch Windows Mobile smartphones, are […]

Google Gears and Picasa Web Doesn’t Work on an HTC Advantage
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:00:34

Google announced a beta release for offline viewing of photos on the Picasa web site using Google Gears. Picasa Web Albums for Windows Mobile This release only works on Pocket PC type devices (Classic and Professional Editions). I tried it on an HTC Advantage 7500 running Windows Mobile 6. Google Gears installed fine on the device. But […]

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Windows Mobile 6.1 Mutterings Part 2: Smartphone Copy and Paste
Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:42:48

Windows Mobile 6.0 Amateur, um, Standard Edition (formerly known as Smartphone) doesn’t let you copy and paste text. This is fixed in Windows Mobile 6.1. Pocket PC/Classic/Professional Edition users have always had this feature and may now issue a smug look of superiority at Smartphone users who will need to wait a while more before […]

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Windows Mobile 6: Application Sampler
Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:45:42

Another article I wrote for Microsoft.com’s Windows Mobile section went live. This one can be thought of as a kind of applications sampler. Despite my many (many many) complaints about Windows Mobile, it direction (or lack thereof), and basic platform design issues, one thing that is undeniable is that it probably has the richest set […]

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Windows Mobile 6.1 Mutterings Part 1: Internet Explorer’s Brain Transplant
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:39:19

I haven’t played with Windows Mobile 6.1 myself. So, I’m not sure how much Windows Mobile 6.1 muttering I have to,um, mutter. But, here’s the first thing about WiMo 6.1 that interested me: Internet Explorer. The word is that WiMo’s brain-dead web browser is getting replaced by a browser that can deliver desktop experience (or […]

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Leaving Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition and WEP Behind
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:12:18
I’ve been running two WAPs (Wireless Access Points) for a while now. The second WAP is an old Linksys 802.11b with WEP to let older WiFi devices like my trusty Dell Axim X50v connect to the net. The real issue was the OLPC XO that didn’t have any connectivity except for WiFi. However, with the […]

Don Syme’s WebLog on F# and Other Research Projects : Tackling the F# Productization

be matched by a draft of the F# Language Specification

Emphasis mine.

Back to Basics: The Subtler Differences Between Cameraphones and Digital Cameras
Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:42:32

Discussions (and sometimes rants) about camera phone photos usually steer towards pixel count, clarity, and color. However, there are subtler differences between camera phone photos and digital camera photos. Take the two photos above taken using a T-Mobile Dash cameraphone (left) and a Canon Powershot A710IS point-and-shoot digital camera. I’ve resized both photos from their […]

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OLPC XO Build 656 and WiFi WPA
Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:39:56

I finally got around to playing with the OLPC XO in an effort to get it to work with WPA on a wireless LAN. It turns out that the build 656 update back in January added WPA support. The OLPC wiki has detailed instructions at… Olpc-update …but here’s the condensed version. Open up terminal window (scroll right to […]

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Windows Mobile 6: Connected Applications
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:33:58

Did you know that there is an Encarta encyclopedia bot that you can talk to on Windows Live Messenger? That’s just one of the tips I wrote about in this new article on Microsoft.com’s Windows Mobile website area. Introduction to Connected Applications: Applications That Plug You in to the Wireless World

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Windows Mobile 6 Excel Mobile: Transform Your Day with Top Spreadsheet Tips
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:55:43

Here’s another article of mine that is now live in Microsoft.com’s Windows Mobile area… Transform Your Day with Top Spreadsheet Tips In addition to some basic and tips, I spent a bit of time to discuss the differences between the versions of Excel Mobile available on Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition and Professional/Classic Edition devices.

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Windows Mobile 6 Word Mobile Tips: Write Down Great Thoughts While They Are Fresh
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:25:32

One of the articles I wrote for the Microsoft.com Windows Mobile site just went live. This one has tips and information about Word Mobile for Windows Mobile 6. Write Down Great Thoughts While They Are Fresh Let me know if there are other aspects of Word Mobile you’d like expanded on for a future article.

CNET’s Matthew Miller Posted a Redfly Video Demo
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:47:39
CNET’s Mobile Gadgeteer Matthew Miller posted an informative video demo of the Redfly Windows Mobile Smartphone Companion at… Can the REDFLY Windows Mobile Smartphone Companion succeed where the Foleo couldn’t? The Redfly is actually LESS than what the never-launched Palm Foleo was supposed to be. The Redfly does not have any internal functions. It is just an […]

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Website Exploit Can Freeze or Crash iPhone/iPod touch
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:47:27
According to CNET… A new exploit will either lock up your iPhone or iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Web code locks up iPhones and iPod Touch The current workaround is to disable Javascript in the Safari brower. Yuck. CNET’s […]

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ActiveSync/WMDC and Zune Sync: Birds of a Sync Feather
Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:35:09
The Zune 2 firmware upgrade turned my 1st generation Zune from a moderately useful MP3/video player to a decent media player with a screen I prefer to my iPod video’s screen (though nothing can touch the iPod touch’s display - pun intended). With its 30GB hard drive (compared to my iPod touch’s 16GB) and the […]

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Notebook Too Hot? Try a Newer Notebook Model
Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:05:38

My old Dell Latitude D600 notebook was too hot to work on the keyboard all day long. I bought a USB keyboard to use with the D600 to avoid touching it during the day. As you can see, the hottest area on the keyboard side of the D600 got up to 109 degrees F. The […]

SmartPhoneThoughts.com: Paul Thurrott to the Windows Mobile Team: “Screw ‘em!”
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:12:29
Found this reference one SmartphoneThoughts.com (I’ve been telling Jason over there that he needs to rename it StandardEditionThoughts.com to stay in line with Microsoft’s branding SmartPhoneThoughts.com: Paul Thurrott to the Windows Mobile Team: “Screw ‘em!” …to a statement made in the Windows Weekly podcast by Paul Thurrott and Leo LaPorte. I guess I’m not the […]

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Back to Basics: Assigning Apps to Buttons
Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:16:21

The blog item I wrote earlier about Google’s tip for assigning Google mobile applications to a Samsung Blackjack’s key pointed out that not all Windows Mobile Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) devices have this feature. However, all Pocket PC type devices (Professional Edition, Classic Edition) have this feature baked in by Microsoft. The problem is that […]

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One-Click Access to Google Mobile Apps
Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:23:12
The Google Mobile Blog has a tip for Blackberry 8800, Samsung Blackjack, and Nokia N95 owners… Fast tip: one-click access to Google mobile applications on your phone My Dash (Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition) does not have the option to assign buttons or other physical inputs (volume slider) to applications. However, all Professional Edition (Pocket PC Phone […]

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Sprint HTC Mogul EV-DO Rev. A Upgrade
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:30:40
I don’t have an HTC Mogul. But, if I did, I’d be pretty happy after reading this report on Wired. Sprint Phone First to Use Fast Network Sprint said Monday it was releasing a software update for the Mogul phone, made by HTC Corp. of Taiwan, that will enable the phone to connect at Rev. […]

ActiveSync for the iPhone? Keep in Mind it is Exchange ActiveSync, Not Desktop
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:16:32
Apple announced that they licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft to let the iPhone directly sync with Microsoft Exchange. I could make some snide remarks about ActiveSync here (all well deserved). But, the thing to remember is this: They are NOT talking about syncing an iPhone to a PC using ActiveSync. This is purely an over-the-air sync […]

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Google Greasing the Path from Windows Mobile to Android
Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:14:21

No one has ever accused the folks at Google of being dumb. And, despite their stock (along with nearly every other firm’s stock) tanking lately, the Googlelonions are still a smart bunch. On Tuesday, they provide Google Gears for Windows Mobile. This sure looks like a testing ground for preparing people for working with Google’s […]

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Zoho Writer + Google Gears Mobile + Windows Mobile = Winner
Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:37:36

I installed Google Gears for Windows Mobile today and tried out the Gears-enabled Zoho Writer on a Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (an HTC TyTn) device. The result is not perfect but is far far ahead of what anyone else (including Google and Microsoft) have available for Windows Mobile. After installing Google Gears Mobile, I went […]

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Google Gears for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (this is huge!)
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:39:05
This is huge news in so many ways… Google Code Blog: Power up your mobile web applications Google Code: Google Gears on Mobile Devices Google Gears is an API for creating rich web applications and provides the ability for taking those rich web applications offline. Google Gears on Mobile Devices supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6. A […]

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Bind Bluetooth to MyBlogLog? Sounds Scary
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:56:23
If you head over to the mobile version of Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog service (I use the regular web version of their service here — look at the left sidebar)… http://m.mybloglog.com/ …you will find they say this about their mobile service: Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and find out if you have […]

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HTC Advantage 7500 Camera Went Bad
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:50:44

The main camera in my HTC Advantage 7500 (1st generation) went bad about six weeks ago. The rest of the system is fine including the secondary camera next to the LCD. I’ve tried the obvious remedies like wiping the camera lens area and performing a hard reset. Never seen anything like it before. Switching to […]

via Tim Sneath,

Secondly, the real Scott will be sharing Wednesday’s MIX keynote with Ray Ozzie and Dean Hachamovitch (GM for Internet Explorer). If you’re into web development at all, that keynote is going to be required viewing - we’ve got lots of new announcements, some great demos, and one or two surprises. You can watch the keynote live at 9:30am Pacific / 5:30pm GMT by clicking on one of the following three streams: 750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps.

So as many of you will know I’ve been a *HUGE* fan of both Peter Fisk and his Vista Smalltalk project here on this blog. The problem is that, as some of you will have noticed, as of July 5th, 2007 there’s been no sign nor trace of Peter OR Vista Smalltalk. Well, that’s not completely true. I did exchange a few emails with Peter in or around August of last year, all of which seem to have suggested that both he and Vista Smalltalk would reappear after he finished a “move to a new city” and the next release of Silverlight came into being.

But that release came and went with September of last year, yet no sign of Peter or VST resurfacing for air. When I queried the Vista Smalltalk list on September 19th regarding the whereabouts of Peter, I got the following in reply a day later from Gal Zsolt, another VST list member,

2008 Daylight Savings Time Fixes for Windows Mobile 5 & 6
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:30:15
I thought this Daylight Savings issue was fixed in last year’s patch. Guess not. Here are the links for the CAB file download as well as the desktop (setup.msi) installer version. Update for Windows Mobile for PC (KB949168) (SETUP.MSI) Update for Windows Mobile for PC (KB949168) (WMDST2008-1.CAB) FYI: I just installed the CAB file installer version on my […]

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MSNBC Reports AT&T Wireless & Sprint As 2 & 3 in U.S. ID Theft Victims Numbers
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:09:30
MSNBC: Which firms have the most ID theft victims? MSNBC reports that Bank of America is #1 in U.S. ID Theft victims. But, what interested me was that A&T Wireless was #2 and Sprint PCS was #3. Verizon Wireless checks in at #7 while T-Mobile USA is at #11.

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WiFi Shirt
Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:12:09

Someone I know won one of those WiFi detecctor t-shirts as a door prize the other day. The plate on the front of the shirt (the detector itself is a little box connected via cables to the front plate) actually works. It went all blue (no WiFi) in a known dead-spot and lit up (four […]

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US-CERT: WinCE/InfoJack Trojan
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:58:02
Hmm… US-CERT has an advisory about a Windows CE Trojan. Here’s the list of things it is said to do on a Windows CE device: spreads via seemingly legitimate application installation files installs as an autorun program on the memory card installs itself to the device when an infected memory card is inserted protects itself from deletion by copying […]

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Ubuntu Mobile
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:45:36
Ubuntu announced their mobile version of Ubuntu Linux Ubuntu Mobile …targetted at the UMPC sized devices with flash storage (instead of spinning hard drives) that started to gain popularity with the release of Asus Eee PC and OLPC XO last year. Microsoft needs much lighter weight version of Windows Vista if they intend to stay in the […]

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If Microsoft Buys Yahoo!, Yahoo! Go Must Go Away
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:45:17

Yahoo!’s mobile sites are great. But, for some odd reason, its Yahoo! Go Mobile client for Windows Mobile is just awful. Its navigation is non-intuitive and it is unbelievably slow when it actually works. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, I sure hope they keep its mobile-friendly websites which are more content rich than Microsoft’s sites. But, […]

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Linkedin Mobile Looks So Much Better on an iPhone/iPod touch
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:24:21

Linkedin is the latest big social network site to mobile enable itself. You can find the mobile friendly site at… mobile.linkedin.com It would have been nice if they adopted the “m.” prefix to reduce the amount of tapping on a small keyboard or screen. But, oh well… The real story here though is that once again the barebones […]

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Motorola T305 Bluetooth Hands Free Speaker
Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:36:54

I really don’t like using phone headsets. I’ve bought a couple of and have used them sparingly. But, they are just plain uncomfortable in warm weather environments. And, I can’t hear my podcasts clearly when listening to them in the car with one ear blocked. So, I finally got around to buying the Motorola T305 […]

Microsoft Sync: Business Week Dissects this Car System
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:50:49
Just found this in Business Week… The Secrets of Microsoft’s Sync Sync is is a Microsoft car product found in Ford cars that lets you control the stereo and your phone (via Bluetooth) using voice commands. Microsoft tried this several years ago with their Windows CE Automotive products that never really caught on. Given Ford’s slipping sales, […]

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Microsoft TechNet: Intro to System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:59:07
If you’ve been looking some info about scmdm (System Center Mobile Device Manager) 2008, Microsoft TechNet has a 23 minute video interview about it at… Intro to System Center Mobile Device Manager (scmdm) 2008

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Tiny-Code.com Now Redirects to Apple iPhone Dev Center
Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:00:01
While reading a PC World blog entry about Apple’s upcoming iPhone SDK, I learned about the Tiny-Code.com site for people interested in unofficial iPhone installers. When I tried to visit the site, I was redirected to Apple’s official Developer Connection… iPhone Dev Center It (the official site) only has information about Webkit (browser) development now. But, we […]

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iFrogz Vibez: The Little Speaker That Could
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:40:26

I bought this little Vibez speaker from iFrogz on a whim during their post-holiday sale period. It listed for $34.99. I bought it for $19.99. And, it currently lists on their site for $24.95. This thing is not going to give your high-end or even decent portable speakers any competition. However, despite its relatively low-fidelity, […]

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Engadget Describes the Limits of Verizon’s Unlimited Plans
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:08:29
Engadget points out the limits of the new Verizon Wireless Unlimited Plans. It looks like the way to read the three offerings are: Somewhat unlimited, sort of unlimited, and unlimited but pricey. These plans can also have two-person and three-person family plans (Sprint and T-Mobile family plans include up to 5 phones if I recall […]

Microsoft’s announcement of “broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors” is certainly an interesting development. Although most of my career experience has involved Unix/Linux platforms, lately I do quite a lot of experimentation on Windows, in my role as open source community manager for the cross-platform Threading Building Blocks (TBB) project.

In fact, I’m hoping to present a 45-minute session at this year’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) that will involve an application I’m working on that integrates Python, Boost.Python, Visual C++, and TBB. So a statement by Microsoft that talks about interoperability between the Microsoft platform and open source (one aspect of the new initiative is “fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities”) is quite interesting to me.

Threading Building Blocks (if you haven’t heard of it) is a C++ template library that simplifies the development of multithreaded applications, by abstracting the details of low-level thread management behind constructs such as parallel_for, parallel_reduce, parallel_scan, etc. TBB also includes thread-safe STL-like containers (concurrent_vector, concurrent_queue, concurrent_hash_map), scalable memory allocators, mutexes, a well-developed task manager, and quite a lot more.

In this sense, Threading Building Blocks is “like” Microsoft’s Parallel Extensions (ParallelFX) — though a major difference between the two is that TBB has several years of development behind it and is already a fully-functional library, while ParallelFX is a new initiative announced just this past November. Hence, as you’d expect, ParallelFX is currently fairly slim in terms of capability compared with TBB.

What grabs my attention in this Microsoft press release is the stated objective to “drive greater interoperability … and choice for developers”. As I said, Threading Building Blocks is a cross-platform library. You can apply it to multithread your Windows applications without spending a dime, using the following free software packages:

• Threading Building Blocks open source
• Visual C++ Express Edition
• Microsoft Assembler
• Microsoft Platform SDK

(See my recent post about how one developer accomplished this.)

One question, though, is: do Windows developers really want to integrate non-Microsoft libraries and applications into their Windows projects? Doing so carries some risk (given Microsoft’s past), should the development path of Microsoft’s own platform diverge from the newly declared commitment to openness and interoperability.

Then there’s the convenience aspect. When I was a Windows development manager a few years ago, we didn’t use anything outside of Microsoft’s own platform. But the truth is, as good as the Microsoft development platform is, in some instances there are other products that are better for accomplishing a specific task. We seriously considered offering customers the option of using SQL Server or Oracle, for example.

When it comes to multithreading C++ applications on Windows, developers have an already-solid (on Version 2.0+ at this point) open source choice in Threading Building Blocks. Yet, thus far, it seems to me (from the anecdotal evidence, talking to people who visit the #tbb FreeNode.net IRC channel, etc.) that TBB has been embraced primarily by developers who prefer other (primarily open source) operating system platforms.

As expected, the Microsoft announcement has received plenty of negative press and commentary (doesn’t that happens with every Microsoft announcement to a certain extent?). I happen to like the Microsoft platform — it’s development tools are stellar in my opinion. I’m also a great fan of open source, and indeed I have a vested interest in open source through my involvement in TBB open source.

It’s going to be very interesting to see if Windows developers and software companies will take advantage of Microsoft’s new encouragement for them to explore integrating open source libraries into their Windows applications.

iPhone Searches on Google 50x More Than Other Phones
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:30:32
Saw a reference to this on the AppleInsider site and followed the link to… Google homes in on revenue to phones …The key quote from the article that AppleInsider pointed out is: Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple’s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence […]

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PIM Backup: Free Windows Mobile Pocket PC Backup App
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:29:58
Just read about this free Windows Mobile backup software… PIM Backup 2.8 …on the Inside Microsoft blog. Note that this software only works with the Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition (Classic or Professional). Standard Edition users need to look elsewhere for a free backup solution (let me know if you find one) or use a […]

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Is T-Mobile USA Going to Survive? Should Microsoft Help Them Stay Relevant?
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:53:41
I mentioned earlier this week that T-Mobile USA customers will still have WiFi access in Starbucks coffee shops due to a WiFi roaming agreement between T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless. Then, I learned that this agreement ends after 5 years (early 2013). It is possible they could renew their agreement at that point in time. But, […]

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Microsoft Posts: Troubleshooting BCM for Pocket PC/Smartphone
Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:43:00
Just noticed this blog post over on the Microsoft Business Contact Manager (BCM) Team Blog… Troubleshooting BCM for Pocket PC/Smartphone If you are using BCM, you probably want to bookmark this blog entry. And, I continue to be amused when even Microsoft forgets the whole awful Classic Edition (Pocket PC), Professional Edition (Pocket PC Phone Edition), and Amateur […]

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Social Micro Presence Sites for Windows Mobile
Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:22:19
I’ve become a fan of social micro presence sites over the past year or so. I think Twitter and Tumblr were the two that showed me the way and their value. Although all the good mobile web designs are being developed for the iPhone Safari browser, there are a lot of social micro presence sites that […]

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OEDb: 100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:16:50
I don’t know anything about the OEDb (Online Education Database) site. But, someone associated with them pointed out this useful looking iPod resource… 100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better I thought it looked useful enough to spread the word. The resources are categorized as study guides, podcasts, tutorials, applications, tools ad sites, […]

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MSN Direct for Windows Mobile Standard Edition
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:43:53

I read about the MSN Direct beta release for Windows Mobile before heading to work this morning. So, as soon I got in, I point my T-Mobile Dash at http://phone.msndirect.com/ and downloaded the installation CAB file. To make a long story short, MSN Direct was removed from my phone within 20 minutes. Here’s what happened… The […]

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T-Mobile Customers Still Can Use WiFi at Starbucks
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:47:44
As a T-Mobile customer the first thing that came to mind when I read the headline that Starbucks is switching WiFi providers (from T-Mobile to AT&T Wireless) was… well, I won’t write them in a G-rated blog. However, if you read the Starbucks press release about this switch, you’ll see that they say: In recognition […]

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Are the HTC Shift and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 Too Little Too Late?
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:19:09
I read somewhere that the HTC Shift is near shipping and that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 was announced. (the first Windows Mobile device from a firm that normally uses their home-brewed Symbian OS). Both devices are amazing pieces of ultra mobile technology. The question is: Are they still relevant? We already know that the […]

In Sunday’s NY Times (February 10, 2008) Tim O’Reilly is quoted as saying

Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0…They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.

This raises a host of interesting questions for me as a long time author for O’Reilly Media and as “Silverlight Geek” for Microsoft.

As a start, I decided it was time for me to turn my attention to writing a bit more about Popfly, and I invite you to join me if you’d like to know more about this interesting, if now somewhat controversial, technology.

Thanks.

-Jesse

Manufacturers Can’t Build Linux Based Ultraportables Fast Enough
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:23:38
The Wired article Linus Torvalds on Why Users Aren’t Flocking to Linux has the Linux creator rationalizing why Linux hasn’t been accepted on the desktop. My message to Mr. Torvalds: Dude, don’t worry about the desktop - Linux has conquered and cornered the ultraportable market! I just went over to ZaReason to check on the […]

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Does Mobile Device Ecosystem Matter?
Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:48:30
While syncing my Zune with a bunch of video podcasts, I began thinking about the fact that my iPod is usually what travels with me because of all the eco-system infrastructure I have to support it: FM transceiver dock for the car, battery powered docking speaker, belt cases, etc. The Zune 2 firmware transformed my […]

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HanDBase 4.0 Available
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:27:05
When HanDBase was only available for the Palm OS, I remember wondering if it would ever be available for Windows CE devices. I remember how excited i was to get an early Windows CE version of it to write the first review of it for Microsoft.com. Here’s a republished version of it that is still […]

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Apple Bumps iPhone to 16GB and iPod touch to 32GB
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:00:53
Just read an MSNBC article that Apple increased the iPhone to 16GB ($499) and the iPod touch to 32GB (also $499). I wonder: (1) Why didn’t they announce this during Macworld? It might have prevented some of their dramatic stock price drop since then. (and) (2) Shouldn’t the iPod touch price be down around $449 […]

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Pownce Mobile
Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:43:15
Hmm, I think I’m asking for information tonight instead of providing it Pownce switched from its invitation beta phase to public beta a few weeks ago. They also brought out a mobile friendly site you can find at… http://m.pownce.com/ So, here’s the thing. I like Twitter a lot. I like Tumblr a lot. Jaiku, um, […]

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DPreview.com Mobile Friendly Site
Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:44:07

My favorite digital camera review site recently created a mobile device friendly website. You can find the Digital Photography Review mobile friendly site at… http://www.dpreview.com/mobile/

Gartner Says: More Macs, More by 2012
Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:28:48
Information Week quotes some Gartner predictions in the article… More Macs, More Mobile, More Open Source, Gartner Predicts They predict mobile workers will abandon the notebook form factor in favor of what they term new classes of Internet-centric pocketable devices at the sub-$400 level. Believe it or not, people have been making this prediction since the early […]

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PayPal Security Key: Part 2
Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:59:39
I received my replacement PayPal Security Key and went through the activation process again. Fortunately, the process went smoothly this time. I made a small purchase to test the purchase process and it also went well. Here’s something to note though. After completing the activation process, PayPal instructs you to use the system by logging […]

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Windows Mobile Calendar Weirdness: Outlook Overrides Smartphone Changes
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:12:08
This Windows Mobile Calendar problem happens all the time to me ever since Microsoft removed the two-way conflict resolution option. Here’s the scenario. 1. Create an appointment on a WiMo smartphone 2. Sync it to Outlook 2003 (or 2007) 3. After syncing, edit the appointment and change it to a different day (i.e., reschedule it) 4. Resync it with […]

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Why Do US Cell Phone Companies Hate Text Messages?
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:41:15
An article over on ABCnews.com talks about the high cost of text messaging and calculates some interesting comparisons based on AT&T Wireless’ upcoming increased charge of 20 cents per text message and 30 cents per MMS message. Based on the assumption of a cost of 1 cent for every 7 bytes (characters), AT&T’s text messaging […]

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The Mysteries of Windows Mobile Battery Problems
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:38:00

Of all the problems a Windows Mobile smartphone might have, battery problems rank somewhere in the top three if not number one. Why? If your battery dies at an inopportune time, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the phone is, you have a paper weight. Having a spare always helps, of course, but […]

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iZoho: Zoho Web Office Suite for the iPhone/iPod touch
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:43:03

Cool sites designed specifically for the iPhone (and by side effect the iPod touch) just keep on coming. I’ve been using the Zoho Creator web database product for almost a month now because it works well both on the desktop as well as mobile devices (not just the iPhone). However, Zoho created a very nice […]

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Sync Windows Mobile with a Mac?
Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:58:55
I installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac this weekend and have been giving some thought to syncing my Windows Mobile smartphone with a Mac instead of Windows XP (I have Vista running but don’t want to use WMDC). Unfortunately, all of the solutions have issues. Here are my options. Sync my smartphone with Mac OS X’s […]

FixMyMovie.com: Enhance Your CameraPhone Video Recordings
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:58:10

FixMyMovie.com uses the MotionDSP (which is funded by Q-Tel) video enhancement technology to enhance digital video. I uploaded a few seconds of video recorded by my T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 smartphone) to see what it could do with the normally fuzzy video produced by this cameraphone. You can find my video test at: Test […]

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Instructions for Submitting Podcasts for the Zune
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:19:14
From what I’ve been reading the Zune has been picking up its pace as a podcasting device. So, if you are a podcaster and want it to be available on the Zune, head over to this Zune.net web page that provides the information need to know about submitting Podcast content for the Zune. Provide Content for […]

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atlarge.com: Airport WiFi Access Point Locator
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:20:28
atlarge.com provides information about wireless LAN access in airports around the world based on user contributed information. It also provides ratings for power outlets, comfort, and other features. So, if you’re traveling by air, you might find useful information from this site. And, if you are so inclined contribute some information.

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Disney Testing Nindendo DS as Park Tour Guides
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:22:39
ds fanboy and other Nintendo DS and Disney focused blogs are reporting about Disney testing the idea of providing guides to their theme parks on the Nintendo DS. Taking a Closer Look at the Disney DS Guide Before you pooh-pooh (pun intended) the idea, consider this. I recall hearing or reading somewhere that the Nintendo DS Lite […]

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New Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketing Corp. VP (Breath of Fresh Air?)
Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:25:22
CNET reports that Microsoft just brought in a new Corporate VP for Windows Mobile Marketing named Todd Peters (good first name . Microsoft aims to add ‘easy’ button to Windows Mobile The article quotes him as saying: From my perspective, it’s not the marketing of Windows Mobile that needs work. It’s the software. After having […] CORRECTION: I incorrectly attributed the quoted comments to the new VP instead of the blog entry’s author. Ack…

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iPhone AT&T Corporate Accounts Now Available. Windows Mobile Team: Need ActiveSync/WMDC Tools
Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:32:01
Just read over on Engadget that… AT&T rolls out iPhone plans for business customers Hey, I commented just yesterday that Microsoft needs to fix Windows Mobile’s Internet Explorer browser to let it render iPhone-specific sites because business customers and service providers are now looking at the iPhone as a business device. Now, they have an official mechanism […]

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Windows Mobile 7 Request: Let IE Render iPhone Sites
Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:52:13

There is nothing wrong with your display. This is what the Digg.com site formatted for viewing on the iPhone (digg.com/iphone) looks like when rendered on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (AKA Professional Edition). The Windows Mobile product people always ask people to give them examples or use-cases of issues outsiders bring to them. […]

I’ve been doing a bunch of dev work inside the confines of System.Drawing as of late, an area in which I’ve spent less time than I have elsewhere, and came across the following that left me busting a gut,

No doubt there’s good reason to have the enum value PixelFormat.DontCare, but it’s still making me smile none-the-less wondering just how purple and sticky** the sky’s above Redmond are these days (or at least that day, anyway). ;-)

Enjoy your “What pixel format should I use? Ah, hell, I don’t care. Just pick one.” dev days, everyone!

** If you don’t know, don’t ask. ;-) :D

More “mobile” than “Windows Mobile” in this set of blog entries from last week. Hope you find them interesting anyway!

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Cheap(er) Ultra Portables Are Hot!
Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:18:13

A year ago the then unreleased OLPC XO seemed to have the cheap ultraportable market to itself. However, its altruistic goals limited it to non-retail sales. The idea of $100 (or even the current $200) price for an ultraportable seemed unthinkable for the retail market. Who would buy a cheap small notebook? Then Asus […]

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Information Week Clears Up the Airline Battery Confusion
Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:27:19
Information Week has an informative article clearly explaining the whole US carry-on battery issue at… Airline Passengers Can Bring Batteries Aboard, After All

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PayPal Security Key
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:09:49

I heard about the PayPal security key on the Security Now podcast last year. I don’t actually use PayPal but I was curious about the key so I bought one for $5. It arrived today and I went through what looked like the simple activation process. But, guess what. The process didn’t work (at least […]

POST-POSTING NOTE: If I wasn’t clear in my original blog entry, I am currently waitig for a replacement key fob to arrive. I will try activating it after it arrives. I received email from the PayPal Sr. Product Manager for Two-Factor Authentication the day after I posted this item in my personal blog. I’m quite surprised PayPal noticed my entry. I’m guessing that they have a search engine looking for comments about them. Good idea! I wish more firms would pay attention to what customers say like PayPal does.

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iPod touch January Upgrade Problems
Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:04:00

I’ve never had an iTunes/iPod sync issue… Until this evening. I ran into problems related to the iPod touch January Upgrade released today and announced on Macworld 2008 this morning. You can read the gory details in the blog item I wrote for the O’Reilly Mac Center. I discovered one item in favor of the Windows […]

POST-POSTING NOTE: Apple appears to have refunded payments for the unsuccesful iPod touch upgrades. However, I still have not received any resolution on how to actually upgrade the 2nd iPod touch.

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Microsoft Press Release: Survey Shows Increasing Worldwide Reliance on To-Do Lists
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:10:49
I saw this title in Microsoft’s press release list… Survey Shows Increasing Worldwide Reliance on To-Do Lists …then saw the subtitle… Results shed light on organizational habits and differences between men and women… and thought it might be some kind of early April Fool’s joke since it didn’t seem to mention any product or project. Then, looking […]

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Google Optimized for the iPhone
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:14:34

Google is at it again. They optimized a bunch of their web services for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. You don’t need a special web URL to find it. Just head over to google.com with your iPhone or iPod touch and your device will be routed to the right place. Clicking the link to […]

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Qipit Good! Scan Cameraphone Photos to PDF
Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:48:12

Qipit good!… With apologies to Devo… I signed up for the free Qipit online cameraphone to PDF scanning service today. Although I’m focusing on the cameraphone aspect today, you can upload a digital photo taken with any kind of digital camera and upload it from the desktop too. For this test, I used a T-Mobile […]

Amazing Flash Prices
Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:14:37

I gave my spare 2GB SD card to my daughter last night to put into her OLPC XO. The SD card showed up right away and was usable from applications such as the word processor. I’m not sure how Fedora generated the card name (model number?). But, it was definitely not user friendly (e.g., /media/flash). […]

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Dual Booting Linux/Windows OLPC in the Future?
Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:58:42
Computerworld’s article… OLPC developing dual-boot Windows, Linux OS for laptops …reports that there are plans to produce an OLPC that can dual-boot Linux or Microsoft Windows. When I first heard people suggest this, I was against it. I couldn’t imagine how to shoehorn something as huge as Windows Vista or even Windows XP into the tiny flash […]

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Back to Basics: Soft Reset
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:10:33
Have you ever found your Windows Mobile smartphone (Standard or Professional Editions) in a state best described as frozen? This can happen in several ways. The most common experience on a non-touch Standard Edition device is that it becomes so slow that I can’t seem to get any action to work on it. Can’t dial, […]

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Book: Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1
Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:21:43
I just read Rob Tiffany’s (a Technical Product Manager in the Microsoft Windows Mobile group) blog and noticed he has a new book out (with a very long title … Windows Mobile Data Synchronization with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Compact 3.1 If you need to use SQL Server held data with your WiMo smartphone. […]

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Microsoft Releases iPhone Clone in 2009?
Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:21:22
The Inside Microsoft blog has a very interesting entry titled… Windows Mobile 7 To Focus On Touch and Motion Gestures …with what looks like dozens of Windows Mobile 7 screen captures. From the looks of it Microsoft discovered the Apple iPhone and is trying to catch up to it by 2009 (Windows Mobile 7’s projected release according […]

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Zune Oddities… Also 2.3 Firmware Upgrade
Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:14:21
Microsoft seems to have been busy providing point upgrade releases since they released the Zune 2.0 firmware upgrade a few months ago with the introduction of the 2nd generation of Zune devices. The 2.3 upgrade came out in mid-December. But, I only recently plugged in my 1st generation Zune to the PC to upgrade it. […]

Hmm. Not much Windows Mobile specific blog items last week…

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OLPC Info and Quick FAQ Page Created
Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:22:21
I created a brief OLPC XO information and QuickFAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) page to help OLPC users find more information about their device. You can find the page at… MobileViews OLPC Info Here are two examples of OLPC information you might not see elsewhere: First, I tested a USB keyboard with the OLPC and found that the […]

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OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO Arrived
Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:43:34

My daughter’s OLPC XO finally arrived today (Jan. 3, 2008). In the photo above there is an iPod touch on top of it and an Apple Macbook beneath it to help provide a sense of scale. The first thing I want to make clear is that I think the OLPC is a great idea with […]

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Zoho Creator Mobile: Simply Amazing
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:58:27

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 […]

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MobileViews Weekly Podcast #2
Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:25:36
I posted the MobileViews Weekly Podcast #2 summarizing blog items here for the week ending Dec. 29, 2007.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year! I posted a podcast summarizing the items below in MobileViews Podcast 2. So, if you want to get an audio summary in a 5 minute podcast instead of reading each blog item, try the podcast.

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WifiRouter 0.80: Use a Windows Mobile Phone as a WiFi Router?
Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:58:41
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 < [...]

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Rumored Apple Sub-notebook
Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:46:08

I generally don’t mention rumors in my blogs. But, like many people, I’m anxiously waiting to see what Apple announces at its Macworld conference in a couple of weeks (Jan. 14-18). One persistent rumor this past year is that Apple is going to introduce some kind of subnotebook sized device. A couple of people are […]

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New U.S. Fed Spare Battery Travel Rules Starting January 1, 2008
Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:07:17

The U.S. Department of Transportation has new rules regarding to traveling with spare Lithium-Ion batteries that go into effect on Jan. 1, 2008. Check out the… SafeTravel.dot.gov …site for the details. I wonder how much variability there will be among TSA screeners looking at items like spare notebook computer batteries, spare digital camera batteries, and my power workhorse […]

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GettingTasksDone Doesn’t Support OpenID on an iPhone or iPod touch
Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:58:26

Saw a blog post over on jkOnTheRun asking if anyone tried using the iPhone formated website for GettingTasksDone.com on an iPod touch. I figured, hey, I have an iPod touch so I’ll check it out. Given my inability to learn to tap-type on the touch’s screen, I headed over to the normal desktop formatted version […]

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OLPC Focused Blog: XO Activity
Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:24:02
I was one of those unlucky people who got a semi-Dear John letter before Christmas telling me that my XO OLPC would not be delivered this year. So, my daughter and I will have to wait at least a few more weeks before we can try out the XO. However, I did run across an […]

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amazonmp3 Beta
Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:43:19
The Amazon MP3 Beta download service advertises DRM-free MP3 song files for 89 cents and albums for $8.99 or less. This undercuts Apple’s iTunes prices and one ups them in the bit-rate area by providing 256Kbps files (compared to Apple’s 192kbps). I don’t have golden ears. So, I probably can’t tell the difference. But, the […]

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MobileViews Weekly Podcast #1
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:30:12
I’m testing the idea of a weekly podcast summarizing and commenting on my blog entries here. You can find the RSS feed for the podcast at… MobileViews Podcast RSS Feed The podcast itself with a built-in web audio player can be found at… MobileViews Podcast 1 20071221 I recorded the audio using Vito Technology’s SoundExplorer on an HTC Advantage […]

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Sony Playstation Portable 3.80 Firmware Upgrade
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:59:26
The Sony PSP 3.80 firmware upgrade is available. The update includes the option to listen to Internet Radio. Sony provides what looks like two 3rd party options for this. RSS feeds can be imported using OPML now (good to finally see this given how difficult it is to “type” on the PSP). They also added […]

I’m testing the idea of a weekly podcast that provides a brief (5 minute or so) audio summary of the mobile tech blog items summarized here. You can find the MobileViews podcast feed here. The direct podcast entry (I’m using Blogr) can be found here.

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I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!

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Zune Diagnostics Tool? What About an ActiveSync/WMDC Tool?
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:05:13
Microsoft released a Zune Diagnostics tool yesterday and a Zune media collection reset tool earlier this month. That’s great. But, what about a Windows Mobile ActiveSync/WMDC diagnostics tool? Windows Mobile users (including me) having been asking for one for years. In my case, I’ve asked various generations of ActiveSync product team members face to face […]

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Back to Basics: Unfocused Smartphone Browser Text Boxes
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:38:15

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 […]

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Wired Vaporware 2007: Windows Mobile 6 for Samsung BlackJack
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:41:29
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 […]

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YouTube Demo: Windows Mobile Live Search vs. Google Maps for Windows Mobile Zoom Feature
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:59:16
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 […]

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Word Mobile vs. Word Mobile
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:28:54

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 […]

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Official Google Mobile Blog
Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:07:02
In case you haven’t already visited the… Official Google Mobile Blog …you might to add it to your feedreader or visit it a couple of times a month. One of the recent announcements is an over the air sync between Google Calendar and Blackberry devices. I wish they would provide that feature for Windows Mobile devices. There’s […]

ClearType Color Artifacts
Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:20:02

The other day I wondered about whether turning on ClearType on Pocket PCs (Professional and Classic Editions) helped or hindered those of us with aging eyes. Here’s another ClearType issue that I noticed a couple of years. Under certain circumstances color artifacts show up. In the case illustrated above, I was reading an MSNBC news […]

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Back to Basics: Touch Screen Alignment
Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:20:13

I had two recent touch screen issues that prompted me to write a bit about screen alignment. The first has to do with the iPod touch. My daughter brought her touch to me and said touching the left side of the screen did not work. After fussing with it for a bit, I peeled off the […]

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Sony Playstation Portable 3.73 Firmware Update vs. WiFi Settings
Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:26:29
I read somewhere that the Sony PSP 3.80 upgrade might be out soon. So, I fired up my PSP for the first time in a long time and checked for system upgrades. 3.80 is not out but 3.73 was available. So, downloaded it over a WiFi connection and upgraded the PSP’s firmware. After rebooting, I […]

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Back to Basics: Is Turning ClearType On Actually Useful?
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:17:18

It was, I believe, at the 1997 Fall Comdex that I first saw Bill Gates announce ClearType technology for notebook LCD displays. The ClearType anti-aliasing technique’s purpose was to render easier to read text on LCD displays. I looked down at my HP 320LX and wondered if we would ever see this technology trickle down […]

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Morning Sky Capture by an HTC Advantage
Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:17:08

I recall reading somewhere that many (most?) people consider photos taken with cameraphones to be throw away items. I don’t happen to one of those people. I stepped out to head to work this morning and wanted to take a photo of the sky. I didn’t have a real camera. But, I did have an […]

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Weather.gov Mobile Friendly Sites (U.S.)
Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:58:00

To say the weather has been whacky recently is, at best, an understatement. If you are in the U.S. and want to get a better handle on the weather situation, the U.S. National Weather Service has two mobile friendly sites: mobile.weather.gov is for devices with mobile web browsers cell.weather.gov is for devices with WAP browsers

Download Google Spreadsheet to Windows Mobile
Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:38:54

I only noticed this Google Spreadsheet feature today. But, it may have been available for a while. If you use a Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone with Google Spreadsheet, it gives you the option to download an Excel XLS file. This worked fine for me. The XLS spreadsheet opened up in Excel Mobile right […]

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Back to Basics: What Apps Run on Windows Mobile? Part II
Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:59:01
Windows Mobile devices are not limited to the native or managed (.NET Compact Framework) code for applications. Although Microsoft does not provide a Java runtime, many manufacturers add a Java Midlet Manager to their WiMo products. You’ll need this if you want to use products such as the Operamini browser or some (but not all) of […]

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Back to Basics: What Apps Run on Windows Mobile? Part I
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:39:13
You might think this a trick question. How could figuring out what applications run on a Windows Mobile device be difficult? You run Windows Mobile software on Windows Mobile devices, right? Kind of… There’s a number of factors that makes answering this question a bit more difficult than it ought to be. First, there’s the Professional […]

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New Google Interface for iPhone/iPod touch
Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:29:37

I just read on TechCrunch that Google quietly launched a new interface for Apple’s iPhone (and iPod touch too by default). If you have your iPhone (or iPod touch with WiFi turned on) handy, just head over to google.com. You don’t need to type a special URL. Your iPhone will be autodetected and sent to […]

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iPhone Browser Marketshare Greater than Windows Mobile
Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:06:54
According to the Gartner data reported in this Computerworld blog item… iPhone browsing marketshare closes in on .1% … the iPhone browser marketshare eclipsed the total Windows Mobile browser marketshare in less than half a year. That is pretty impressive considering that Windows CE/Windows Mobile has been around since late 1996. The iPhone checks in with 0.09% […]

An Actual Mobi Site: ESPN.mobi
Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:42:07

Ok, despite my comment a while back that there aren’t any dot-mobi sites, I guess there are a few. Here’s one you might find useful as holiday basketball tournaments and college bowl games approach. ESPN.mobi

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Windows Mobile Office Mobile 6.1 Can Read and Write Office 2007 Files
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:48:19
After a false start a few months ago, the Office Mobile 6.1 update is finally available. Well, at least it hasn’t been pulled back again so far. You can find information about the upgrade at… Microsoft Office Mobile Upgrade For the first time it is also possible to purchase a package. You can find this on Handango […]

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Google Maps Mobile vs. Microsoft Live Search Mobile
Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:53:20

Google and Microsoft both recently released new mobile mapping services: Google Maps Mobile and Microsoft Live Search Mobile. Google Maps seems to respond and refresh the screen faster (compared on the same device using the same network). But, its new My Location feature that tries to figure out your location without a GPS didn’t […]

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PowerPoint for Mac 2008 Exports to iPod and iPhone
Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:05:21
Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is due out early next year. The Office 2008 for Mac team blog let us know about a very interesting feature that PowerPoint 2008 for Mac will have: The ability to export PowerPoint slide decks as pictures to iPods that provides photos viewing (all current models except the Shuffle […]

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Back to Basics: Dialing a Windows Mobile Smartphone
Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:26:54
Little known fact: One of the Windows Mobile Smartphone’s (Standard Edition) features that rarely gets featured is its ability to make a voice call. Really. No kidding. Open a second tab in your browser and go visit a bunch of great sites that discuss Windows Mobile devices and take a look at the articles. Heck, […]

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Back to Basics: m. Trumps .mobi
Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:35:10

One of the truly bad recent web-ideas was the so-called dot-mobi (.MOBI) top-level domain that became available just over a year ago in September 2006. Its purpose was to create a top-level domain where mobile friendly sites would live. You can only who came up with the bright idea to force mobile device users to […]

HTC Advantage Has A Battery That Rocks!
Sat, 24 Nov 2007 22:53:13

I had to drop off my daughter for a hike with a school group this afternoon. The location was far enough from home that it didn’t make sense to drive all the way home and then back again. So, I headed to the nearest Starbucks, took out my HTC Advantage 9500, unfolded the Thinkoutside […]

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2008 Year of the UMPC for Everyone Except Microsoft?
Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:12:27
In a strange ironic way, it looks like 2008 will be the year of the UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer) for everyone except Microsoft (who coined the term). One model of the Asustek Eee PC has been shipping for a couple of weeks now for a reasonable price ($399) and is getting pretty good reviews. […]

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Thumbs Up for ifrogz Customer Service
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:22:02
After watching Jeff MacArthur’s review of ifrogz cases on commandN #110, I decided to order a case. The case arrived pretty quickly. Unfortunately, ifrogz sent the wrong case. I sent email to try to get it corrected but became impatient even though I hadn’t even waited a full 24 hours yet. So, I called ifrogz’ […]

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Google Mail Ate My Battery Part II
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:52:05
Ran a quick test today. Checked the battery level on my T-Mobile Dash Smartphone (Standard Edition). Then, I manually triggered Windows Mobile Messaging (email client) to check the Gmail IMAP4 mail server. After the the glacially slow mail sync completed, I checked the battery level again. It had dropped 4%. This explains why my battery […]

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Back to Basics: Windows Mobile Battery Life
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:28:51
Battery life on any device is way too complicated for a brief discussion. But, this is a Back to Basics blog entry. So, I’ll just stick to simple and easy to apply battery life suggestions for Windows Mobile Smartphones (Standard Edition). First, head over to the Power Management applet to optimize backlight and display times that […]

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Google Mail Ate My Battery
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:19:21
My T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone has a pretty decent battery. Up until recently it would generally have a 50 to 60% charge after being on for 12 hours or so (I turn it off at nights). My phone usage (voice and data) is pretty consistent on a day to day basis. Recently, however, […]

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Amazon’s Kindle ebook Reader: Does it Hit or Miss the Mark?
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:15:48
The Amazon Kindle ebook looks like a great device for reading digital books. However, at $399 (US) it has a pretty high price point. My original opinion was that this relatively high price point would kill it as a product. Then, I started reading Kindle’s product description and read this: Whispernet utilizes Amazon’s optimized technology plus […]

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Back to Basics: Windows Mobile Smartphone Programs List
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:00:40

The Windows Mobile Smartphone (Standard Edition) and Pocket PC Phone Edition (Professional Edition) started out as two distinct platforms. However, starting with Windows Mobile 5, they started to try to bring the two platforms closer together. The most visible sign of this was taking away the Pocket PC’s bottom bar area that many applications used […]

The necessity for applications to utilize the multiple processing cores that are available on modern PCs is increasingly a topic of conversation. It’s recognized that the old formula of “faster processors will keep my increasingly complex application humming along” will no longer work. Instead, applications that utilize the multiple processing cores in standard office and home PCs will have much less latency than applications that continue along the single-threaded development path.

There’s an interesting developer poll on the Devx.com Go-Parallel site. The poll question is:

Where are you on the concurrency learning curve?

The possible responses are:

• I’m just discovering concurrency
• I’ve used threading before
• I’m a threading guru
• I’m using implicit parallelism
• I’m researching experimental approaches

This is an important question. It seems to me that companies that develop software for home and office PCs simply have not caught on to the fact that a revolutionary turning point in software development is at hand. I put up a poll at ThreadingBuildingBlocks.org asking:

How many processing cores will a typical new low-end (under $1000) computer have in 2012?

The results, reported in my “Poll: Many Core PCs Expected Very Soon”, was that a majority of respondants expected that low-priced PCs will have 16 cores in 2012.

If this indeed happens, then the performance and response differences between a traditional single-threaded application and a competitor’s multithreaded application will be enormous — consigning the single-threaded application to mere historic relevance.

The Devx.com Go-Parallel site has a lot of relevant material on where (in my view) software development has to be heading in the near future. I’m actually very surprised the need for concurrent programming isn’t getting more attention than it has lately.

Anyway, if you’re a developer, check out the site and participate in the poll. I’m interested in seeing more data on where developers stand with respect to multithreaded development experience.

Back to Basics: The Smartphone Power Button

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:03:58
How much more basic can you get than the Windows Mobile Smartphone’s on-off button. Of course, this is a WiMo device, so nothing is as simple as you might want or expect. In most of our minds, on-off switches work in a 19th century mode. Setting it to the on position closes a circuit and […]

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Back to Basics: Windows Mobile Smartphone Talk Key
Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:33:08
What, you may ask, can I possibly say about the Talk key on a Windows Mobile Smartphone (aka Standard Edition)? There’s three functions assigned to that key. Let’s start with the obvious and work our way down the list. 1. If you press the Talk key while the phone is ringing, the phone will pick up […]

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Zune 2.2 Firmware Upgrade
Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:17:05
I upgraded my first generation 30GB Zune from the 1.4 firmware to the 2.2 upgrade. The desktop software upgrade took quite a while. The actual Zune firmware upgrade was relatively fast. It was a busy night that included the previously mentioned iPod touch firmware upgrade, more PC RAM failure (ordered replacement RAM), and debating and […]

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Apple iPod touch 1.1.2 157.9MB Update
Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:40:26
I finally got around to downloading the Apple iPod touch 1.1.12 firmware upgrade (157.9MB large). I couldn’t find an official Apple page describing the changes in 1.1.12. However, I did find a discussion thread in their support area created by users describing the changes. You can find it at… Apple Support Discussions Forums User Generated 1.1.12 […]

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Back to Basics: Smartphone Keypad Lock
Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:42:37
While writing my scorecard for Pogue’s complaints about Windows Mobile, I began thinking that a few people might appreciate a series talking about some of the basics of using Windows Mobile devices. So, I’m going to spend a little time this week writing a few blog entries about Windows Mobile Smartphone (Standard Edition) basics. I’ll […]

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Analysis of T-Mobile Shadow Crticisms from David Pogue of the New York Times
Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:35:19
The New York Times’ technology writer, David Pogue, savaged the recently released T-Mobile Shadow (titled Reach for Apple, Falling Short). His summary starts with: Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. I’ve taken my shots at Windows Mobile. But, I’m still a Windows Mobile fan (though a critical one). So, let’s take a look at […]

So it looks like Microsoft just won the lottery, landing Dan Reed in his first position outside the world of academia. That’s quite a catch, and from the sounds of it Dr. Reed is pretty excited for the opportunities that lay ahead.

Supercomputer researcher joins Microsoft

Microsoft Research has landed a heavy hitter from the halls of academia, bringing in supercomputer expert Dan Reed to direct a new initiative in scalable and multicore computing. Reed is currently director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina and has a resume to die for. Microsoft will represent his first job out of academia. “There is a sea change in computing coming at the intersection of multicore and large data centers, and working on this is one of the most exciting things I can imagine doing,” Reed told the EETimes. “I will be working with Microsoft researchers and product developers, as well as industry partners and academics. It doesn’t get any cooler than this,” Reed wrote on his blog.

Before moving to UNC, Reed led the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University of Illinois computer science department. He is one of the world’s leading experts on parallel computing and large-scale system design. But he’s more than that. As Microsoft points out, besides being a high-performance computing all-star, he is also a “leader in US information technology research policy,” an area in which Microsoft has more than passing interest. Think maybe Microsoft likes that combination?

Nice! Congratulations to you both!

The article continues for a few more paragraphs, but it’s even further down — in the comments section — where things really seem to get interesting,

So, What About the Google Phone?
Like most people I read the Google Open Handset Alliance reports with great interest (here’s MSNBC’s report if you haven’t read any of the reports yet). At the end of the day (quite literally in the case of writing this blog item), what’s the deal?

First, no handsets will be available until the 2nd half of 2008. In Internet time, that is forever. The Symbian and maybe UIQ based phones will probably have some kind of response by then. Palm OS seems mired in development issues. And, Windows Mobile shows no signs of evolving much past where it was when the Pocket PC 2002 came out. Apple, of course, is the possible spoiler. But, um, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board. I wonder if…

(Second) this is the reason the Google based phones will not be available for essentially another year and they have not signed up AT&T Wireless (which has the exclusive to the Apple iPhone). US mobile service providers Sprint (#3 in the US) and T-Mobile (#4 in the US) signed up. But, Verizon Wireless (#2 in the US and with a history for turning off features such as Bluetooth file copy and Bluetooth shared modem) has not signed but is said to be in talks.

Third, Google’s strategy will probably assume an always connected model. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile has an excellent client software model. But, they too are focusing on model that assumes you are always connected (read my earlier rant on this topic at: Windows Mobile Focusing on Windows Live). Some of us (a lot of us? most of us?) spend part of the time either completely out of mobile carrier signal range or in poor data quality situations. For those of us in that situation, always connected is not part of our reality. Client resident software is a good thing.

Fourth, T-Mobile is limited to relatively slow (but cheap!) EDGE wireless data. Sprint PCS has the faster EVDO available and has, I guess, some kind of WiMax plan. Unfortunately, they appear to have customer retention and net income issues (see this RCR Wireless News article).

Fifth, it is very interesting that HTC signed on as a handset manufacturer. This was no secret of course. But, HTC has been (as far as I know) producing only Windows Mobile based phones up until now. And, IMHO, they are pretty much responsible for most of the innovation we have seen in the Windows Mobile space in the past few years. It will be interesting to see what the combination of their hardware design skills and Google’s software design skills creates. More importantly, will HTC’s top engineers be moved from Windows Mobile hardware projects to the Google phone project? This might mean a drop in innovation for the Windows Mobile space.

Sixth, the presumed low price (Google is providing their phone software for free) of the new phones combined with their presumed coolness factor should make life miserable for Microsoft, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson in the consumer space. The enterprise space is if-fy if you assume that Google’s phone must tie into Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM’s Lotus Notes to make inroads to the enterprise space.

Seventh, and finally, although the Google phone does not appear to have the closed-system Apple iPhone issue (at least for now), it remains to be seen how much innovation we’ll see from third party developers. It’ll be interesting to see which developers get seeded with prototype phones.

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Internet Explorer Mobile Browser Details Explained
I used to use Internet Explorer a lot on my Pocket PCs and Smartphones. But, the lack of suitably mobile format friendly sites (though that is improving every day) and the huge number of RSS feeds that are nicely reformatted by Ilium NewsBreak (or whatever feed reader you prefer) changed my reading habits on Windows Mobile devices. However, if you are developing mobile-friendly websites or just wonder what your IEM browser supports, the IE Mobile Team posted two very informative blog entries earlier this year (May and June 2007). Take a look at…

IE Mobile Standards Support

IE Mobile Support of ActiveX

The standards blog includes a section listing the elements new to Windows Mobile 6 that should prove especially helpful if you are focusing on that platform.

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Opera Mini 4

Since I ranted about Internet Explorer Mobile earlier, it seems fair to mention the other major mobile browser from Opera. They just released the Opera Mini 4 production (no more beta!) version this week. If you have a Java Midlet manager on your Windows Mobile device, you really should consider taking a look at this browser. It does a good job of rendering web pages of all formats (not just mobile friendly ones).

However, while Java allowed Opera to port this easier to multiple platforms, Java also prevents it from providing a great end-user experience. For example, while the Menu and Back buttons in the screenshot above look like they are soft buttons, pressing the left or right soft button on a Pocket PC (Professional Edition) does nothing. I had to tap those buttons with a stylus to get an action.

My gold standard for mobile device browsing these days is the Safari browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Nothing on a WiMo device comes close to providing that end user experience. However, if you plan to do a lot of web browsing on your WiMo Pocket PC or Smartphone, you probably want to learn more about Opera Mini 4 and, perhaps, give it a test drive. It will render those pages that will either break or simply look horrible on Microsoft’s IE Mobile.

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Vito Technology SoundExplorer: Sound Test

I’ve been toying with the idea of recording short podcasts using just a Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. How short is short? About the time it takes to brush your teeth or less :-)

I posted four previous tests to my Blogr account at OgasaWalrus.blogr.com. Thanks to Vito Technology, I was able to post a 5th test to that site tonight. I installed their SoundExplorer audio recorder on my HTC Advantage Pocket PC Phone Edition to make the test recording. Windows Mobile’s built-in recorder only records WAV audio files. These things can become large very quickly. And, some of the free web audio posting sites (like Tumblr) only accept MP3 files. Fortunately, SoundExplorer can record directly to an MP3 file and in various formats. I chose the higher quality 44KHz 16bit 96Kbps recording format to get the best quality sound.

The 30 second clip I recorded created a 358KB file. This is much much smaller than the file size required to contain a equivalent quality 30 second WAV sound recording.

One problem (to me anyway) is that I recorded the clip in a relatively quiet room this evening. And, wow, my voice sounds really boring. So, I’m going to make another test recording during the day outdoors to see if some real-world ambient noise makes it sound just a tiny bit more interesting and life-like :-)

You can listen to the 30-second audio clip I recorded using SoundExplorer at: MobileViews Mini-cast 5.

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Apple iPod touch 1.1.2 Adds Calendar Event Creation: Watch Out Windows Mobile!
According to MacRumors.com, the Apple iPod touch 1.1.2 firmware upgrade adds the ability to add calendar events on the iPod touch (the iPhone already has this feature). My iPod touch is still at 1.1.1 and is apparently not on the schedule for upgrading today. So, I can’t confirm this first hand. But, I’m looking forward to getting the update sometime in the next couple of days.

Combine this news with the commentary over on PocketPCThoughts.com about well-known techie Chris Pirillo’s conversion from Windows Mobile to the iPhone (see Chris Pirillo on the iPhone vs. Windows Mobile for Business Use) and the many concurring comments on PocketPCThoughts’ forums. Now, things are getting interesting. The big problem with the iPhone is that many of us in the US are unwilling to switch from our current mobile phone service provider to AT&T Wireless. The iPod touch, however, doesn’t require anyone to make any kind of change to use it.

Since the calendar sync will probably be flawless like the contacts sync, iPod touch owners are not going to have the kind of love-hate relationship with ActiveSync and WMDC that Pocket PC and Smartphone owners have. In fact, iPod touch owners simply won’t even think about syncing much. It will just work.

The iPod touch’s Safari browser is already the gold standard for mobile browsing. The touch is a great music, video, and photo player. It lets you enter contacts and soon (if not now) lets you enter calendar events. Most people don’t add applications to their Pocket PC or Smartphone from what I’ve seen over the years. But, application development is underway via Jailbreak and iPod touch and iPhone development will be legitimized by Apple early in 2008. Add the perceived coolness factor that all iPods (and the iPhone) have and you have a killer mobile product.

While I doubt that anyone from the Microsoft Windows Mobile team reads this blog, I’ll add a note for them here anyway… Earth to Windows Mobile Team: Geeks like me (and probably the two or three people who read this blog now and then) will continue to buy and use Windows Mobile devices because we need/want apps like Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, eWallet, Newsbreak, SoundExplorer, and HanDBase. But, the vast majority of non-enterprise non-geeks (99.999+% of the world) just need contacts, calendar, and media playback (mobile browsing is not high on the list of non-geeks). And, since syncing an iPod with a Mac or PC is natural and easy for iPod users, syncing contacts and calendar will be just another automatic action that they don’t worry about.

I’ve already watched one of my favorite mobile tools, the good ol’ Windows CE Handheld PC, go the way of the dinosaur and disappear. The Pocket PC (Classic Edition - no phone radio) is probably not far behind. And, the Pocket PC Phone Edition (Professional Edition) and Smartphone (Standard Edition) may become niche enterprise tools. The iPhone and iPod touch are here now. The Google phones are on their way in 2008 (or more likely 2009 IMHO). If Windows Mobile doesn’t fix its broken basics such as the awful sync experience and awful Internet Explorer web browsing experience, it will not be a viable platform except in vertical markets by 2010.

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Another Daylight Savings Time Bug?
Today (Nov. 10) was a friend’s wedding anniversary. So, it showed up on my calendar. But, um, it also shows up on Nov. 11! I suspect (but have no proof yet) that it is related to the recent shift back from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. I saw this on other people’s Windows Mobile devices earlier in the year when the new shifted Daylight Savings Time began. So, check the various birthdays and anniversaries on your Pocket PC or Smartphone. Some of them may not be split across two days.

Mailbag Q&A: Using a Mobile Phone for Heart Attack Care
Reader D.S. has an interesting question. I usually post interesting questions because I think the question and my response might be of general interest. This time, however, I’m posting it because I think the question needs a better response than I can provide. D.S. asks…

We are in the midst of setting up a system to improve the care for patients who are suffering a heart attack in the city and county of […]

One significant issue is how to to allow the cardiologist to see the electrocardiogram. This is important for the cardiologist to make a decision as to whether an emergent cardiac catheterization should take place.

Obviously if it is during business hours or if the cardiologist is at home and has a fax machine, this is not as much of an issue.

However, we need to address the possibility that the cardiologist on call is out and about. Hence the question about how a cardiologist might be able to view the electrocardiogram in the field.

One thought is for the cardiologists to have mobile devices. In my research of the topic, there do appear to be ways for a fax of the electrocardiogram to be sent to a mobile device. However, the worry is that there is still a delay, especially with a fax to email solution. In acute heart attack care, seconds and minutes count, so the image would need to be available in real time.

In your experience, what would you recommend as a way to get an image of the electrocardiogram to the cardiologist. Some way for the emergency room to send a fax of the electrocardiogram to the phone? Could it be send via MMS messenging?

First, here’s a caveat/disclaimer: My response here should not be considered as advice, recommendation, or consultation. It is merely a response to an interesting question. (Sorry for the weasel words :-) .

Couple of thoughts…

1. First, before starting on the technical aspects of the project, be sure to consult with an authority in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). You may need to encrypt the electrocardiogram image for transmission.

2. As you point out both SMS and email are subject to potential delays. And, sending images may be problematic depending on how email is configured, the storage capacity of the receiver’s mail server, and other factors. It may be worth investigating the possibility of keeping multiple resolutions of individual images (low, medium, high) on the server and sending alerts to the cardiologist via simultaneous multiple channels: E.g., automated voice call, SMS, email. This message would point the receiver to a password protected site where the image could be called up on a mobile device for viewing.

3. Don’t rule out the possibility of an old-style client-server application where coded alphanumeric data is sent from the server to the client (mobile device) instead of a graphic image. An electrocardiogram image could be rebuilt from this smaller coded data. This could greatly reduce the amount of data that is sent compared to an image file and thus speed up the process of receiving and viewing the electrocardiogram image.

Here are links to two mobile technology sites that may provide more information than I can provide.

MedicalPocketPC.com

Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine has an M.D. as a regular contributing author

Finally, if anyone has other information links that might be useful to D.S., please post it in a comment to this blog entry.

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T-Mobile Shadow: Here Come the Custom Interfaces
The T-Mobile Shadow has been generating a lot of interest (not as much as the iPhone did, but quite a lot in the scheme of things). Like most HTC designs, the slide-out keyboard design for a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone (Standard Edition) looks good. The odd thing (to me anyway) is that the Shadow is being marketed as a cool hip lifestyle music playing phone.

The issue is that Windows Mobile 6 is not designed for cool hip consumers. It is designed for uncool, unhip enterprises with Microsoft Exchange Server (which actually does some cool stuff with Windows Mobile but not in the sense of young people cool). Does putting an easier to use Today screen really make that much of a difference? Probably not IMHO. And, unless some significant enhancement was done to Windows Media Player for Windows Mobile, it does not have a good non-techie end-user story to tell as a media player.

The Shadow looks like a good solid Windows Mobile 6 smartphone. Its lack of a QWERTY keyboard probably takes it out of the e-mail focused crowd. It will be interesting to see which market segment actually gravitates towards these green and brown (brown?) phones.

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Google Mobile Phone: T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless?
RCR Wireless News reports that T-Mobile may be the US carrier that launches the Google mobile phone. Information Week reports that Verizon Wireless may be the lucky carrier. If Google uses Apple’s one carrier strategy for a mobile rollout, VZW seems like the more likely candidate since it has a much larger presence than the far smaller T-Mobile USA.

My guess, ok wishful thinking, is that Google has more clout than Apple (though that may be hard to believe) and is able to avoid the whole exclusive carrier agreement and roll out both a CDMA (VZW) and a GSM (T-Mobile) solution. VZW would give it the US footprint to compete effectively with the Apple/AT&T Wireless iPhone product. The T-Mobile GSM solution would give it worldwide roaming. The combined rollout would also have a larger customer population than AT&T Wireless.

I guess we’ll see how things shake out in the next couple of weeks if we believe the various reports and rumors published in the past few weeks.

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New Windows Mobile Site: The Wow Stops Now?
Microsoft launched a new Windows Mobile site that apparently has the slogan Start Doing More.

Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Start Doing More

However, this heavily flash-based site seems to be about less instead of more. The initial page with its three tiny thematic buttons sitting in the middle of the screen looks lonely on the nausea inducing full motion video sitting in back of it. Clicking a button results in another long Flash site load that takes a long long time even on a broadband connection. This is not a sticky site design and offers little useful information. All flash, no substance.

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Back to Basics: Jumping Bluetooth Com Ports
One of the two RAM DIMM sticks in my main PC went bad last week. So, I had to unplug the cables from the back, take the case cover off, replace the bad DIMM (lucky to have guessed on the first try which of the two DIMMs was bad), replace the cover, and plug all the cables back in. Simple, right? One would think so. But, not really.

My Bluetooth USB dongle is on a USB hub. When I plugged the hub and other USB cables back in, I didn’t plug them back in to the same USB ports they were in before I took the PC’s case cover off. After I turned on the now repaired PC, I tried to Sync my Windows Mobile smartphone over Bluetooth. Didn’t work. When, I checked ActiveSync, it showed grayed out options. A bit of digging around revealed that the pseudo COM port Windows XP assigned to the Bluetooth dongle had jumped from COM4 to COM6. A bit of fiddling around fixed this and got things working as expected.

So, if you need to pull cables from your PC, be sure to note which physical port the Bluetooth dongle is assigned to. FYI: This is an issue for the USB sync cable too. Although it does not suffer from the jumping pseudo COM port issue, Windows will not recognize your Windows Mobile device hardware and will have to re-recognize it. This should not require any intervention on your part. But, it does take a bit of time and may be anxiety causing the first time you see this. This has been like this for years. So, I don’t expect it to change anything soon.

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iPhone Yahoo Pipes
I’m constantly amazed by how enthusiastically websites are adapting to the relatively new iPhone browser. The latest one that caught my attention is the iPhone tuned site for Yahoo! Pipes.

iphone.pipes.yahoo.com: Access your mashup while mobile

As the announcement’s title says, you can find it at…

iphone.pipes.yahoo.com

I just tried it using my iPod touch and it worked fine on that too (as expected). The one tiny gotcha is that the login screen is the conventional non-iPhone formatted web page. Fortunately, the Safari browser deals with it just fine. You are thrown back to an iPhone/touch friendly view after the login process is complete.

Windows Mobile Focusing on Windows Live

Brighthand and ZDNet both recently had blog items commenting on Microsoft reorganizing the Windows Mobile group and focusing the division on Windows Live service. I’m a little worried about this me-too strategy that seems to follow on the heels of Apple’s iPhone (and to a lesser extent iPod touch). Windows Mobile’s greatest strength has always been the rich set of client software available for it that gave it a good disconnected experience. And, what about Windows Live anyway? It is a bunch of barely connected web services that doesn’t seem to have a strategy of its own. How can it be the basis of a Windows Mobile strategy?

I hope history doesn’t repeat itself. Take a look at the photo above. See that big white thing behind the T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile Smartphone AKA Standard Edition)? That is not a PC. It is an MSN Companion that like Windows Mobile was based on Windows CE. Its only function was to connect to the web (by phone line or Ethernet) and was based on Interent Explorer 4. It was barely web-ready even when it was introduced though I thought it was a good first start and used it quite a bit as stand up terminal for quick web browsing. The problem is that it was orphaned and never had more that 2 firmware updates (which took a month to roll out to customers). Today, with its lack of a modern browser, it is essentially useless. Even the first Handheld PC or the earlier MS-DOS based handhelds, on the other hand, are still useful with their built-in client applications and third-party software. But, try using a GPS in your current day Windows Mobile device with only Microsoft applications and no phone service (when you are out of a service area for example). Now imagine that there were no 3rd party client-side GPS applications. What would you do?

Microsoft’s strategies have not been firing on all cylinders for the last couple of years. Their stock price and the general reception of major products like Windows Vista (Office being a rare exception) are two prominent examples. I think Windows Live needs a strategy before it can be used a strategy for Windows Mobile. Microsoft should focus on the broken aspects of Windows Mobile like ActiveSync/WMDC (Windows Mobile Device Center), email, and Office Mobile before looking at Windows Live services.

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Google Docs for Mobile Devices

Google announced that a mobile-friendly read-only (ack!) Google Docs web access.

Docs on the go

Head over to https://docs.google.com/m to view (but not edit) documents and spreadsheets on an iPhone (iPod touch), Blackberry, or Windows Mobile device. iPhone users can also view presentations (slide decks).

I recorded a quick and dirty 2 minute video demo and placed it on YouTube: Google Docs for Mobile Devices on an iPod touch.

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The Have and Have Nots: Windows Mobile vs. iPhone Sites

The screen shot on the left is of the Weather.com site on a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC (Professional Edition). The screen shot on the left is the same site tweaked for the iPhone on an iPod touch. Although it takes a lot longer to load on the iPod touch (both devices were on the same WiFi network although the Pocket PC was limited to 802.11b vs. the 802.11g for the iPod touch), the iPhone version sure looks a lot nicer and provides a lot of functionality without scrolling up and down.

Microsoft has a lot of work to do to bring the Windows Mobile Internet Explorer browser into the 21st century. The iPhone has clearly inspired a lot of firms and their web designers to maximize web-impact for the iPhone’s Safari browser in a way that we have not seen previously for other web-enabled mobile devices.

Microsoft’s announcements of more enterprise mobile-enabling products for 2008 is good for the enterprise. But, again, that is clearly not where most of us are these days even if we work for a large organization. Microsoft really needs to focus on the basics and fix the broken stories at that level: Internet Explorer, ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center, and alarms are just a few of the basics that need fixing.

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Issues With Recurring Meetings in Windows Mobile
Microsoft’s Jason Langridge wrote an interesting blog item related to recurring meetings earlier this week…

Having Problems With a Calendar With Lots of Recurring Meetings?

The problem, it turns out, occurs because Microsoft creates recurring meetings out to 400 years if no end date is set. Um, who was the big brain who decided on that I wonder? I suspect many of us set recurring events that go on forever even if we don’t expect to live for another 400 years. And, I wonder if birthdays and anniversaries are set using the same recurrence algorithm? That might explain some of the bizarre behavior there. Many WiMo users have seen birthday events multiply inexplicably. Some have even seen birthdates split across two days after Microsoft issued a patch to deal with the fact that Daylight Savings’ start and end dates were changed in the US this year. And, then, there is the problem of changing just a single occurrence of a recurring event that I’ve described earlier…

Here’s the scenario for that problem: Set a recurring appointment (e.g., weekly staff meeting) with no end date in Outlook on the PC. Sync the PC with a WiMo device. Detach the WiMo device from the PC. Change just one of the meetings in the series on the WiMo device while leaving the other recurring events in place. Sync the WiMo device with the PC. When I do this, the single event changed on my WiMo device reverts back to the original date/time after syncing with the PC. It does not happen 100% of the time. But, I would say it happens at least 50% of the time for me.

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Google Gmail IMAP4 Works Fine with Windows Mobile
My Google Gmail IMAP4 feature was turned on earlier today (Oct. 25, Thursday). The first thing I did was test it with a T-Mobile Dash (Smartphone AKA Standard Edition) running Windows Mobile 6. And, yep, WiMo’s Messaging (email) works fine with the new Gmail feature.

Google provides step-by-step instructions to configure Windows Mobile 6 to work with Gmail and IMAP4.

Google Mail Help IMAP Windows Mobile 6

However, experienced WiMo users may find the less eye-glazing generic help page faster to go through.

Google Mail Help IMAP Configuring Other Mail Clients

Google’s IMAP service seems a lot slower than service on other IMAP servers I use. However, it may simply be because of all the new clients being configured and downloading email. I’m hoping this will clear up (speed up) within a couple of days or weeks.

Addendum: Hey, I just noticed my Gmail storage is up to 4.3GB. When did that happen?

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Concerned About Asustek Eee PC Math

The October 18 Asustek press release title for the eagerly anticipated (at least by me) ultra compact Eee PC reads…

An Eee PC Sold Every 2 Seconds

However, the text of the release says…

…with 200 pieces snapped up in 20 mins on Taiwan’s shopping channel, ETTV Shopping - averaging an Eee PC sold every 2 seconds!

Um, hmm, so 200 / 20 = 10 per minute = an Eee PC sold every 6 seconds. Still impressive but off by 3x. Not very good math. Hope it wasn’t calculated on an Eee PC :-)

Addendum: Here’s a link to CNET UK’s Asus EeePC 701 Full Review.

Video Viewing Experience on Windows Mobile, Zune, and iPods
Viewings videos on ultra portable devices is nothing new. However, perhaps surprisingly, the oldest of the device families, Windows Mobile, falls far short of a good end-user experience. This is especially true for the under-powered (processor-wise) Smartphone (Standard Edition) where viewing anything except a video specially prepared for it results in a disappointing experience. For example try viewing a video podcast NOT specially prepared for a Smartphone. You will probably see what amounts to still images with a sound track.

The Pocket PC (Professional Edition) video experience is a bit better but still not good. Since Windows Mobile is not designed as a media device, you will find it does things like dim or blank the screen after a timeout period. Normally, this is fine since it is a battery saving feature. However, it is annoying to have to remember to change this setting everytime you watch a video and then set it back when you are done. On the other hand, the faster processors on the Pocket PC (compared to the Smartphones) lets you watch a wider variety of video files (including video podcasts). And, it is not often that you see someone showing a video on an external device connected to a Smartphone or Pocket PC. Despite what Microsoft might claim, these are not real media devices (see any WM5 or WM6 Playlists for example?).
The Zune does a better job since it is designed as media device. However, its non-intuitive user interface (navigation pad) makes something as simple as scrolling and selecting from a list tedious. Once a video gets rolling, it is a pretty good experience though and optional docks make it easy to connect to an external display.

The iPod touch has the best video and user interface I’ve seen so far. Its one drawback is that Apple decided that all 6th generation iPods require docks with a special chip for video playback on external devices. So, previous video docking solutions do not work with the latest iPod models.

The 5th (previous) generation iPods only had one model that provided video playback. But, it has a huge existing accessory infrastructure that lets you easily and relatively cheaply purchase devices to provide a larger video screen. For example, there are several portable DVD players with integrated LCD screens that also have iPod docs built-in. This lets you use the player to show and listen to videos on a larger screen.

For the moment, it is a toss-up between the 5th and 6th generation iPods. As soon as the 3rd party accessory market catches up (probably this holiday season or early 2008), the 6th generation will be the device of choice. It will be interesting to see what the Zune 2.0 delivers. And, unfortunately, my favorite overall mobile device family (Windows Mobile) is down for the count when it comes to Media playback.

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FTC Separates Fact from Fiction on Cell Phone Do Not Call Registry
This is slightly off-topic. But, I figured a few other people might find it useful information (I did) in this article from Government Technology magazine.

FTC Separates Fact from Fiction on Cell Phone Do Not Call Registry

There’s a 7-point bullet list specifically related to cell phones.

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Frank McPherson’s PocketPCHow2.com
My old friend Frank McPherson is back from his little blog sabbatical at PocketPCHow2.com. He’s re-emerged from the shadows and has a mini-overview of the new HTC TyTn II (AKA Kaiser) Pocket PC Phone Edition (oops, I mean, Professional Edition). I’m a huge fan of the earlier generation TyTn. Frank provides feedback on both the good and the bad of the new TyTn II. So, head over to his blog if you are interested in getting the perspective of TyTn II from a WiMo expert.

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Asustek Eee PC Gets, Um, Real-er
Engadget reports on the four Asustek Eee PC models announced today. And, Asustek finally has an official looking Eee PC product page…

Asustek Eee PC 4G

So, while I can’t find any prices for the four models or anywhere to order one. It seems like a slighly more real (real-er?) product. Of course, The Palm Foleo had models announced, an official looking product page, and even prices revealed. So, I’m still not quite convinced that the Eee PC has emerged from vaporware quite yet. However, if it actually appears in the U.S., this UMPC-sized Linux based notebook with a 7 inch LCD display looks like something to seriously consider.

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Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
Nokia announced the N810 at the Web 2.0 Summit. Engadget (1st link) and Information Week (2nd link) both have coverage on the announcment (nothing on the Nokiausa.com site yet).

Nokia N819 gets official

Nokia Launches ‘Context-Aware’ Internet Tablet

The first thing you notice about the N810 is that it has a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard (see the photo in the Engadget article) unlike its touchscreen only devices that preceded it. At $479 it should make for an interesting race between the N810 and the Asustek Eee PC. The N810 doesn’t have has much storage as the top-end Eee (although you can insert an SD flash card for more storage), but it is smaller and lighter. The $1000+ UMPCs based on Microsoft Windows need to get into the $500 price range if they intend to compete in the nano-scale mobile market.

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Use a Virtual Machine to Sync with an Old Pocket PC or Smartphone?
I tend to listen to the podcast version of Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy radio program when I want to listen to something interesting while driving but don’t want to pay attention to very single word (which I tend to do when listening to something like the Security Now podcast). I have a backlog of these files on my iPod. Today, I was listening to Show 363 from June 23 and noted the segment about someone who has an old Jornada Pocket PC who can’t sync with Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) on Windows Vista.

The issue is that WMDC only supports devices going back to Windows Mobile 2003. The last Jornada model was a 2002 device. So, you can’t sync it on a Vista PC. The caller seemed aware of the issue and asked if a Windows XP virtual machine running on Vista might be able to sync with the Jornada if ActiveSync was installed on the Windows XP Guest OS. Leo correctly suggested using either VMware Workstation or Parallels Desktop for Windows. However, the caller asked if Microsoft Virtual PC (which is free) might work too. Leo agreed. Alas, that is not the case. Microsoft Virtual PC has virtually (pun intended) no USB device support. So, it wouldn’t see a Pocket PC or Smartphone and partner it to ActiveSync. VMware Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Windows, on the other hand, have pretty decent USB device support and should be able to run ActiveSync in a Windows XP Guest OS and partner with an older Pocket PC or Smartphone. I haven’t tested this myself. So, you might want to verify this using a 30-day trial before plunking down your hard earned dollars. I have VMware Workstation 6 though. So, I’ll get around to testing this idea one of these days.

FYI: You aren’t limited to virtual machine running on Windows Vista. If you use a Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion have good USB device support too. The wrinkle in this story is Apple is releasing a major upgrade (Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) next week Friday. All this should still work under Leopard. But, it wouldn’t hurt to check first. I’ve got my upgrade copy pre-ordered and plan to install it next weekend.

The Digital Slowness Paradox
The biggest complaint from most people in the early days of consumer digital cameras was the lag between the time the camera shutter button was pushed and when the photo was actually captured. That problem hasn’t completely disappeared yet (except in higher end models and DSLRs) . This seemed odd to most people (esp. non-techies) who expected all things digital to be better-faster than things-analog.

Unsurprisingly, digital slowness is apparent in all kinds of devices now. Some smartphones seem to take forever to fire up and enter a ready-to-use state. My Dash, for example, has a multi-second delay between the time I push the power button to the time it actually starts to boot (something visible on the screen). And, it takes, perhaps, a full minute before the phone is actually ready to make a phone call. The Pocket PC doesn’t appear to have this problem for most users because it is usually in suspend mode and not actually off. But, if you perform a soft reset, you’ll probably need to wait a bit before you can use the Pocket PC again.

The most annoying sources of digital slowness for me, however (aside from Windows XP/Vista’s booting speed) is television related. My digital cable TV box seems to take forever to change channels. The old TVs with channel dials (back when VHF channels were limited to 2 through 13) were instant in changing channels. Digital cable boxes have a noticeable lag. And, the current generation of HD TVs seem to take many seconds to turn off or on. Shades of vacuum tube TVs. I think the TV manufacturers should add the old tube shrink-expand look to let us know when they are going on or off.

And, then , of course, there are Windows XP and Windows Vista. Their login account model that launches all kinds of applications after the user login process (including all kinds of security software) means that it might be several minutes before various processes settle down to the point the user can actually use the system. UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X (really a BSD UNIX variant) fire up most processes before any login takes place. So, from the end-user point of view, it seems they take less time before you can use them.

Let’s hope we never get digital flashlights or fire extinguishers where instant-on should really be instant.

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Use Windows Mobile Internet Explorer with Care
I think I’ve suggested manually clearing the Windows Mobile Internet Explorer browser cache once a week or so to help prevent what might otherwise be mysterious system-wide slowdowns on a Pocket PC or Smartphone. However, today I got another reminder of why I spend more time using Ilium’s NewsBreak RSS client on Windows Mobile than the IE browser.

When using IE directly, I am pretty careful to stick to mobile-friendly websites in my Favorites list. However, I clicked on a Reuters link in their RSS feed after reading a brief summary in NewsBreak which launched IE (this normal). This turned out to be a bad idea because the feed link led to Reuters normal website formatted for desktop PCs. WiMo IE couldn’t deal with what appears to me to be a decently designed web page for the desktop and froze my entire phone. I couldn’t even turn it off and had to pull the battery to reset my Dash. Upon rebooting, the Dash came up very slowly… more slowly than normal. So, I went to IE’s options menu and manually cleared the browser cache (about 2.5MB, large but not huge). This returned my phone to normal.

In comparison, I just brought up Reuters.com on my iPod touch Safari web browser. And, while it seemed to navigate that site much slower than other sites (there must be some Javascript whackiness going on there), the site didn’t blow up the browser or lock the iPod touch.

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Stylus vs. Finger
The old Windows CE Handheld PCs had large (by today’s thumb keyboard standards) physical keyboards and a touch screen. They never caught on (even though I really enjoyed using them :-) . The problem was that the touch screen were really just a substitute for a mouse and the need to pick up a stylus in between typing was annoying.

Following the lead of the Palm Pilot, Microsoft moved on to the Palm-size/Pocket PC and dropped the physical keyboard completely. Then RIMM’s Blackberry and Palm’s Treo showed that a physical keyboard was indeed a good thing but needed to be sized and designed correctly. Many current generation Windows Mobile Pocket PCs (Professional Edition) and Smartphones (Standard Edition) have physical thumb keyboards too. And, many of them are well designed (I particularly like the Dash’s and TyTyn’s).

Recently, Apple went retro and introduced the iPhone and iPod touch with touch screens that don’t need (or work) with a stylus and dropped the physical keyboard in favor of a graphical tactile-less one. On one hand, the finger gestures for viewing photos and navigating web pages works much better than stylus based Pocket PCs or keyboard based Smartphones. On the other hand, I guess I’m just one of those fumble-fingered people who prefers tactile feedback when typing (even thumb typing). I do think it is great that I don’t have to reach for a stylus to use the iPod touch. But, I really wish I had some kind of option (Bluetooth keyboard for example) for the iPod touch.

I was originally going to comment on the relative granularity differences between finger touch screens and stylus touch screens. But, I need to think that through a bit more. It just occurred to me that one of the original applications categories for the Pocket PC were little mini-PhotoShop type drawing apps. Yet, those never did become very popular. And, we don’t see that category heavily pushed or sold these days. Part of the issue may be the relatively small processing power on mobile devices (compared to desktops). But, I wonder if the digitization errors inherent in any touch screen might have something to do with this too. More later…

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Do You Feel Phantom Vibrations?
Do you sometimes feel phantom vibrations from the area where you phone sits on your body even when your phone is not on you? Apparently you are not alone (I think I’ve felt this too). Check out this article on CNN…

Phantom vibrations shake crackberry addicts

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Apple Web Apps List for iPhone and touch

No third party binary applications for the Apple iPhone or iPod touch yet. However, Apple created a list of web apps for these devices. You can find it linked below.

Apple Web Apps

I was surprised to see so many (relatively speaking) web apps designed specifically for the iPhone/touch (215 as of Oct. 11, 2007). It will be interesting to see if this part of the iPod eco-system continues to grow.

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Senuti 0.50 Beta 2: Copy Media Files from an iPod to a Mac
Just an quick blog item this evening. I posted an item over on my Freeware and Free & Open Source Software blog (OgasaWalrus) about a Mac OS X freeware that lets you copy media files from an iPod to a Mac.

Senuti 0.50 Beta 2: Copy Media Files from an iPod to a Mac

In my case, this is a backup plan in case I can’t restore the backup of my now dead Mac mini (the backup is on an external Firewire drive) to whatever replaces my Mac mini.

Thumbing Around an iPod touch Screen Keyboard
My iPod touch is still wandering around in FedEx-land. But, I was able to use my daughter’s iPod touch for a few minutes to help her set up WiFi access. I found it nearly impossible to type on the screen keyboard in portrait mode. The lack of tactile feedback from a physical keyboard is a real drawback. However, using the screen keyboard in landscape mode was a bit better though I still pressed the wrong key way too many times. I think the 2.0 versions of the iPhone and touch really needs a slideout keyboard even though it would increase the thickness of each device. I’ll get a better feel for this after I have some time to play with my own device (which should arrive soon).

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HTC Shift: Interesting but too $$$ for Mainstream
HTC announced the ultraportable HTC Shift running Windows Vista Business Edition. At 800 grams (1.76 pounds) and with its 3G/HSDPA and SnapVUE low power mode (no Windows Mobile as rumored long ago), it is unique compared to the UMPC device crowd. However, at $1580, it is relatively pricey (compared to standard sized notebooks) although it is not outrageous compared to the truly overpriced and underpowered UMPC devices. If it had come in at $1000 or less (or even $1200), it might have a chance for mainstream acceptance. However, at nearly $1600 (without a CD or DVD drive), it will join the UMPC as being a specialty device for those who crave true mobility with an XP or Vista based device.

The various rumor sites say that Apple is planning to release a sub-notebook class device in the near future. Apple has been able to get away with somewhat pricey devices. But, if they come in with a slick looking sub-2-pound device for under $1000, I think the UMPC and the Shift will be relegated to discount bins.

I’m also waiting for the Asustek EEE PC. I though it was supposed to appear in September. But, here it is October and no sign of it yet. Will it go the way of the Palm Foleo?
UPDATE: According to CNET, the Asustek EEE PC is supposed to be available later this month (October). However, its retail price is rising from $199 to $260 (still very reasonable).

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iPod touch and T-Mobile Dash - Tactile Impressions

My 16GB iPod touch arrived yesterday. Since I’m probably among the last of the mobile enthusiasts who got a touch (even though I pre-ordered it the day it was announced), I’m not even going try to write a mini-review. However, as a Windows Mobile enthusiast, I thought other Windows Mobile users might find a couple of quick observations from that point of view interesting.

The T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition, formerly Smartphone) has been my main device for the past half-year or so. As you can see from the photo the iPod touch and the Dash are pretty close in height and width dimensions although the touch is much thinner than the Dash (0.31 vs. 0.5 inches). According the to iPod touch spec page and the T-Mobile Dash spec page, both are 4.2 ounces. Frankly, I’m having a hard time believing this. The touch feels much much heavier than the Dash. But, I don’t have a scale to check this, so I’ll believe the specs. You can see that the screen is about twice the physical size of the Dash’s screen and is exactly twice the resolution (480×320 vs. 320×240).

The one thing that became obvious real fast is that thumb typing as I know it is impossible for me on the touch. The lack of tactile feedback and what appears to be a slight digitizing offset (selection appears slightly to the left of where I touch the screen) is deadly. My typing mode (especially for passwords) is reduced from two thumbs to my right hand index finger. I’m really tempted to use a stylus when I need to type on the touch. The Dash’s keyboard, on the other hand, is the best thumb keyboard I’ve used on a Smartphone (the Universal’s and TyTn’s keyboard are my favorites on the Pocket PC side of the Windows Mobile house).

One somewhat surprising aspect of the touch’s lack of tactile feedback is that I don’t think I can use it without looking at the screen. I’ve also used the iPod nano and the 5th generation iPod (video). Both of those are very easy to use without looking at the device because the click wheel gives lots of location and tactile information.

IMHO Apple was wise in NOT positioning the iPod touch as a PDA. It is clearly not a PDA. On the other hand, its Safari browser is clearly superior to Windows Mobile’s Internet Explorer (and Opera mini on Windows Mobile — for me anyway). That combined with a relatively easy (but not great) YouTube app makes the iPod touch the current overall multimedia champ. I just looked at the new Zune announcements. I think the Zune still has a lot of catching up to do. But, more on that after the firmware upgrade for the current generation Zune’s become available next month. I’ll flash my Zune then and give it a spin.

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Viigo Free RSS Reader
The Microsoft Windows Mobile Owner Circle current featured free offer is Viigo. This free app for Windows Mobile and other device platforms is an RSS feed reader. You can find out more about it on the Virtual Reach Viigo download site.

I haven’t tried it myself. So, let me know what you think if you have tried it. It looks like Viigo lets you manage your RSS feeds from a web page (after signing in). Does that mean you have to be connected to the net to view feeds? One of the things I like about the Ilium NewsBreak RSS reader is that it just downloads the feeds and lets you read them even if you don’t have network connectivity (deep in a large building, etc.).

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Zune vs. iPod Language Handling Differences

An odd confluence of events took place over the past few days. First, my Mac mini died suddenly and without warning last week (which left me Mac media-less since I don’t keep media on my Macbook). My iPod touch arrived on Monday. Then, Microsoft announced the new Zunes yesterday. My 1st generation Zune doesn’t have the 2.0 update yet. But, it got me thinking about the Zune again. So, I decided to put music from the same CD on both devices to see if my non-golden ears could hear any difference. I used a CD that my daughter and I have been listening to lately… Utada Hikaru’s Single Collection, Vol I (an import).

However, before I could get to the audio comparison I ran into some interesting differences in the way the Zune desktop software and iTunes dealt with the disc’s contents. Apple’s iTunes brought in the CD exactly as shown on the jacket. Title parts that were in English (roman letters) remained in English. Title characters in Katakana (phonetic Japanese characters) stayed that way. The Zune software, on the other hand, decided to, um, transliterate from Katakana characters to roman alphabet. The Zune software couldn’t figure out one of the titles at all though. So, it is listed as “[Untranslated]”.
The other difference that amused me was how the Zune software and iTunes decided to deal with the artist’s name. iTunes left it Japanese characters and sorted it out of range (after “Z”). The Zune decided to transliterate it to “Hikaru Utada”. And, this confused me when I tried to search alphabetically by artist. You see it reversed the expected Surname/Given-Name order (Utada Hikaru) to the western Given-Name/Surname order (Hikaru Utada). So, I was doubly confused. It was not listed in the “U” section or out of range (after Z).

It will be interesting to see what the Zune 2.0 firmware update and, presumably, new Zune desktop software does when it becomes available.

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Finally Got to Try Canon Fireworks Preset Mode

I’ve been using various Canon cameras (including several 35mm) for a long time. But, for one reason or another I never got around to trying the Fireworks scene preset available on a number of models. This evening I finally got the chance to try it when I noticed fireworks in the distance and happened to my Canon Powershot A710IS (now replaced the the Powershot 720IS model). I was pretty far away. So, the image above is a cropped and resized (smaller to fit this blog web page). I thought the preset did a pretty good job.

MSN Video Beta + Windows Mobile = Nothing

I just read about the MSN Video Beta. So, I figured that surely Microsoft enabled it to work with Windows Mobile smartphones to counter YouTube (which doesn’t play well with WiMo). So, I pointed a Pocket PC Phone Edition at http://next.video.msn.com/ and, well, it turns out I figured wrong. Once again, WiMo users are shut out of a Microsoft product. Not even the login link on the beta page works with WiMo.
And, where is Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility for WiMo anyway? Or, SkyDrive, or multi-page live.com?

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Windows Mobile is Apparently Not Interesting to the U.S.

If put our faith in the results of Google Trends (now updated daily), then we in the U.S. apparently don’t care enough about Windows Mobile to search for it in Google compared to the rest of the world. If you take a look at…

Google Trends results for Windows Mobile

…you’ll find that the U.S. does not even show up in the top 10 world regions (countries) searching for the term Windows Mobile. San Francisco does show up at #4 in the cities list, however. However, if you limit the search region to the U.S., Redmond (home of Microsoft’s main campus) shows up as the #1 city followed by Seattle, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco again in position #4. Huh? Shouldn’t S.F. be #1 for the US if it is #4 worldwide? And, in less that 12 hours, the city rankings changed completely with S.F. dropping out altogether. Personally, I think that Google Trends is not quite firing on all cylinders.

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NPR Mobile

NPR launched NPR Mobile at http://m.npr.org/. This mobile friendly site lets you either call in (voice phone) to listen to a show (not recommended IMHO) or listen to an audio stream (great if you have an unlimited data plan or WiFi). I tried it over a relatively slow EDGE network. It took a while for the audio stream to sync up, buffer, and then start playing. But, once it did, the sound quality was good and I didn’t run into any oddities. Navigating through the large and rich NPR site was quite easy on a WiMo6 T-Mobile Dash smartphone.

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53 Weeks in a Year

Did you know there are 53 weeks in a calendar year? Yep, according to Windows Mobile, that is the case for certain years. This is one of the oldest bugs and has been around since the Windows CE days. So, if you use week numbers for project planning, don’t use the Windows Mobile week numbers as your definitive guide.

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Work with Office 2007 Files on Windows Mobile 6 Devices
UPDATE: It turns out someone at Microsoft jumped the gun on this download. It is not actually available yet.
Just read the announcement in Jason Langridge’s (Microsoft’s Mr. Mobile) blog about the release of…

Microsoft Office Mobile 6.1: Upgrade for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats

This upgrade lets you work with (read and write) Office 2007 generated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. The upgrade is only for Office Mobile on Windows Mobile 6 devices. So, if you have an earlier generation device, this upgrade is not for you. Note that this upgrade is relatively huge at 6MB. However, the system requirements section says this space can be on a storage card. So, presumably, you can install this on a flash card instead of using up system memory.

The download page also mentions that it is possible to buy Office Mobile 6.1 if your device does not already have it. But, the link provided there just leads to a general Office Mobile information page at this time. I don’t see any link or graphic indicating this purchase can be made today.

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Calendar Year View Incomplete in Landscape View

Here’s a little oddity I noticed just a few weeks ago. The Windows Mobile Pocket PC can display a calendar in year view (something not available on the Smartphone AKA Standard Edition). However, while all 12 months are displayed if the Pocket PC is in portrait mode, only 8 months are shown in landscape viewing mode. You can scroll left or right to see the other 4 months. But, still, this seems lame.

System.Object::ToString ()

Today, I had an amazing experience.

Today, I’ve patched our implementation of System.Object::ToString (). Do you realize that every time you’ll use ToString in Mono you’ll be executing a line I actually wrote? That’s simply amazing. I felt like I was literally modifying the blueprints of the known universe.

Sadly, you’ll most probably never notice it.

That’s life for ya`.

I don’t think enough appreciation and thanks for the amount of time and effort that goes into OSS projects such as Mono, Classpath, IKVM.NET, Saxon, lighttpd, Apache, IronPython, Ruby.NET, IronRuby, (to name a tiny handful of the projects I benefit from directly on a daily basis), etc. can be given. Maybe trying to take better notice of these things wouldn’t be such a bad thing?

Well, either way: While I can’t say that each and every time I use System.Object::ToString() in Mono I will think of Jb Evain (and to be honest, if I did, I think extensive counseling would soon be in due order ;-)), I think I can speak for *MANY* folks in saying thanks! Your efforts are both noticed and appreciated on a daily basis.

Odd Results from YP.com (Yellow Pages)

This started out as a quick note about the m.YP.com Yellow Pages website formatted to be mobile browser friendly. But, it turned out to be a post about what looks like a little search engine issue over there. I tested it searching for the word dogs in areas that are familar to me. However, I didn’t get many useful results (though the results I got were on target). Then, I tried the search you see in the image above. And, well, the result was pretty weird. If anyone from YP.com would care to comment, I’m sure a few people besides myself would be interested to learn how your search engine decided on this result.

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Windows Mobile Comm Manager Oddities

Windows Mobile communications related oddities continue to baffle me after a decade of using the product. Various versions of the Comm Manager (T-Mobile Dash version seen above) have been in all Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices I’ve seen. And, yet, the ActiveSync button (7 in the screen cap above) does not consistently work across devices. It works fine (brings up ActiveSync on a T-Mobile Dash running WiMo6 and an HTC Advantage 7500X running WiMo5). But, it does nothing on an i-Mate K-JAM running WiMo5. Most people won’t be bothered by this. But, if you sync wirelessly using Bluetooth like I do, it is a small but annoying issue.

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Smartphones Are NOT An Enterprise Tool>
One of my big beefs with Windows Mobile’s roadmap for the past few years has been its focus on the Enterprise and mobile carriers instead of the consumer. So, here comes the Information Week 500 survey, and it reports that…

And those smartphones? Just 10% consider “issuing smartphones beyond a few top executives” a most-effective strategy of the past 12 months,…

IMHO 10% maketh not an enterprise strategy (as IW points out above). In the meantime, while people synching with Exchange Server may be OK, ActiveSync and WMDC remains broken. Windows Mobile is a great platform. But, it needs to be refocused on its core customers: Individuals on the street who go and buy their own phone and don’t have an IT department to support them.

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diggm8: Digg Reformatted for Mobile Viewing

diggm8 (pronounced digg-mate) is a non-Digg affiliated site that reformats Digg.com for mobile browsing. Unlike Digg’s own iPhone formatted site, diggm8 works fine with a Windows Mobile IE browser.

Digg was my favorite post-Slashdot morning destination site. But, its focus has become so diluted that I’m looking for a new destination site. Any recommendations for something to succeed Slashdot and Digg (or TechMeme for that matter) for geekie news?

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Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5
OK, this one is for the Windows Mobile developers out there…

Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5

…was released on Sept. 12. The various toys focus on diagnostics and performance evaluation. The Known Issues list is quite long. So, be sure to read through the list before using the Power Toys.

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Lotus Notes Traveler for Windows Mobile

Lotus Notes Traveler is scheduled for release sometime in 2008 (screen shot above obtained from IBM’s site). The big deal about this IBM product is that it will, for the first time, provide native Windows Mobile connectivity to Lotus Notes. I wonder, though, how widely accepted this will be buy Lotus Notes support staff may be very unfamiliar with Windows Mobile devices. And, I wonder how it will affect the long available CommonTime products that seem to currently be the product line of choice to get Lotus Notes and Windows Mobile devices working together.

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What’s with the Names Windows Mobile Standard Edition and Professional Edition?

Most non-geeky, non-techie people (if you are reading this, you are a tech geek, btw), seem to know how to distinquish the different Apple iPod models. The shuffle doesn’t have a screen. The nano is the little one with a screen The iPod (now iPod classic) is the big one. And, the touch… well you can touch its screen on purpose. It is the iPhone without the phone (for the most part). You don’t need to go into engineering or design philosophy details to distinguish the various models. And, note that the distinguishing names are all in lower case: shuffle, nano, classic, touch.

Now look (literally) at the Windows Mobile Standard Edition and Windows Mobile Professional Edition. You practically need to be an engineer to sufficiently distinguish the two devices past the touch non-touch dimension because the Professional Edition is not a true superset of the Standard Edition. The Pro Edition is actually missing a few features that are in the Standard. And, quick, look at the photo above and figure out which is the Standard and which is the Professional in under 1 second (the time it would take to distinguish between iPod models).

What is the deal with the Standard and Professional designations anyway? Is the Standard Edition for non-professionals? That’s the implication from the names, isn’t it? Microsoft needs to rethink this whole branding campaign. The previous Smartphone vs. Pocket PC Phone Edition was much easier for the average consumer to figure out (though still way to wordy) that Standard vs. Professional. The first thing they should do is create a secondary branding using WiMo instead of Windows Mobile just to shorten that part of the name. Then, they need to shorten the device category names to something like WiMo Touch (Pocket PCs with touch screens) and WiMo Phone (no touch screen) or WiMo One (one-handed Smartphone operations) and WiMo Two (two-handed Pocket PC operation). Or, how about WiMo Pocketphone and WiMo Smartphone? It would be a lot easier for non-techies to remember and cut down the typing and awkward sentences in articles and blogs :-)

WiMo Smartphone 2 and 8 Keys Browser Navigation
Scrolling through a long web page on a Windows Mobile smarpthone (Standard Edition) can be a giant pain using the up or down arrows on a navigation pad. However, you can (sometimes) use the 2 and 8 keys to page up and down (respectively) through a web page in Internet Explorer. And, yes, it works on smartphones like the Dash with QWERTY thumb keyboards instead of a conventional numeric keypad.
Note that the 4 and 6 keys do not scroll left/right as they do when using Operamini. And, it doesn’t do anything on a Pocket PC (Professional Edition) - presumably because you can use a stylus to quickly move through a page. And, this keyboard trick doesn’t work on all pages. The infamously mobile device unfriendly CNN.com website inexplicably grabs the keys to use with their little used bottom of page menu section (this doesn’t happen with a desktop PC, btw).

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The Problem with Video Podcasts on a Windows Mobile Device
Video, unless specially prepared, is often an unsettling experience on a Windows Mobile device. Although I’ve been using Ilium Software’s NewsBreak since its 1.0 release, I only recently tried the podcast retrieval feature added (I think) with their 2.0 release. I decided to try the Geekbrief.tv video podcast since it was included in Ilium’s default list. The video podcast looked like an old stop-motion movie when viewed on an HTC Vox smartphone. So, I decided to try it on a Dell Axim X50v. Although this is an older device, it still has a fast CPU and video accelerator. Video motion on this was much smoother than on the Vox with its relatively slow CPU. However, the video and audio were out of sync.

Although I haven’t tried to view this specific video podcast on an iPod video, I do subscribe to other video podcasts on the iPod and do not see any video or video/audio-sync issues on that device.

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OutSync Syncs Facebook Photos to Outlook Contacts Entries
Microsoft’s Mel Sampat released a free utility called OutSync that syncs your Facebook contacts’ photos with Outlook. The side-effect for Windows Mobile users is that the photos become attached and visible to contacts on a smartphone. Of course, I consider ActiveSync and WMDC so flaky that I refuse to add anything that might even slightly upset the delicate balance and duct tape that appears to keep sync working for me (some of the time, anyway).

You can watch a video demo of this on on10.net.

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Priorities 1 and 2 for Windows Mobile 7 Should be Fixing IE and ActiveSync-WMDC
I was just thinking about Mel Sampat’s clever OutSync that I blogged about yesterday. Microsoft obviously has some bright and talented software developers in its ranks. And, you know what? I think none of them should be involved in cutting a single line of code for clever stuff like OutSync? Why? Microsoft should be focusing its energies on just two problems: First, fix the horror that should not be named but instead has two names: ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC). This has been broken since Windows CE Services 2.0 (1.0 was actually pretty stable) for a decade now and needs to be fixed. Second, Internet Explorer. IE for Windows Mobile is damaged goods. Operamini gives a much better visual experience but suffers from its Java roots that creates a keyboard navigation problem for those of us who expect certains keys (like Back) to behave a certain way. Who know what happened to the Microsoft Labs SeaDragon project? It made a splash and then disappeared.

In the meantime, the Apple iPod touch is on its way to customers in the next three or four weeks. And, since a lot of Windows Mobile users already carry an iPod for their music and video, it isn’t much of leap to think some percentage (like me) will swap out their old iPod for an iPod touch and start playing with Safari on it. From what I’ve seen on the iPhone, it looks like a pretty good mobile browsing experience.

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iPod touch Support Area Went Live
Apple’s…

iPod touch Support

…website went live. And, according to Engadget, units are showing up in Apple stores. My unit still hasn’t shipped. So, I guess I won’t be playing with one as soon as those you who are buying off the shelf. In the meantime, however, the 85 page iPod touch manual is available on Apple’s website as a PDF download.

The good news is that the support pages are up. The other good news is that the touch is so close to the iPhone that Apple is essentially repurposing its web pages for the touch. The bad news is that Apple didn’t bother to take out iPhone related references to things like the EDGE network or even the word iPhone out of the documentation pages.

Opera Mini 4 Beta 2

I have to admit that with the release of Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 last week, this browser is growing on me. The image above is the BBC News’ main web page in Opera Mini’s full page thumbnail view. I’m testing it on a HTC Vox (Windows Mobile 6 smarthone), btw. If you look carefully, you can see a small rectangle with a cursor arrow. Pressing the select button zooms in to that area. Then, it is easy to use the 2 4 6 8 (up, left, right, down) keys to navigate around the page without going back to the thumbnail view. The zooming and scrolling is lightning fast and makes for a good browser experience on a small smartphone screen.

There are a couple of interesting issues, however.

First, there appears to be at least one major web page that just doesn’t like the browser. In this case it is CNN. I tend to use the cnn.com web page for browser testing because it is one of the most mobile-unfriendly major websites I know of. In the case of Opera, it just times out. And, no the site was not down when I tried to access it.

Second, if a site is too mobile friendly (I know this seems like an odd idea), it defeats the great Opera Mini thumbnail and quick navigation features by defaulting to the mobile friendly site which tends to less rich than the full site intended for viewing on a desktop. I tested it with msnbc.com which detects your platform and sends you to a mobile friendly version of the site if it detects you are using a mobile device.

Third, and this is kind of ironic, Opera Mini works better (from a keyboard navigation point of view) on a simple numeric dialpad layout than it does with a full QWERTY thumb keyboard. I found myself sliding the Vox’s keyboard back under the device and switched to the simpler numeric dialpad to speed up navigating around Opera’s screen. I haven’t tested it with the Dash which only has a QWERTY keyboard. I suspect it will not be as nice as using Opera Mini with a device like the Vox which gives you a choice. Another irony? The problem is that I prefer the Dash’s QWERTY keyboard to the Vox’s QWERTY keyboard.

Finally, the odd (probably related to the Java platform) procedures for functions like typing a web site’s URL and accepting (many more keystrokes than with Internet Explorer) is kind of annoying.

That said, I like what I see in Beta 2 and am looking forward to what comes next from Opera for smartphones.

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Tried Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 on a T-Mobile Dash Smartphone
After being impressed by Open Mini 4 Beta 2 on a HTC Vox smartphone, I decided to try it on another Windows Mobile 6 smartphone: The T-Mobile Dash (HTC S620). The Vox has both a QWERTY thumb keyboard (pull out) as well as a standard numeric dialer layout. The Dash, on the other hand, just has a QWERTY thumb keyboard (my favorite of the various thumb keyboards I’ve tried). Opera Mini seems to place the keyboard in numeric keypad mode when in browse mode because I was able to use the 2-4-6-8 diamond pattern embedded in the QWERTY keyboard layout to quickly navigate around a web page. The Dash has a very reasonable square layout for the numeric keypad on its keyboard. The Vox, on the other hand, has a slightly asymmetrical keyboard layout that makes navigation a bit harder.

CNN.com was still unreachable (although alive from any other device I tried). But, other sites I tested looked and worked fine with Opera Mini.

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Palm Foleo Linux Sub-notebook Bit the Dust
Wow, we didn’t even get a chance to see Palm get the Foleo out the door…

A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

I hope Austek gets the Eee PC out into the market. I still believe there is a significant market for a lightweight (2 pounds; 1 Kilo) category near instant-on device with a keyboard and LCD screen like the old Handheld PCs. The UMPCs are interesting. But their $1000+ price points for relatively weak specs (CPU, etc.) are not attractive. We need something in the sub-$500 range.

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Apple iPod touch
I’ve been saying since the introduction of the Apple iPhone that I just wanted the “i” part and didn’t need the “Phone” part of it. Today, with the introduction of the iPod touch, I got my wish.. or at least part of it.
Here’s what’s missing from the iPod touch when compared to the iPhone…

• Phone radio (of course!)


• Bluetooth radio (aargh!)


• Camera (sigh…)


• Microphone and speakers (no VoIP either)


• Email client (for IMAP4 and POP3)


• Google Maps client

Still, what is left is pretty good. You can watch a video introduction on Apple’s site here (though the choice of spokes-person leaves me a bit baffled).

Apple iPod touch Guided Tour

I ordered mine this evening with shipment currently scheduled for late this month. So, you can expect to read iPod touch rants and/or raves sometime next month.

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BatteryUniversity.com Battery Info Site
I ran across this site a while back while looking at battery issues but don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet…

BatteryUniversity.com

I’m certainly no battery expert and can’t vouch for every detail of the site. But, the information there is quite detailed and accurate looking (to me). Well worth checking out IMHO.

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The Multipurpose End Call Button
You definitely know that pressing the End Call button on a Windows Mobile (Standard Edition) Smartphone ends a call :-) And, you probably know that pressing and holding the End Call button locks the keyboard (left soft-button and then * unlocks it). But, did you know that a simple press (and then release) of the button when you are not in a phone call moves you from whatever menu or app screen you are currently on back to the Today screen? This works on Pocket PCs with a End Call button too, btw. You can get back to the previous window (if you pressed End Call by accident) by pressing the Back (left arrow) button (this doesn’t work on a Pocket PC Phone Edition, btw).

The End Call button is often bigger and easier to find than the Home button. So, this can be a quicker way to get back to the Today screen to, for example, make a phone call or quickly check for an upcoming appointment.

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Revisiting the Apple Newton While Waiting for the iPod touch

The Apple iPod touch is weeks away from delivery (early October at best). So, while waiting for it I decided to revisit the original Apple PDA. This is the Apple Newton MessagePad 130. I said in the video that is it 12 or 13 years old. However, according to Wikipedia, this model was released in March 1996. So, I probably bought it around then which makes it a bit over 11 years old. Although its rechargeable battery and backlight died long ago, the unit itself still works after all these years. So, click on the image above or this link here to view the short video to see the Newton in action. I’ll probably bring it back to show the Newton and iPod touch side-by-side in October.

The Second Ignite Boston is taking place this Thursday, September 6, from 6 to 10pm at Hurricane O’Reillys. If you have already RSVP’d your name is in our list and you will be entered into a drawing for $300 worth of O’Reilly books, and a Free Beer, or drink of your choice. If you have not RSVP’d or if you think a friend or two should join you, send email with your name to IgniteBoston AT oreilly DOT com. The talks are listed below.

Keynote: Ben Fry - Visualizing Data
Visualizing large data in a compelling style with tools that scale.
1. Alessandro Pace - Flash Lite mobile technology
   I would like to showcase how to create Flash Lite content for mobile phones. I would be able to show sample applications
2. Yael Maguire - New Uses of Long Range RFID
   Agile RFID reader technology.
3. Jon Orwant - Google Book Search
   
4. Ned Gulley - A wiki-like programming contest
   Picture a programming contest that’s open source, fast-paced, and competitive. Addictive collaboration ensues
5. Andy Gregorowicz - Mining Wikipedia
   An overview of how we mine the Wikipedia to create massive networks of concepts and terms with interesting visuals.
6. Hari Jayaram - Waiting for the MySpace scientist
   Science is getting so complex that we need to open things up, collaborate and use technology more than ever before
7. Neil Henry - Digital Image Glut
   Articulation of an unmet need of modern consumers. The scarcity of time to organize, rate and enjoy digital images
8. Jesse Liberty - Sliverlight
   Learn what is cool with Sliverlight.
9. Ivan Schneider - A proposal for rules-based payment processing
   Why should affiliates and suppliers wait for a check when the payments network can divvy the spoils for every purchase?
10. Shava Nerad - Convergence: games, virtual worlds, social networking
    They grew up on their own — now corporations enter. How will they deal with convergence and big money colonialism?
11. Greg London - Bounty Hunters
    Looking at copyright law as a bounty/reward shows how to set the terms of copyright to some reasonable length.
12. Michael Burns - Securing the OLPC
    Millions of XOs are being distributed this year. Bitfrost is the system to protect these child users. How does it work?
13. Matt Douglas - Founder
    Develop a mantra for your product: how we make design decisions at MyPunchbowl.com
14. Brian Olson - Ending Gerrymandering Through Automatic Redistricting
    Lots of states have crazy congressional districts drawn to the benefit of one party. Let a computer do it fairly!
15. Daniel Olguin Olguin - Sensible Organizations
    Social sensor network technologies that will help individuals and organizations work better.
16. Michael Colombo - AIR from the commercial trenches
    Seen enough Web 2.0 mashups? Let’s discuss building a business case, managing, and executing in an Adobe RIA universe.
17. Ted Gilchrist - Extending Robocal to do “talking driving direcctions”
    Robocal is a talking Google Calendar, that you can call up. Now you’ll get driving directions to your meetings.
18. Renat Khasanshyn - Enterprise 2.0 and Data Mashups: Bridging the Web 2.0 Information Gap
    In today’s enterprises, most data integration projects never get built. The ROI on these projects is simply too low. Co
19. Dan Stolts - Free Local Technology Resources
    The local user group community is thriving. Get a taste of what the community is doing for the community.
20. James Turner - 5 Ways to Keep an Editor Happy
    So, you’d like to write something for the ONLamp Family of Websites? Here’s 5 basic boo-boos to avoid.
21. Daniel Berube - Storytelling
    As Leader of the BOSFCPUG, I would like to discuss Final Cut Studio 2 as a tool for storytelling and video on the iPhone
22. Keith Erskine - Launch: Padpaw
    Padpaw is out of the Garage! Padpaw helps your group with important updates and information using your cell phone
23. Greg Raiz - Launch PicMe Photo Sharing
    PicMe is a desktop based photo sharing application. It allows users to view and share large collections of photos.

Technorati Tags: Boston, Cambridge, Event, Geeks, Ignite, O’Reilly Media, Speakers

A year ago I thought it might be a good idea to blog about mobile tech on a personal blog and summarize in Windows DevCenter once a week instead of monopolizing this blog. So, here’s the 52nd weekly summary. Although my main interest and focus is tech related to Windows Mobile (smartphones, etc.), I’m actually interested in all kind of mobile technology and sometimes talk about things like the Nintendo DS (which now has a browser option), the Apple iPod (which might get a browser on Sept. 5th if you believe some of the rumors), and even notebook PCs (I’m still waiting for the promised but never delivered $500 UMPC). I’ve got a second PC sitting next to me churning away trying to deploy a VMware Pocket ACE instance. It is my first try and I didn’t realize that it would take so long. The 10GB required space for this portable virtualized environment is too big to fit on the largest USB flash drive I have (4GB). But it does fit on an old 40GB drive I stuck into a $26 USB drive enclosure purchased just for this little project. Is Pocket ACE a mobile technology? I’m starting to think it qualifies.

I’m thinking about starting a monthly or bi-weekly live talkcast on TalkShoe. If you are working on a mobile technology related project, drop me a note at editor(AT-SIGN)mobileviews.com. Perhaps we can arrange to chat on TalkShoe or some other live audio site and invite others to join in the discussion.

Ilium Screen Capture Tip for Smartphone Users

Small tip for Windows Mobile smartphone (uh, Standard Edition) users who use Ilium Software great (and FREE) Screen Capture utility. The default capture key for the smartphone version (it also works fine on a Pocket PC/Professional Edition) is the asterisk (*). However, if you have a non-clamshell phone (T-Mobile Dash, Vox, etc.), the key sequence to unlock a keyboard locked phone is Left-softkey Asterisk. So, if you forgot that you have it running, you can’t unlock the phone after locking the keyboard (press and hold the End Call key). Fortunately, Ilium provided options for this utility. If you press the Menu key (right soft button), thre is an option to change the screen capture key. I set it to the pound sign (#). But, you might prefer something else. This optional change also seems to stick. So, you only have to make the change once.

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Cell View Tip for WM6 Standard Editon (Smartphone)

Excel Mobile for Windows Mobile Standard Edition (formerly Smartphone - no touch screen) is quite different from the Professional Edition (AKA Pocket PC Phone Edition). In general it has much fewer features than the Pocket PC version. However, it does have a few unique and useful features.

For example, if you navigate to a cell that contains more text (or numbers) than the cell can display, just press the phone’s select button on the navigation rose and it will pop the entire contents of that cell into a zoomed highlighted cell view.

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Thinkoutside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard Works with WM6 Standard Edition
Just a quick note. The Thinkoutside website doesn’t specifically list the HTC Vox Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition (AKA Smartphone) as a supported device for the Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard for PDA. But, I installed the WM5 Smartphone driver for the keyboard on the Vox this evening and it seems to work fine.

The configuration utility even dealt with the incompatibility between the built-in Bluetooth HID profile and let me disable from a menu. It then enabled its own profile and let me setup usage with the keyboard.

I sent a test email over WiFi (no SIM card in the Vox to make sure it didn’t go out over EDGE instead) with the Bluetooth connected to the keyboard to make sure that both those radios could work simultaneously while using the keyboard.

Glad to see all this works with Windows Mobile 6.

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Enterprises Just Don’t Get It
My little rant about Gerardo Dada’s MSDN blog item about Windows Mobile email support (or lack thereof) in business environments came to mind again when I read this item in InfoWorld…

Mobile workers still struggling with security

The issue of mobile device support (or any kind, not just Windows Mobile based ones) is, in the mind of many businesses, it seems reminiscent of the mindset surrounding the Apple II (1977) and IBM PC (1981) timeframe through, well, now in many cases. You still see businesses without any desktop/notebook disaster recovery/business continuity plans (or even regular backups of their desktops). And, you still see a total lack of mobile technology policies, support, and integration in businesses. Email, of course, is a huge part of the mobile device infrastructure. If you ask a Blackberry user, it is the only reason to carry a mobile device.

But, for a lot of us, it is not just email. There is value in the Contacts list, Calendar list, documents and other files stored on the mobile device. Does your firm have a remote device kill process in place if you device is lost or stolen? Does it have a continuance process replace your device and keep you working on the go? What about device encryption policies?

Sure some of you can raise your hand. And, you’ll probably grumble about the need to enter a PIN everytime you want to you your device (I’m not a fan of that either). But, I’ll guess the vast majority of us still buy and own our own mobile device and have no practice in place for our work related activities on this device. I tend to keep my day-job related items off of my WiMo phone… um… except for contacts, calendar, tasks, and, oh well… Welcome to 1980… Hey, that VisiCalc thing on the Apple II looks really cool. Wonder if would be useful in the office…

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Google Mobile Summer Traffic Rises 35%
The MobileCrunch article…

Unexpected Surge in Google Mobile this Summer

…reports that Google mobile traffic went up 35% this summer instead of down as it (and regular Google traffic) normally does during the summer (vacation) months. I wonder if the Apple iPhone (which automatically uses some Google mobile services) is a big factor in this rise. Whatever the reason, it is good indicator that mobile data use is on the upswing.

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Once Again: The Value of a Camera Phone

I took part of the afternoon off to attend a function for parents and students at my daughter’s school. And, sigh, I forgot to bring my digital camera (a Canon PowerShot A710IS). Fortunately, I always carry one or two Windows Mobile devices with integrated cameras. Today I had an HTC Advantage Pocket PC Phone Edition that happens to have a pretty decent lens and a 3 megapixel resolution. So, I was able to squeeze off a couple of photos at the school.

Now, are these photos as nice as ones that a decent point-and-shoot like my Canon would have taken? Not really. Are they better than nothing and pretty decent looking (good enough for a 4×6 print)? You bet! Thank goodness for cameraphones.

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A Tale of Two (USB) Cables

According to Wikipedia, USB 1.0 emerged in 1995 and 2.0 in 2000. You would think after all these years, its operation should be dirt simple and flawless (although I guess you would think ActiveSync/WMDC would have its act together after 11 years too). So, USB’s finickyness always amazes. Take the two cables pictured above. You would think they would be pretty similar. And, in fact, for the most part they are. The exception is when I try to use the white cable with an HTC Vox smartphone and try to sync it to WMDC on Windows Vista. Windows reports that it sees a USB device but can’t identify. Switching to the black cable solves the problem. And, yet, the white cable works for other functions and devices.

And there’s more USB-wise. Most of us know by now that there is a difference between powered and unpowered USB hubs. Windows Mobile users also generally know not to use any hub at all when upgrading firmware (plug in directly to the PC’s native USB port). But, did you know that the front ports sometimes deliver less power than the rear ports? This makes a difference to devices that draw a lot of power (e.g., USB hard drives powered through the port).

So, if you run into sync or other USB related issues, be sure to check all the variables you can: Cable, port position, unpowered vs. powered hub, front port vs. rear port, and whatever other USB variable you can manipulate.

Reading through…

BeyondTrust Tames Vista’s UAC Pop-Ups

…in PC World, I kept thinking that this utility must be freeware or, maybe, an Open Source product. But, the last line of the article states: Privilege Manager 3.5 is priced starting at $30 per seat. Now, hey, more power to anyone who can make a few $$$ selling software while making Vista more palatable to users. But, doesn’t this just indicate that UAC (User Access Control) is just broken in Vista?

I think Microsoft needs to rethink and redesign how UAC works (make it less annoying) and take a look at Vista’s menu system while they are at it. Has anyone looked at the network configuration maze lately? Ouch.

Raise Your Hand if Your IT Dept. Supports Windows Mobile

I read Gerardo Dada’s MSDN Blog item titled Windows Mobile eMail Troubleshooting with the hope of getting some insight on topic. Then, I read the key sentence:

If step 2 fails then you need to chat with your IT department.

Um, say what? Let’s think this through. From my observation, the vast majority of Windows Mobile device users do not have an IT department to consult with. And, for the ones whose organizations do provide them a WiMo device, their IT group is probably so busy with Windows Server, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and a bunch of server and desktop applications that they are not really focusing on WiMo support.But, let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say that 80% of all WiMo users are part of an organization that handed them a WiMo device and supports it fully. Why would those people need to read a blog to fix their email problem? Wouldn’t they just go to their IT department first? And, what about the other 20% (which is probably more like 95%) of WiMo users? Let’s say that there are 10 million WiMo units out there in use. If 80% is enterprise supported, that still leaves 2 million people without support of any kind.

I think a reality check is needed here. The vast majority of people I have spoken or emailed with over the past 10 years do not have an Exchange Server or are not allowed to connect to it with their WiMo devices. So, we really need some non-Exchange based ActiveSync/WMDC/email support. Even those of us who do work for large organizations often (usually) do not have WiMo support (there may be Palm OS or Blackberry support though).

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Is 0×85002002 Meaningful to You???

There is no doubt in my mind that no matter how much you like a Windows Mobile smartphone or Pocket PC, you will one day have an epic battle with ActiveSync or its Windows Vista counterpart WMDC. And, on that day, if you look through a log file, you may find a meaningful message such as 0×85002002. This tells you so much, right? It turns out that this code means ActiveSync ran out of memory. That is obvious, right? Sure it is. Fortunately, Jason Dunn over at Pocket PC Thoughts has been contracted by Microsoft to explain this gobblygook and found that Palm has a great customer support web page that deciphers ActiveSync’s otherwise useless error codes. You can find it at…

ActiveSync error messages when trying to sync a Windows Mobile device

I suggest you bookmark this page on multiple bookmark sites so you can always find it.

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Facebook iPhone Site Snubs Windows Mobile



I mentioned a while back that the Digg iPhone website wasn’t viewable on Windows Mobile devices. Well, we WiMo users are being left in the browser dust again. This time it is the Facebook iPhone formatted site. The m.facebook.com site still works for WiMo and other mobile platform users. But, it is still kind of irritating to be left behind again. Ah well.

FYI: The screen cap above was taken by using Firefox on a Mac (it works on Windows too).

BTW/FYI: If you are on Facebook, I created a Facebook MobileViews group. Drop by. Say hello. Tell us about your iPhone, Nokia, WiMo, or any other interesting mobile device.

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Podcasting on the Move

I’m still playing around with the idea of podcasts for my two main blogs (this one - MobileViews - and my Freeware/Open Source blog - OgasaWalrus). The Blogr web service that lets me easily post Podcasts and even videos has been a huge factor in working towards this goal. They just applied a fix to let their users email audio files directly from a mobile device and post it as a podcast. I recorded a short audio clip on my T-Mobile Dash and posted it today. You can find all 14 seconds of it at…

MobileViews Mini-cast 4: Blogr email podcast test

There are, however, two problems I need to deal with before I will feel comfortable with the process. First, Windows Mobile smartphones appeared locked in at 11KHz for recordings. I would really prefer to record at 44KHz. Second, even at 11KHz, the resulting WAV file is pretty large (e.g., 14 seconds = 320KB). This can take a long time to upload using the pokey ol’ T-Mobile EDGE network (and, no, I don’t want to move to AT&T Wireless or Sprint/Verizon). So, I need to find an audio recorder that can produce smaller MP3 files. Three apps that look interesting are Resco Recorder, Vito SoundExplorer, and Vito AudioNotes. Unfortunately, only AudioNotes works on a Smartphone. The other two are for Pocket PCs.

Any comments on those three apps would be appreciated. And, any recommendations beyond those three apps would also be appreciated.

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Finding/Getting Windows Mobile Support

From a gadget owner’s point of view, there is nothing more frustrating that one that isn’t working the way you think it should. One comment posted here is how do you contact Microsoft for a Windows Mobile problem. You can find direct Microsoft contact information at…

Microsoft: Contact Us

Be aware that there may be a fee involved if you contact Microsoft for support for a specific problem outside of your initial support period (right after you buy a device). I suggest visiting one of the many mobile device community sites. Here’s a couple created by Microsoft itself to consider…

Microsoft Public Newsgroups (NNTP client such as Outlook Express or Vista Mail required)

Microsoft Windows Mobile Owners Circles Forums (web based)
There are also many excellent 3rd party sites with large and active communities. You might want to start two that were founded and managed by an old friend of mine: Jason Dunn.

Pocket PC Thoughts (AKA Professional Edition & Classic Edition)

Smartphone Thoughts (aka Standard Edition)

There are, of course, many other great sites. And, I’ll list them somewhere on MobileViews later. But, I have to rush off to my day job now :-)

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Dell is Still the #4 PDA in Sales???

If you look at the chart in the IDC report…

IDC Worldwide PDA Sales

…you’ll note that Dell is the #4 worldwide PDA seller. Since Dell got out of the PDA business earlier this year, this can’t be good news for the PDA industry.

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MobileViews Mini-casts 2 and 3: More Windows Mobile Audio Recording Testing

I posted two more MobileViews Mini-casts (very short audio files) that can be found at…

MobileViews/OgasaWalrus Podcasts

Mini-Cast #2 is an audio recording created using an HTC S710 (Vox) Windows Mobile 6 smartphone. Mini-Cast #3’s audio recording was created using an old Dell Axim X50v Pocket PC (Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition). I used it because it is the only WiMo device I have that can use an external microphone (mini-plug type) for audio recordings.

You’ll notice that the HTC Vox’ recording sounds a lot tinnier than the Dell Axim. This is because WiMo smartphones only allow recordings at 11KHz. Or, more correctly, I can’t find a way to change the audio recording quality settings on a smartphone. I changed the Axim’s audio recording setting from the default 11KHz to 44KHz.

Having tested a couple of devices for audio recording quality, I think it is pretty reasonable to use a Pocket PC as a recording device for Podcasts. Smartphones are ok but produces recordings that are not as clear as Pocket PCs set to record at 44KHz. I’ll guess that running a smartphone’s audio file through something Audacity for post processing could clean it up and make it sound better though. Finally, I didn’t think using an external mic with a Pocket PC sounded any better than using the PPC’s internal mic. And, of course, the odd drop-outs when recording using the external mic isn’t a good thing either.

HTC Advantage Flash Photos

A number of Windows Mobile camera phones have so-called camera flashes. But, that is a misnomer for the ones I’ve seen so far. They do not flash for a brief period to light up a photograhpic subject like real camera flashes. Instead, they light up and stay lit up until you manually turn off the light. In effect, they are flashlights. These camera flashlights do not have much of an effective distance. They do not do much good on objects more than a foot or two away. They can be useful sometimes, however. The photo on the left was taken in a relatively well lit restaurant using available light. The photo on the right was taken a moment later with a HTC Advantage 7500’s Pocket PC Phone Edition’s flash turned on. I think I instintively moved the Advantage a bit closer to get the light to shine as best as possible on the ice cream.

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Pseudo-Sync Word Mobile & Word Excel with Google Docs

I’ve had issues with ActiveSync and WMDC in the past like many other people. So, I’m always looking for ways to avoid using AS (in Windows XP) and WMDC (in Windows Vista). If you are of a like opinion, you might find Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Docs might be a big help in moving Word Mobile and Excel Mobile files around.

Just mail the Word or Excel file to your Gmail account. It will auto-recognize the file type and give you the option to open the file in Google Docs. There is a brief period needed to transform the file to HTML. After that is done, you can edit the file in a Google Docs web app. If you want it back on your Pocket PC or Smartphone, just email it back to an address your Windows mobile device knows about.

Google Docs doesn’t understand every Word or Excel formatting feature. But, if you keep your file formatting simple, you should be able to get a lot of mileage using your Windows Mobile device with Google Docs. And, you don’t need ActiveSync or WMDC at any point.

BTW: Google can display PowerPoint files on the web too. Editing is supposed to be in the works, but I don’t know when that feature will be available.

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Call History Left-Right Nav Key Use
Try this on a Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone or Pocket PC (Standard or Professional Editions). Bring up your Call History list. Navigate to a call to/from a person who you know to have multiple phone numbers in your Contacts list. Then press the Left or Right navigation. It should rotate through the phone numbers for that contact. You can settle on one of the alternate numbers and call it instead of the number originally called from.

It worked on WM6 devices but did not seem to work on a WM5 Pocket PC Phone Edition.

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imity Pocket Radar?
Anyone try this imity Pocket Radar? It is a kind of mobile social networking tool that uses Bluetooth on phones to identify nearby people with like interests. Unfortunately, its website does not seem to have any information about which devices (phones) are supported by this J2ME app. And, I’m too lazy to email them this evening :-)

It was released as an Open Source project. So, perhaps when I’m not feeling so lazy, I’ll wander over to Google Code and check it out.

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How to you Feel About Windows Mobile Upgrades?
I was just reading Jason Langridge’s blog (Microsoft’s Mr. Mobile) about a bunch of devices that have had announcements about the availability of an upgrade from Windows Mobile 5 to 6. One of the announcements was for the very cool HTC TyTn. But, apparently the upgrade is only available to HTC e-Club members who claimed someplace in or around the EU as their homebase. If you joined as a US-based member, no update is available. I’m guessing it has something to do with FCC clearances or some other such red-tape type reason. Fair enough.

But, it made me wonder what people think about regarding Windows Mobile devices and whether or not an upgrade is available. For example, I bought a T-Mobile Dash after the WM6 upgrade was announced for it. But, there is little hope for a WM6 upgrade for my i-Mate K-JAM. And, there is no hope for an upgrade for my T-Mobile SDA. Dell used to be pretty good about providing an upgrade path for at least one generation. HP was pretty spotty. For example, the iPAQ 2215 (the last iPAQ I bought with no plans to ever buy another HP iPAQ device) never had an upgrade path.

If your device is less than, say 24 months from its release (not necessarily when you purchased it), do you expect an upgrade path for it? Just wondering.

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everythingiPhone Wiki: An iPhone Website You Can Contribute To

I don’t have an iPhone. I think what I really want is just an “i”… everything except the Phone part of the iPhone. That said, the iPhone is definitely a cool device. If you have a hankering to contribute to a website focused on it, here’s one to take a look at…

everythingiPhone

It is built using the Wetpaint Wiki web service. So, I logged in with my Wetpaint account and, yep, I was allowed to edit pages that weren’t locked.

I originally posted this on a personal blog. But, I really wanted to see some discussion, so I’m re-purposing it here to see if the larger O’Reilly audience might have some thoughts on this question.

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The PC World article…

Businesses Rethink Vista

…reports on surveys conducted by Patchlink that indicates that the number of businesses who said they were staying with Windows XP instead of upgrading to Vista went up from 53% in December 2006 (before Vista was released) 87% in July.

One of my blog items over on the O’Reilly Media WindowsDevCenter site…

Windows Vista Doesn’t Run Any of My Software! Oh, Really?

…posted on May 1 continues to draw venomous comments about Windows Vista because of its software compatibility and lack of hardware driver support. Now, many of these comments are made without actually naming a single specific application. So, there may be a bit of anti-Microsoft trolling at work there. I’ve used Windows Vista for over two years now (Beta, Release Candidate, and production versions) and have run into only a handful of applications that didn’t work. But, I’ve definitely run into a bunch of hardware driver issues. That said, I actually like Windows Vista and use it for a good chunk of the day on my notebook PC at work.

Given the general anti-Vista sentiment appears to be rising, I wonder if Windows Vista may be Microsoft’s PlayStation 3. Sony’s PS2 was the dominant game console for many years. Even the Xbox really didn’t do much more than dent its dominance. But, the PS3 doesn’t seem very popular except with hard core gamers. The Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 seems to have over-taken the PS3.

I think Vista’s problem is that it didn’t go far enough. Its incompatibility and user experience issues (I hate those UAC pop-ups) stem from trying to bandaid over years of Windows code. Microsoft should have bitten the bullet the way Apple did when they moved from OS 9 to OS X. Microsoft could have dealt with compatibility issues by providing a big upgrade to their Virtual PC product (instead of the incremental one they produced). A Microsoft Virtual PC that had the features of VMware Workstation and bundled with a Windows XP SP2 license would have allowed Vista users to simply move their current environment to a virtual machine and then migrate to the real Vista Windows as applications and drivers arrived. Instead, Virtual PC is too weak in the USB support area to really do much good as a complete virtualized environment.

With good virtual machine support available for the Mac (Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMWare Fusion), I wonder if we might see the migration there instead of Vista. The big problem, of course, is that most people will have to buy an XP license which is hard to find these days and somewhat expensive to do if one is found (since their old PCs probably came with a non-transferable OEM Windows XP). But, still if one is going to have application and hardware compatibility issues, why not move to a modern Linux or Mac OS X operating system instead of sticking with the nearly six year old Windows XP?
So, does Windows XP == Sony PS2? And, does Windows Vista == Sony PS3? We’ll should know within the next 12 months or so. I’m going to keep using Vista on my PCs (and just bought VMware Fusion to try to virtualize it on a Mac). But, I may be in the minority if the various published reports are true.

MobileViews Blog 1st Anniversary
Although the MobileViews.com site has been around for many years, this version of the blog just reached its first anniversary since its relaunch on July 22, 2006.

The blog had been down for many months after one of those former web hosts and broken software sob-stories. And, it took a while to decide to get back to blogging after that horrible experience.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to visit this blog more than once :-) And, a special thanks to everyone who took the time and effort to comment on a blog post. When you agree, disagree, or correct an error on my part, it is all appreciated.

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Windows Mobile Standard Edition Wireless File Transfers?
I discovered today that the little Windows Mobile videos I’ve been posting to YouTube has actually generated some questions via YouTube email over there. I created those videos to illustrate things I talk about in this blog. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. Some of the comments are interesting though. So, I’m going to try to muddle through a few this week. Here’s one from DargonPacer to start things off…

Just got my Dash a few days ago.. AWESOME device. I am able to connect to wifi and surf, but I cannot find out how to transfer files via wifi.(I want to be able to just drag and drop files on the laptop into the dash, w/o using ActiveSync)

I wouldnt mind using active sync over wifi or bluetooth so much, but I cant get either to work..followed your tutorial, didnt help. When it is connected via USB, all works well including active sync, but the only thing I can do with the wifi is surf faster.

The bluetooth pairs fine and the bluetooth software on my laptop ’sees’ the phone (and the phone ’sees’ the laptop), but active sync wont connect. Have tried using various serial ports (making sure to add correct comm) and all that..

I have the latest Active sync on my laptop and the days SAYS it has Windows Mobile 6 Standard (CE OS 5.2.1236 (Build 17741.0.2.1)) on the Dash (came with it). Any suggestions?

Couple of comments: First, IMHO Bluetooth under Windows XP or Vista is iffy at best. I, for example, was unable to use my Microsoft Bluetooth Presenter Mouse on my Dell D620 notebook after the June Patch Tuesday. I can’t diagnose your particular bluetooth problem. But, I can address your other question. Be warned, however, it doesn’t offer much help.

Microsoft removed the ability to use ActiveSync over WiFi with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5 and Active Sync 4. Older (Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Ed.) should be able to sync over WiFi using AS4 because it actually drops back to AS3.8 code when it sees pre-WM5 devices.

If you used a Pocket PC (Professional Edition) instead of a Smartphone (Standard Edition), you might have been able to use File Explorer’s Open Path function to access a shared directory on a network. But, honestly, that has been an iffy proposition too in my experience.

So, short of using a USB connection, putting the micro-SD card in a reader, or emailing a file attachment to yourself, I don’t see any other alternatives (perhaps someone who does know of one can chime in here). You might want to get a second set of eyes to look at your PC’s Bluetooth configuration to see if you can get it working with ActiveSync.

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Misc. T-Mobile Dash Questions from my YouTube Mailbag
Here’s another Windows Mobile question I found in my YouTube mailbag. This one is from dagdag32.

so on my dash…im wondering how do u change da background to oother things….like wuns dat dont come wit da phone….and how do u put new games and upgrade it to a bettel windows mobile.

First, it sounds like you would really benefit from just spending 30 minutes exploring your Dash. It is a very rich device and well worth learning more about. You’ll find yourself getting a lot more productivity and enjoyment from it by becoming more familiar with Windows Mobile in general and features specific to the Dash.

Take a look at the manual that came with the Dash. If that is not enough, browse through some of the excellent books covering Windows Mobile. I can heartily endorse my friend Frank McPherson’s excellent WM5 book: How to do Everything with Windows Mobile. It was written for WM5 devices. However, a good chunk of it still applies to WM6.

Fortunately, T-Mobile made the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the Dash available free of charge. You can find and download it from the T-Mobile USA (assuming you are in the US) website.

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T-Mobile Dash Video Recording Limits?

Today’s question from the YouTube mailbag is from mstakkrid who asks:

anyway how long is the video running time for this phone?! does anyone know?

The screen cap of the Dash’s video recording limits options screens shows you the recording limit options available. Basically, you only need to set this if you do not have a microSD storage card in the Dash. If you have a reasonably large microSD card (I see a Kingston 2GB microSD card for $22.99 with free shipping at Amazon), you can consider choosing the No Limit option I use. The 3 minute 49 second raw AVI file I posted on YouTube as a video demo (after converting it to WMV) is 12.8MB. You can get much smaller video files by using the higher compression MPEG4 format. However, you won’t be able to use low-end tools such as Microsoft’s free MovieMaker to edit those files.

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Windows Mobile View Menu Options All (or mostly all) at Once

The list of Window Mobile video size options in yesterday’s blog entry reminded of something that may not be common knowledge to Smartphone (Standard Edition) users: The Smartphone often presents single line scroll lists that let you scroll up and down in a single character high text window to select an option (say the reminder period for a calendar event). The next time you see one, try pressing the select button instead of scrolling up or down. There’s a good chance you will see the option expand to a full screen size showing you as many of the options as possible on the screen. You still need to scroll, but it lets you quickly scan and decide which of many options to choose.

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Yahoo! Go 2.0 for Windows Mobile

The earlier releases of Yahoo! Go 2 for Windows Mobile only worked on a small number of devices. However, if you visit the new…

Yahoo! Go 2.0 page for Windows Mobile devices

… you will find a huge number of supported Windows Mobile PDAs and Smartphones. I installed it on a Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (Pocket PC) and a Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. The over-the-air installation directly to the device using the direct installation site… http://us.get.go.yahoo.com

…went smoothly. The initial application startup was very slow. I suspect it is because Yahoo! Go attempts to cache as much as possible before displaying the initial screen. What they should do is cache 2 or 3 of the most used initial features (probably email, maps, and news), display the screen, then continue caching other content. The app seemed much faster than previous beta releases. However, they retain the same non-intuitive (from a Windows Mobile user point of view) GUI interface. Menus are navigated from the bottom-up instead of the top-down menus that most WM apps use. The side-scrolling menu on a Pocket PC is even more puzzling because choices are relative rather than direct: If you tap an icon 2 icons away from the center icon under focus, the menu just moves 1 icon in the direction your tap occured instead of selecting the icon you actually tapped.

The mostly text http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ web site is much faster to use and as a lot more content available. But, Yahoo! definitely deserves brownie points for making their app available in native binary form for pretty much every modern Windows Mobile devices out there.

Truncated Menus on Smartphones with Landscape Screens

When the first Windows Mobile Smartphones came out way back in 2002, they all had Portrait oriented screens (screens that are taller than they are wide). That changed with Smartphones based on Windows Mobile 5 (one generation ago) when Landscape (wider than tall) and Square screens emerged. For those of us who went from a Portrait oriented phone (SDA for me) to a Landscape oriented one (Dash in my case), this meant that some of the full menus we used to see became truncated. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to scroll down to see those now hidden options. The Calendar menu, for example, only shows the first 6 items (see image above). However, if you know the number of the hidden option, you can still select it without scrolling by pushing the associated button number. Option 7 in calendar is go to today’s date. So, you can just press 7 and it will do the right thing even though you don’t see it on the screen.

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Microsoft Live Search for Mobile

Microsoft released a new version of Microsoft Live Search for Mobile. You can aim your Pocket PC, Smartphone, J2ME enabled phone, or even a Blackberry at…

wls.live.com

…to check on client compatibility. I didn’t expect to like it. But, it is actually pretty good and looks useful (i.e., it will stay on my phone). I installed it on a Dash Windows Mobile 6 smartphone. My home town isn’t covered by the traffic service. So, I selected San Francisco to see what it looks like (see screen cap below).

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My Mobiler: Control Pocket PC from the Desktop (Freeware)

My Mobiler is a Windows Mobile freeware utility for the Pocket PC (and maybe the Smartphone?). I tried it using a Windows XP desktop PC and a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC. You can see the Pocket PC’s screen displayed on my desktop in the image above. It has a unique installation that starts it up on the desktop and then automagically installs the Windows Mobile piece and starts it running. This freeware utility can copy and paste text between the desktop and the Pocket PC as well as drag and drop files (haven’t tried that yet).

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HTC Advantage 7500 Photos Look Pretty Good

I’ve been interested in cameraphone photography since the first time I tried a Nokia 3650 cameraphone way back in 2003 (The Nokia 3650 GSM/GPRS Phone with Camera, Bluetooth, and More). I also wrote a half dozen of the hacks in the cameraphone section of the book Digital Photography Hacks (2004). But, I’ve always readily admitted that cameraphone photos were nowhere near the quality of even low priced digital cameras. You just can’t compare a glass lens device to a (usually) plastic lens device. However, cameraphone photos have been steadily improving over the years and are starting to look pretty good. The T-Mobile Dash I use as my day to day phone takes decent photos in daylight conditions. I just started taking photos with an HTC Advantage 7500 (a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition with a 3 megapixel camera). So far, I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve seen so far (see a shrunken version of a photo from the camera above). I’m planning to perform more testing of the 7500’s still photo and video capabilities over the next couple of weeks and will post photos here and on other sites.

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Cameraphone Evolution: HTC Advantage Close-up Shot

Most cameraphones (at least the ones I’ve tried over the years) have limited the kinds of photos I take. Outdoor shots in bright but not too bright sunlight came out best. Indoor shots were grainy. And, close-up Macro type shots? Forget it. One of my early cameraphones (the MPx220?) had a flashlight sort of flash. But, it was essentially useless for indoor shots. I’ve heard great things about the various high-end cameraphones available outside of the US (or outside of my budget like the Nokia N95) but have not been able to test any. So, it has been very interesting to take the camera part of the HTC Advantage 7500 (Windows Mobile 5, the WM6 based 7501 is out now) through some tests.

The photo above was cropped and resized smaller to fit this blog. But, it is otherwise untouched. The original 3 megapixel photo was taken indoors. And, I used the 7500’s flash feature to light the Altoid can (I just discovered this Dark Chocolate dipped Peppermint candy last week :-) . The 7500’s autofocus feature seems to result in photos that are much much better than the usual photos I get from other cameraphones. I hope lower end cameraphones start getting these specs and features soon.

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All New MSN Mobile?
Like many of you, I received the mass email announcing the all new MSN Mobile found at…

mobile.msn.com

But, after a quick look, I can’t figure out what is new about it. And, despite all my complaints during a beta testing phase earlier this year, it still has way too much white space that forces me to scroll way too much on a smartphone. For some reason, many of the major portals have adopted the use of enormous amounts of white space in their mobile portals that forces me to scroll up and down a lot. Google went from a fast clean design to a scroll-a-lot design. Yahoo did this too for some reason. I thought their previous mobile portal was the best designed in terms of a small, fast, clean mobile UI. Is the same consulting team providing this awful advice for all of these redesigns?

Microsoft has been criticized as being bloated, with too many layers of bureacracy. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has often been held up as a lean business machine. But an interesting new analysis holds that Microsoft is far more efficient than Wal-Mart.

TechNet Article on Windows Mobile 6 Security
If you are looking for a concise summary of Windows Mobile 6’s security features/options, take a look at this TechNet article…Improve Security with Windows Mobile 6

The problem is that some of the features requires Exchange Server and an ISA Server. Does anyone know if any of the hosted Exchange Server services offers full WM6 integration to provide features like Remote Kill?

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What’s New in IE Mobile in Windows Mobile 6?
If you target web apps for Windows Mobile 6 PDAs or smartphones, take a look at this blog entry from the IEMobile Team…

IE Mobile Standards Support

One of the sections of this detailed blog entry shows the new HTML tags, CSS support, and script/DOM support in IE for WM6.

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Digg for iPhone Incompatible with Internet Explorer

The popular Digg.com community news site introduced a special version of its site for Apple iPhone users. No big deal, right? Just another site streamlined for the small screen, right? No, there is something else going on here because the site not only is non-functional when viewed with Windows Mobile’s Mobile Internet Explorer, it is also non-functional when viewed with Internet Explorer 7 on the desktop. Clicking on the links results in… nothing. It works fine with Firefox and Safari though.

I’m guessing that Digg’s iPhone site should also work on new Nokia S60 phones using Webkit based browsers. It will be interesting to see if more sites start catering to the iPhone to the degree that they are non-functional on Windows Mobile.

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Microsoft Windows Mobile Staff Blogs Collected in a Single Feed

I’ve found nine (9) Microsoft staff related to Windows Mobile work that have blogs. Some blog almost daily (like Jason Langridge). Others, well, they are not so regular. So, it can be a bit of work to follow what each has to say and figure out what is new. It finally occurred to me that Yahoo! Pipes provides the perfect tool to not only collect these blog feeds for me but also for anyone else interested in Windows Mobile. So, I used it to create a single feed sorted by blog post date that makes it easy to see what is new in Windows Mobile. You can find it at…

Collection of Microsoft Windows Mobile Staff Blogs

Note that this feed collection itself has an RSS feed. So, you can subscribe to this single feed for your in-house Windows Mobile news.

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Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 Adds Support for Windows Mobile
If you’ve been following Windows Mobile based robotics projects like WiMo, you’ll be happy to learn that…

Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5

…(released on July 9, 2007) adds formal support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile through its .NET Compact Framework porting of runtime and other files.

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Canon PowerShot A710IS (6X Optical Zoom w/Image Stabilization)

The Canon PowerShot A710IS has been available since last fall. You can see it on the left compared to the Canon PoweShot S1 IS (current version is S5, btw). Although it only has a 6x optical zoom (with image stabilization) compared to the 10x for the S1 (and 12x for the S5), its smaller size won me over. I think it may tend to shoot a bit overexposed compared to the Panasonic Lumix TZ3 I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. But, for the most part, I am very pleased with the A710IS. And, I really like the fact that it runs on two standard AA batteries (vs. the proprietary batteries needed by the Lumix). I suspect Canon may be pushing the Canon PowerShot TX1 camera with 10x zoom and near-HD video recording. If you can find a A710IS, is will probably be heavily discounted. And, you can probably expect a new model to replace it this fall. But, if you find it at a good price, you might want to consider it.

Sample A710IS Macro photo below…

If you were one of the people who forked over extra money for Vista Ultimate because of Microsoft’s promise of soon-to-come “Ultimate Extras,” you haven’t been particularly pleased with Microsoft. The company has only delivered a handful of underwhelming “Extras” to date, and it’s not clear at all what it will deliver in the future.

Windows Mobile Remote Desktop Connection

I played around with Remote Desktop Connection on a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC this evening. You can see a sample screenshot of it connected to a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC with remote access turned on for an account. You can see that Windows Mobile’s RDC does a credible job of showing the entire screen. But, it complains that I have too many menu items (true) to display correctly.

The right soft-key is a toggle between full-screen viewing and normal viewing with menus and navigation bars displayed. You can choose to display more colors but I left it at the default 256 colors to speed up the display.

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Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums (Web Newsgroups)

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.

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More Opera Mini: Why Can’t PIE Render This Well?

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.

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Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Windows Mobile
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…

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What Do You Want in a Windows Mobile SDK FAQ?
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!

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Video of Silverlight Running on Windows Mobile
Eric Griffin’s MSDN blog has an item linking to a…

Kool Video of Sliverlight on Windows Mobile

This is just a demo of an early port that is not available to we outsiders. But, it is interesting to see what is in the development queue.

This may be the last time I can speculate on the future of Silverlight, so I thought I’d do so out loud here. (On 7/9 I start my new job as Senior Program Manager on the Silverlight team at Microsoft).

The problem for many developers with Silverlight is the “what is it?” phenomenon. And this is often expressed as “what does it compete with?” Clear favorites are “Flash” and “Flex” These are reasonable categories for the current (1.0 and 1.1) incarnations but I think the fact that Microsoft chose to call the second version, 1.1 is very interesting.

The difference between 1.0 and 1.1 is that in the latter the CLR and managed code is included, and you can program in C# 3 and VB9 rather than Javascript. You would think that is a very big enhancement; enough to name it version 2.0. The fact that at least for now they are calling that 1.1 must mean that 2.0 will bring… what? I don’t know, but it is interesting

Apple iPhone Launch Impressions

I went to a local Apple store today after work to take a look at the iPhone. I expected to find a couple of hundred people lined up there (the larger Apple store a few miles away probably drew many more people) and, indeed, found around 500 people standing in segmented lines (to allow foot traffic). There were a number of things that surprised me while standing in line… Read more…

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Picasaweb for Mobile Devices

Google announced Picasa Web Albums for Mobile Devices. You can find the announcement at… Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone … and the mobile friendly site itself at…

http://picasaweb.google.com/m/

I tried it on both a Smartphone and Pocket PC (see screencap above) and the site worked fine on both platforms

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Clusty Mobile Search Engine

I guess you can’t have too many mobile friendly web search engines. Here’s another one you can find at:

m.clusty.com

It differentiates itself by dividing (or clustering) search results into groups such as web, images, and deeper drill downs into the category (say “windows mobile”).

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HTC Advantage Pocket PC Phone Edition Unique Keyboard


The HTC Advantage Professional Edition (Pocket PC Phone Edition) is a very unique device in the Windows Mobile world. The first thing that strikes you is its 5 inch LCD display. Its fast processor and 802.11g (not 11b) WiFi makes it a great web browsing tool with that big display. And, of course, it is hard not to notice its big keyboard in various product photos. So, I was quite puzzled when I was able to play with one for a while because I couldn’t figure out where the keyboard. I thought it might pull out from the bottom or, perhaps, be a clamshell design with the keyboard covering the screen. As it turns out, it is neither though my second guess is closer. Its keyboard is a separate device that links up magentically. Click on the screen cap above to go to YouTube where I posted a short video demonstrating how it works. Very cool design.

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Windows Mobile 6 Voice Command Tutorial

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

Warning: this blog entry is totally self-indulgent, has nothing to do with my books or technology, and there is no good reason for you to read it. Feel free to stop right now….

… There is a great joy, when you spend most of your time on the bleeding edge of technology, in being well behind the curve on some things, and for me that is most often music. I tend to listen to music in extreme phases (ask anyone who has had the misfortune of working next door to me).

When I was at Ziff it was Opera. I’d wanted to learn to like opera since I was a teenagr, and in the early 1990s I immersed myself in Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, and to some degree Wagner (Old joke: the answer is 9W. What is the question. The question is.. “Do you spell your name with a V, herr Wagner?”)

Somewhat later it was jazz, and then blues.

This year, it is grunge( /hip-hop/post-punk/alternative-rock). It’s like opening a small closet and finding a whole new wing of your house.

You may scoff (especially if you’re in your 20s), but until last month, I had never heard of Nirvana, let alone Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Yes, You Can Break a Pocket PC Power Button

First, yes I know that Pocket PCs don’t really have a power button. The button just toggles the device between a low-power suspend mode and active mode. But, let’s just call it a Power Button to simplify life.

The photo above is of my old Compaq iPAQ 3650 Pocket PC. It was released in Fall 1999 and was probably the first Pocket PC that really drew a lot of attention. Unfortunately, mine had two moving parts that wore out a lot quicker than I thought they should: The power button and the stylus release button. I ended up having to turn on the device by using its feature of letting any hardware button activate the underlying application. I used the PHM Suspend PowerToy mentioned a few days ago to turn it off. It finally gave up the ghost in early 2002 after I used it about, hmm, 18 months or so. I had a 3850 by then. But, the 3650 was actually replaced by the a first generation T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition.

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YouTube Mobile Doesn’t Mix with Windows Mobile

YouTube Mobile was released from its exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless this week. Unfortunately, most Windows Mobile devices (at least the ones I have) don’t support the 3GPP video file format. I could swear I had a Windows Mobile Smartphone or two that did. But, I can’t remember which one it is. I tried it with Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition, Windows Mobile 5, and Windows Mobile 6 (Smartphone and PDA) devices this evening. None of them could display a YouTube Mobile video.

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How to Turn on a Windows Mobile Smartphone

Every now and I then I hear or read someone advising Windows Mobile Smartphone (aka Standard Edition) users to press and hold the power button until the screen comes on. You could do that. But, I bet your thumb or finger will start hurting after doing that a couple of dozen times. Here’s an easier and less painful way that has worked for every Smartphone I’ve used since the Smartphone 2002 days (1st generation).

1. Press and hold the power button for a two-count (one… two…)


2. Release the power button


3. Wait 4 to 5 seconds. The screen will remain completely blank during this period


4. The screen should suddenly come to life after the waiting period and start up properly

I have no idea why there isn’t some kind of indication (blinking power light or something) during that 4 to 5 second period of nothingness. If someone could explain that to us, I would be grateful :-)

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Opera Mini 4 Beta on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC

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.

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Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition Still Doesn’t Know What a Phone Number Looks Like
Microsoft keeps telling us design choices such as removing the Pocket PC bottom menu bar area, previously used to good effect by many applications, with the two giant soft keys is to make the user experience and software design experience of the Pocket PC and Smartphone closer. And, yet, as of Windows Mobile 6, they still haven’t given the Pocket PC (AKA Classic Edition and Professional Edition) one very simple and useful feature that has been in the Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) for years: The ability to recognize any string that looks like a phone number as a phone number and make it a hot link dial-able object.

For example, if you create a Task in Outlook (on the desktop since you can’t create Tasks on a Smartphone… and what’s up with that limitation???) and type in a bunch of names and phone numbers in no special fashion, the phone numbers will appear underlined and can be used to dial the phone on a Smartphone. I hoped the Pocket PC (Professional Edition) would gain this feature with Windows Mobile 6. But, nope. So much for Windows Mobile feature convergence. Guess we have to wait and see what Windows Mobile 7 gives us.

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Windows Mobile 6 Notes Lost its Inked Text Recognize Ability

The Windows Mobile Notes app never seemed to be able to fire on all cylinders from the very beginning. Despite its apparent usefulness, it seems like it didn’t get widely used by most Pocket PC users. For me the main problem was that it didn’t sync reliably with Outlook Notes when I first tried it. And, other applications from a variety of 3rd party developers quickly overtook Notes by providing a lot more useful features and metaphors (think yellow sticky notes).
Notes lost the ability to draw but gained the ability to recognized inked text a few generations ago. Windows Mobile 5 restored the ability to draw in ink again. But, I just noticed that Windows Mobile 6 lost the ability to recognize inked text (it used to be in the Tools menu). It isn’t a big deal, I guess. But, I hate to see Windows Mobile 6 lose a feature. I guess Recognize gets added to the list of dozens of features lost by Windows Mobile over the years.

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to Vista so that it’s easy to use other search tools instead of Vista’s built-in search. The change will take effect with SP-1 for Vista, the beta of which is due later this year. But just because you’ll be able to change your search tool doesn’t mean you should. Vista’s built-in search easily beats Google’s desktop search.

More Windows Mobile Press Confusion: Maximum PC This Time

Last month I noted the PC World magazine article about Windows Mobile 6 smartphones that incorrectly said that Word Mobile and Excel Mobile on WM6 smartphones could not edit documents. This month iti s Maximum PC magazine’s turn to get it wrong. The Smartphone State of the Union article in the July 2007 issue of Maximum PC includes mini-reviews of many smartphones. Page 44 has a 1/3-page review of the T-Mobile Dash says: You’ll be able to open MS Office documents but not edit them. Given paper publication lag time, this article was probably written way before Windows Mobile 6 became available. Pre-WM6 smartphones did not come with Office Mobile components. So, the review may be speaking of some third party viewing application (but does not clarify this). WM6, however, does provide mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Word and Excel do have edit modes. But, they are just that: Modes. It is not seamless experience like what you find on the desktop or Pocket PC. It is more like old moded vi editor in UNIX. You need to select Edit Mode from the Word or Excel initial menu (the Word menu is shown here). A different menu structure appears at that point and you can edit an existing document.

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Sync-ing a Plain Ol’ Phone with a PC

One of the phones in my household is a Sanyo Katana phone. Although it is not a smartphone, it does have Bluetooth, a camera, and the usual applications that phones have these days. Originally, I paid for web service and photo uploads. But, since those features were rarely used, I moved the phone back to basic voice service. We still wanted to get photos off of the phone now and then though. So, I went in search of something cheaper than $15/month to do that. This weekend I found the… Datapilot Cell Phone Data Transfer Suite Universal (Amazon affiliate link) …at my local Costco and bought it. The box contained a bunch of cables for various phone models as well as a USB Bluetooth dongle. I installed the suite’s software and tried Bluetooth first. The Windows XP PC and the phone seemed to pair ok. And, it looked like contacts information could be synced. But, there didn’t seem to be a way to copy the photos off of the phone. I tried the USB cable next. Getting that to work was an exercise in frustration. But, I eventually managed to get it working (don’t ask me how) and was able to move the photos over. I can understand how the average review of the 39 reviewers on Amazon gave it 2 out of 5 stars. It gave me a bit more appreciation for ActiveSync (but not that much :-) . On the other hand, if we use this Datapilot Suite for more than 3 months, it will have paid for itself.

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Tips for ActiveSync with Bluetooth

Using Bluetooth from a Windows desktop or notebook and anything else seems a lot harder than it should be. And, since Microsoft’s Windows Mobile ActiveSync is a general pain in the neck itself, the combination of Bluetooth and ActiveSync often is a test of patience and some detective skills. Here’s some info that might help you get your Windows Mobile device to sync over Bluetooth with ActiveSync running on Windows XP. Note that even if you do everything right, it still might not work. I could never get my T-Mobile SDA smartphone to sync over Bluetooth, for example. But, I was able to get a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone and pocket pc to sync over Bluetooth.

1. Install Outlook first
2. Start up Outlook, activate it and configure it
3. Install ActiveSync
4. Partner your Windows Mobile smartphone or PDA using a USB cable. Note that the initial partnership must be performed using USB
5. If a Bluetooth device is not installed yet, install it and configure it now
6. Note which COM port is assigned to Bluetooth’s incoming port. You should be able to find this in your device’s configuration utility. Mine happened to be assigned to COM4: (see screen cap above)
7. Open up ActiveSync without any device connected to the PC
8. Select your device (if you have more than one synced) and open up the Connection Settings window
9. Check the box next to Allow connections from one of the following:
10. Select the port you found in step 6 from the pulldown menu
11. Click OK
12. Set Bluetooth on your PC to allow it to be discovered
13. Turn on Bluetooth on your Windows Mobile device
14. Have your WM device search for other Bluetooth devices
15. Pair it with your PC
16. Make sure that the ActiveSync service is visible on your WM device and select it
17. Start the ActiveSync app on your WM device
18. Select Connect via Bluetooth

If all is well, you should see ActiveSync start up on your PC and normal syncing should occur. If not, well, there are all sorts of possible problems. I’m not even going to try to figure out the myriad of ActiveSync awful

• ActiveSync and XP’s Suspend and Hibernate do not always play well with each other. You may need to reboot once in a while to get ActiveSync to work if you Suspend or Hibernate regularly like I do
• Bluetooth drivers seem to lose their way now and then. Try unchecking the box from Step 9, apply it, then check it, and apply again.

Good luck. ActiveSync continues to confound many of us after more than a decade of existence under various names (Windows CE Service, ActiveSync, WMDC). So, again, even after going through these steps correctly, you may find as I did that some devices just won’t sync over a Bluetooth connection.

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Vista 8GB SD Card Compatibility Update Coming June 22
There’s a note on the Windows Vista Team Blog about a… New compatibility update for SD cards …for large (8GB or more) SD cards and improved support for SDHC and SDIO cards. I bought my first 4GB SDHC cards last week and was surprised to find that none of my older SD card readers (including the one built into my desktop) could read it. Fortunately, Sandisk included their MicroMate SDHC card reader with the card itself. I’ll test it with a Vista desktop as soon as the update becomes available on the 22nd.

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PHM Pocket PC Toys Suspend and Reset Work on Windows Mobile 6 PDA

I wrote about the old (last revised in 2004) PHM Pocket PC toys last year. But, since we have moved from Windows Mobile 5 to 6, I thought it was worth mentioning the SUSPEND and RESET utilities from that toy kit works fine with a Windows Mobile 6 PDA (Pocket PC). I use the suspend utility to reduce wear and tear on the Pocket PC’s on/off button. And, yes, actually wore out the button on an iPaq 3650. Reset performs a soft reset without needing to push in the sometimes ill designed soft reset button on a Pocket PC. Some software do not need to be revised and updated to be useful. These two single minded utilities are good examples of such software.

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Windows Mobile 6 Internet Explorer Favorites on Home Screen

I noticed a few weeks ago that Internet Explorer on both my Windows Mobile 6 smartphone and PDA has a drop down Favorites and History area on its home screen. Thinking that it was just another link to the Favorites list, I ignored it until a few days ago. It turns out that the drop-down favorites link provides a list of the last five sites visited from the Favorites list. Very handy, The History list lists the web page titles (not the URL) of the last five pages visited. Again, very handy.

Microsoft may be getting preferential treatment from the Bush administration’s Department of Justice because one of the department’s key lawyers was a top antitrust lawyer for the firm that represented Microsoft in the lengthy antitrust suit a few years ago.

Apparently so.

via a ping from Mark Richardson (thanks, Mark!) I learned of the following. You can find out more @ http://blogs.sun.com/ontherecord/entry/project_blackbox_shake_test,

*NICE*! I want one ten!

NOTE: For those unaware, yes, it runs Windows too.

So here’s the thing I really like about the above video… “What we discovered was that X happened, and X shouldn’t have happened, so we’re now going to go back and fix X.” (or something to that effect.)

Folks, *this* is how engineering is supposed to be done,

* Build it.
* Break it.
* Build it again, but this time around build it better.
* Repeat.

As mentioned already, I want ten twenty! ;-)

Nice work, Sun!

Sample Video from T-Mobile Dash Smartphone

I’m still putting the T-Mobile Dash with Windows Mobile 6 through its paces. If you click on the tiny preview screencap above, you’ll see a transcoded version of a short video I recorded using the Dash smartphone today. I recorded to AVI (Motion Picture JPEG) format which records frames at 176×144 pixels. You probably don’t want to record a feature length movie in this format. But, it does a decent job of recording video given its inherent limitations. And, if you are not carrying any other video recording device, it is better than nothing!

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Ilium’s 10th Anniversary: Good Time to Get eWallet
Sorry this post’s title sounds so much like an advertisement. But, you may have seen me mention their eWallet product (which I’ve used since version 1.0 on an HP 320LX Handheld PC) and rave about it here.

So, if you’ve been thinking about getting Ilium Software’s eWallet (stores sensitive info in an encrypted file), their 10th anniversary celebration week would be a good time. Ilium has it on sale for $10 (regular $29.95) for the Professional Edition on their anniversary page. NOTE: This special was only available for a brief period after I originally posted this blog item on June 4. However, Ilium has extended their anniversary observation by providing a 10% discount until June 16.

Ilium Software 10th Anniversary

You can also read a bit more about their annivesary on their blog.

I moved eWallet and NewsBreak when I migrated from my SDA smartphone to a Dash smartphone which was also a move from Windows Mobile 5 to 6. Both apps to seem to run ok though I’ve noticed a long pause in NewsBreak (RSS reader) that I didn’t see on the SDA WM5 smartphone. I’m trying to collect more details about this and will report the info to Ilium once I can see some pattern.

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PDAmill GameBox Sudoku

I suspect I may be one of the few people on this planet who has not played Sudoku. So, l looked at the announcement of…

PDAmill GameBox Sudoku

(US$14.95)…for the Pocket PC (Classic or Professional Edition in Windows Mobile 6 lingo) with more than passing interest. I installed it on my Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC to see if it would run on WM6. And, yep, it installed and started up mostly fine. It needed 6MB of free RAM for game play. So, I performed a soft reset (quicker than shutting down individual apps) to free up RAM. Then, I started up the game again and read through the instructions.

There are three board/grid sizes (4×4, 9×9, and 16×16) and three game play levels (Easy, Normal, and Hard). I can see why Sudoku was such a craze for while (Is it still? I’m not sure). I have no idea how easy or hard Sudoku experts would view GameBox Sudoku. But, I can see how it might drain more than a few hours of my time if I let it…

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HiRISE Mobile: Images from Mars

The University of Arizona High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment has some spectacular high res photos of Mars on their website. And, I was surprised to find that they have pages formatted specially for mobile devices too. You can find it at…

HiRISE Mobile (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/togo/wap.php)

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Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) 6.1
Microsoft released an update to WMDC (ActiveSync for Vista)…

Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) 6.1

The biggest win probably goes to Smartphone (Standard Edition) users who can now sync files with Windows Vista (Windows XP users could do so with ActiveSync). The surprise for me is that the download worked with Firefox. I didn’t have to switch back to IE to download the file to my Vista box.

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SDHC Card Reader Amazingly Fast

I bought a SanDisk Ultra II SDHC 4GB w/MicroMate USB 2.0 Bundle for use with a digital camera. When I bought it the Micromate SDHC reader seemed like a nice to have add-on. However, since the 4GB SDHC card does not seem to be readable by my older SD readers, it became a must-have accessory. The SDHC card is recognized immediately when used with the bundled reader and file transfers are lightning fast. The SDHC card also slips into and out of the reader without any fuss.

The SanDisk MobileMate SD+ reader I bought just a week earlier, on the other hand, has such a tight SD slot, that I’m worried it might strip the metal contacts on SD cards I use with it. I’m probably going to put it away and give it a negative review over on Amazon.com.

The SanDisk SDHC card and reader bundle, on the other hand, gets a thumbs up from me.

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Windows Mobile 6 & Mac OS X
So, the not-quite-ready Apple iPhone is not the only phone that can sync with a Mac. I read an article over at MacNN describing an alpha release of Mark/Space’s…

Missing Sync for Windows Mobile 4.0 Alpha

According to the article the free alpha release (production release is $40) supports WM6 upgraded Blackjack and Dash smartphones. I’m not quite ready to sync my Dash with a Mac. But, if you are, please let me know how well it works for you.

In the fight over whether towns and cities should be allowed to have their own Wi-Fi networks, Microsoft has clearly come down on the pro side. The company has conducted several market studies about municipal Wi-Fi, and has found, in the words of Stefan Weitz, director of planning for MSN at Microsoft, that there is “significant demand for free municipal Wi-Fi. There is widespread adoption potential.”

No legacy API’s to support.

(or in other words, theres one way to do something, and the way to do that something is the *CORRECT* way to do that something.)

Dear Microsoft Silverlight team,

*PLEASE* don’t given into pressures to provide feature support for *ANY* other reason than it’s absolutely mandatory to provide it. I’m beginning to truly understand just how wonderful of a language within a language LINQ truly is. Please leave it alone. :)

Thanks in advance,

Your *BIGGEST* fan

Much of the criticism of the new Microsoft Surface computing table is misguided, for one simple reason: It’s intended to be used in commercial settings, not at home. Why, after all, would you want one of these things in your living room?

Ack… Windows Mobile 6 Confusion By the Print Press
Well, I knew this was bound to happen as soon as I heard Microsoft changed the names of the Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphone to Professional Edition and Standard Edition. It not only confuses the ordinary customer, it also confuses technology journalists. Take a look at page 22 in the May 2007 issue of PC World. The half-page article is titled: Windows Mobile 6: New E-Mail Options. Read the sentence (about half-way through): And now you can edit data in an Excel spreadsheet (you still can’t create formulas or new spreadsheets though). Um, what? Yep, we have one confused tech journalist here. So, if you hear/read this repeated somewhere, please try to spread the correct information back down the path (I’ll try to track down the writer’s email address and do the same). The Pocket PC/Phone Edition has had the ability to edit Word and Excel documents (though translation was required until Windows Mobile 5) since, hmm, the Pocket PC 2000 days. Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition devices (Pocket PC Phone Edition) can still create and edit Word and Excel documents in their native formats (though not all functions are supported). The Smartphone (now called Standard Edition) never had any Microsoft-provided Word or Excel viewing capabilities at all up to and including Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones. Some vendors supplied third party tools to view documents, but Microsoft never provided the capability for the Smartphone. However, as I mentioned in a previous blog item, Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition (Smartphone) does allow editing Word and Excel documents. Next, you Excel Mobile for Standard Edition (Smartphone) does let you enter functions in a cell. It doesn’t provide an function list, but you can type it in yourself ( e.g., =SUM(A1:A3) ). Finally, yes, for some odd reason, Excel Mobile and Word Mobile do not let you create new documents on a Smartphone (let’s drop the Standard Edition stuff). However, there is a simple workaround. Just think about it for a moment and it will come to you :-)

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ActiveSync vs. Hibernate & ActiveSync vs. Poke in the Eye
If you think I rant about ActiveSync, check out my friend Ed Hansberry’s blog item on PocketPCThoughts.com titled… Windows Mobile Device Center Poked Me In The Eye …where he describes a particularly painful encounter with ActiveSync the Next Generation (aka Windows Mobile Device Center - WMDC) which deleted as he says: …about 90% of my files from both the PC and device, so there were really no files to be found. Ouch! In my effort to conserve energy and reduce my personal carbon footprint, I’ve been using Hibernate with both Windows XP and Windows Vista for the past two months or so (you can check out my new GreenTechies blog if you are interested in such things… One of my slogans is: You don’t need to believe in global warming to want to save money :-) And, guess what piece of software seems to get particularly confused by Hibernating a system? [In my best Mr. Rogers’ voice] You are right… I knew you could guess that… I don’t use my Vista PC to sync regularly with a Windows Mobile device (just for testing). So, I don’t really see it over there yet. But, Windows XP + Hibernate + ActiveSync 4.5 doesn’t paint a pretty picture. If you know how to stablize ActiveSync on a hibernating PC, please let me know.

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Windows Mobile 6 T-Mobile Dash Bluetooth ActiveSync Video Demo
I could never get my T-Mobile SDA Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone to work with ActiveSync over a wireless Bluetooth connection. There was nothing wrong with the old Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter on my desktop or ActiveSync since other Windows Mobile devices could sync with it over Bluetooth. Fortunately, my new T-Mobile Dash with the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade doesn’t suffer from this problem. The new WM6 communications center has an ActiveSync button (unlike WM5’s comm center) to make the whole process of wireless syncing Bluetooth a bit easier. I recorded a brief video (1 minute 28 seconds) this evening to give you an idea of what the Bluetooth ActiveSync process looks like. You can find the YouTube link to the video below… Video: Windows Mobile 6 T-Mobile Dash Bluetooth ActiveSync Demo

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Windows Mobile 6 Word Mobile Looks Surprisingly Good!
I had to rush out of my office early this afternoon after completing a 6 page memorandum draft. I didn’t want to use a USB thumbdrive or a take the notebook with me. So, I just emailed it to myself after saving the file to Word 97-2003 format (from Word 2007). The document does not have any unusual formatting (e.g., embedded images). But, I did use a Word 2007 theme (Header 1 is a large font in blue, etc.). So, I was quite surprised how good the document looked on my T-Mobile Dash. The edge wrapping was well done, the titles and text looked good and was easy to read on the phone’s screen. I kind of wish there was an option to view it at, say, 33% size to fit more on the screen. But, the 50% size view was reasonable to use. If you haven’t tried viewing a “real” Word document on your Windows Mobile 6 phone, try it out. You might be pleasantly surprised like I was.

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Google Calendar for Mobile Devices
Google Calendar for mobile devicesGoogle announced a mobile device friendly version of Google Calendar today… Calendar for Mobile Devices I gave it a quick try on my T-Mobile Dash by adding an event. The agenda view (list of events) is the only view available on a mobile device. I went to the regular PC to flesh out the information (I could type faster there). Adding the address for an event lets you use the mobile version of Google Maps from a link on the event. Microsoft Pocket Streets used to integrate with Contacts on Windows Mobile devices. But, now that it is gone, I guess that this Google feature could be handy (unless you are out of tower range :-) . You can find Google Calendar at: calendar.google.com

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Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC
I’ve got Windows Mobile 6 on a Pocket PC to compare with a Smartphone (or Professional and Standard Editions if you prefer). Word Mobile and Excel Mobile have obvious advantages on the larger Pocket PC format factor with a touchscreen. But, it is amazing how much nicer some features like word completion look on a Smartphone vs. a Pocket PC. You would think the more mature (from an editing perspective) Pocket PC would have the advantage. But, that is not the case from my point of view. Despite this, though, entering information in Word Mobile or Excel Mobile on the Pocket PC is still a much better and easier experience overall. And, ack, ack, ack, when is Microsoft going to bring the good ol’ calculator for the Pocket PC out of the 20th century and into this one? It looks awful and out of place compared to the rest of the Pocket PC and downright archaic compared to the small but reasonably effective UI they added for the Smartphone’s WM6 calculator.

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Small Smartphone Excel Mobile Display Glitch
Windows Mobile 6 Excel Mobile for Smartphone Find Screen GlitchI found a minor display error in Excel Mobile running on a Windows Mobile 6 T-Mobile Dash (Smartphone; AKA Standard Edition). The “Look in:” selection box in the “Find” window is not completely displayed. It is still usable since I can see enough of the option to figure out what the choices are. But, it would be nice to see the whole thing. I suspect we’ll see a few more of these screen form format glitches as time goes by. The variety of resolutions and screen orientations (landscape or portrait) is bound to mess up some applications on the Pocket (Classic or Professional Edition) and Smartphone (Standard Edition). Excel Mobile is probably a double whammy case since the Office Mobile components are seeing their first appearance on the Smartphone starting with Windows Mobile 6 and most people (including developers) probably think of the Smartphone as having a portrait oriented screen.

Mashup fans: You don’t need to know how to write a line of code if you want to create your own, customized mashup. You can use the beta of Microsoft’s new Popfly site, to build them by simply dragging building blocks onto a page and connecting them.

Within one week after Mix and an intensive study of Silverlight and some thought about its implications, I did two things:

1. I partnered with Alex Horovitz, (formerly of Apple and Next ) and my co-author of Programming .NET 3 to form Silverlight Consulting, LLC and…

2. I bought a Mac Powerbook 17″ and, most important, Parallels Desktop for Mac along with the book Switching to the Mac The Missing Manual by David Pogue.

[Editorial note: It is actually a MacBookPro 17, as is pointed out in a friendly comment below]

Here’s what it is like to buy your first Mac.

1. The number of purchase decisions are far fewer
2. It arrives in a beautiful box. You slip it out of the box, set the instructions aside as unnecessary, plug it in, turn it on. The machine is very beautiful. It asks you your name. The fonts are very beautiful.

Then it works.

Mac people laugh at you if you buy a book about how to use it; the culture is; use it, poke around.

Parallels lets you run XP and/or Vista on your Mac in a window or full screen; it is one of the easiest, fastest and nicest VM software packages I’ve seen.

I plugged my 500Gig external hard disk into the mac, formatted it and it worked (3 minutes). I plugged my two button optical wireless mouse in, worked great. I plugged my monitor from my Dell laptop in, worked instantly. I plugged my network in, worked perfectly, instantly and with zero setup.

The kicker was that setting up XP through Parallels on the Mac was faster and an order of magnitude easier than it was on my Dell. Cracked me up; the Mac answered all the questions for me; I just sat back and watched it work.

I hear the Mac folks are afraid that Microsoft is selling Silverlight as cross-platform today but might “walk away”from the Mac at “any moment.” But I just don’t buy it; the Mac is too much fun, and once a lot of Vista and XP users get our hands on it, using Silverlight applications that run both on Vista and on the Mac — well, I wonder if Silverlight won’t eventually sell more Macs than it does Dell machines.

Niftiest program so far: video conferencing through AIM; there is something very nice about seeing the person you’re talking to, for free, with very solid full motion video. Yes, it takes a very big pipe, but FIOS is cheap these days, and the Mac makes it painless.

Meanwhile, the more I program with Silverlight, the more impressed I am.

Is the growing availability of open source, free and third-party tools, as well as the passion of their users, finally getting the attention of .NET developers? Or to ask the question differently, can any .NET developer these days afford to ignore a solution like Rails or a tool like NHibernate?

David Laribee, who blogs frequently on .NET topics, provoked a wide ranging conversation among his peers with his April proposal to put a name to what he and others see as an emerging ethos among .NET developers: ALT.NET (a name that may stir other memories among former usenet denizens). It’s not the tool that’s important, he writes, it’s the solution the tool makes possible, and the ease with which it can be maintained and extended. Here’s his credo:

“What does it mean to be ALT.NET? In short it means:

1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principals and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principals (e.g. Resharper.) “

O’Reilly tried to capture some of the excitement of this movement and the growing array of tools available to Microsoft developers (some from Microsoft itself) in our recently published Windows Developer Power Tools by Jim Holmes and James Avery. But blogger Ayend Rahien warns that ALT.NET should not be construed as an idea that seeks to pit developers against Microsoft:

“The way I see it, this is much more about keeping your head open to new approach[es] and ideas, regardless of where they come from.”

After two days at RailsConf where he got to see first-hand the passion of Ruby on Rails developers, .NET blogger Scott Hanselman wondered aloud in his blog Is Microsoft Losing the Alpha Geeks?, “Why does this need to be Alt.Net? Why is this ‘alternative’?”

“Seems that this should be mainstream and baked in by the tools and “dogma” that comes down from on high. Microsoft needs to make ALT.NET attitudes Mainstream.NET attitudes, through leadership, openness, and a lot more prescriptive guidance.”

In other words, Microsoft should not only encourage the development of alternative tools, but should actively help bring frameworks like Rails to .NET to give those who want to build certain kinds of applications on the .NET platforms the same kinds of experience they can get elsewhere. In fact, he says, Microsoft should spin off an organization specifically dedicated to bringing Ruby and Ruby on Rails to the .NET platform, as Mozilla is for Firefox, and Microsoft should contribute developers to the projects well.

Why? Because, he writes:

“…This isn’t about Microsoft making money on developer tools, but rather about the platform, where the money is made. An open CLR-based implementation of Ruby on Rails would be a great way to introduce Rails into the Windows-based Enterprise, and would encourage more Alpha Geeks to code on Windows.”

American Power Conversion (APC) Mobile Power Pack

I’ve been using the APC UPB10 Mobile Power Pack for three months. It costs around $60 (I bought mine from a local big box store) and can recharge most devices that can be charged from a USB source. The Mobile Power Pack comes with USB cable to recharge itself from either a PC’s USB port or an A/C outlet. However, I had to supply the cables to charge my devices (not a problem). The Mobile Power Pack has a standard sized USB plug at its top. I tested it with a T-Mobile SDA (Windows Mobile Smartphone), i-Mate K-JAM (Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition), and a 5th generation iPod (video). In fact, I recharged all three using the Mobile Power Pack without needing to recharge the Pack itself. The LCD display stripe you see lit up in the photo tells you what the Pack’s charge level is. A fully lit line indicates a fully charged pack.

The unit is small, thin, and light making it perfect for travel. I only wish its own A/C adapter transformer were smaller and had a folding plug. Other than that, this product gets a mobile thumbs up from me.

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MobileViews Excel Mobile Quick FAQs
One of the more popular Quick FAQs pages on the old MobileViews.com site was the one for Pocket Excel/Excel Mobile. I went back into my archives to start bringing back the MobileViews Quick FAQs section. You can find a list of Excel functions and other useful information about Pocket Excel (Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition and older) and Excel Mobile (Windows Mobile 5 and newer) linked below as well as in the sidebar:
Excel Mobile Quick FAQs

Let me know if you find these Quick FAQs useful.

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MobileViews ActiveSync QuickFAQ
I revived another MobileViews QuickFAQ this evening. This time it is…

MobileViews ActiveSync QuickFAQ

Its first paragraph says it all: I hate ActiveSync problems. I bet you do too. This QuickFAQs page is here to help you with your ActiveSync problems so I don’t have to hear about them. &B-) FYI: Windows Vista Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) information coming soon…

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T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile 6 Upgrade
I’m thinking about buying a T-Mobile Dash to replace my current SDA Smartphone (I really don’t like that Standard Edition name :-) . So, I thought I would jot down where the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade is found in a place I could find it quickly: Here :-)

T-Mobile Windows Mobile Upgrade Page

Note that the upgrade for the T-Mobile MDA (Pocket PC Phone Edition) on the same page is not for Windows Mobile 6. That is a feature pack upgrade for Windows Mobile 5 on the MDA.

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T-Mobile Dash (Smartphone) with Windows Mobile 6

I have a short term project (more on this after it is completed sometime in July) that requires a Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone (Standard Edition). So, I walked over to the local T-Mobile store during lunch and bought the last remaining Dash in the store. In fact, at first the person handling my potential purchase said they were all out. Fortunately, another sales person heard our conversation and found an Dash box for me to purchase.

If you want to read about what the upgrade process from Windows Mobile 5 to 6 is like, I suggest heading over to my old friend Frank McPherson’s site (PocketPCHow2.com) and reading his blog entry titled:

Upgrading to Windows Mobile 6

He used a Windows Vista PC for his upgrade while I used a Windows XP PC. However, I am very glad I read his blog entry before attempting my own upgrade. He has some very useful information about the quirks of the upgrade process.

First comment about the Dash with Windows Mobile 6: Wow! Having been totally unimpressed with Windows Mobile 6 Beta running on a Pocket PC last year, I am 180 degrees in the other opinion direction on the combo of the Dash and WM6. Having moved from a T-Mobile SDA WM5 Smartphone that I’ve used for a little over a year (and being reasonably satisfied with it), the experience of having a nice usable QWERTY thumb keyboard with the WM6 apps is just great. Setting up email was a breeze with a QWERTY keyboard to enter email addresses, mail server names, and other textual oddities that are a pain on a DTMF-layout numeric keypad.

More on the Dash with Windows Mobile 6 over the next few days. Stay tuned…

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Control Windows Media Center using a Windows Mobile 5 Device
Microsoft’s Coding4Fun site has an interesting coding project item titled…

Control Windows Media Center using a Windows Mobile 5 Device

It has examples using both Visual Basic.NET as well as Visual C# to remote control a Windows Media Center PC.

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Windows Mobile 6 Office Mobile for Smartphone (Standard Edition)

Shortly after Windows Mobile 6 was announced I was under the impression that Office Mobile components for the Smartphone (AKA, Standard Edition) were document readers (read-only). It turns out that I was wrong. But, there are a couple of interesting quirks to deal with.

First, as far as I can tell, there isn’t any way to create a new document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) on the Smartphone itself. You can, however, edit a document brought over from a PC.

Second, as you may have read on the news-oriented mobile tech websites, you cannot work with files in the various Office 2007 formats (the ones that end in X like DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). You can, however, save files from Office 2007 to what Microsoft calls the 97-2003 file format that should be able to be used on by Office Mobile in Windows Mobile 6. And, the latest version of Dataviz’s Documents to Go features the ability to work with Office 2007 file formats (I haven’t tried this myself to verify this).

I’ve been using the beta of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, and I’m a fan. But Microsoft is making one big mistake with it: It won’t sell the software to people like you and me. It’ll only go to systems makers. Microsoft is missing a big opportunity here.

Microsoft SyncToy + Windows Mobile = No Luck

Microsoft updated their SyncToy PowerToy to version 1.4 last November. But, I only got around to trying it this evening. SyncToy’s function is to synchronize files in two different folders. One obvious use is to sync files from a digital camera’s storage card to a PC’s hard disk. Another, one would think (at least I did),would be to sync from a Smartphone’s or Pocket PC’s. Unfortunately, SyncToy can’t see beyond the Mobile Devices folder of a synced Windows Mobile device during the Folder Pairing process. So, you can’t use it with a Pocket PC or Smartphone synced with the PC. Too bad. Perhaps, the company that wrote SyncToy and the company that designed Windows Mobile should talk to each other. Oh wait, never mind…

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Yahoo! oneSearch Mobile

Yahoo! seems to be trying to provide more than one way for us to use their services from a mobile device. The client software for Yahoo! Go provides an attractive interface but was very slow on my Pocket PC and wasted too much screen real estate IMHO. Recently, it looks like they took the content from wap.oa.yahoo.com mobile web portal and moved it to…

m.yahoo.com

This mobile web portal has the same lightweight and lightning fast mostly-text interface from the wap design and added the oneSearch feature that provides a mixed result page that reminds me of Google’s SearchMash site. oneSearch returns results categorized as Web (all of the web), Mobile Web (results of pages that look good on a mobile device), and Web Images.

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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.

Here’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.

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Tumblr.com is Mobile Format Friendly
Tumblr is a free web tumblog (sort of a minimalist blog format) service that lets you quickly post text, links, photos, videos and other data. I just noticed the other day that it also provide a mobile device display friendly format. Just add a /mobile after a tumblog’s URL. You can see the mobile display version of my tumblog, for example, at:

http://mobileviews.tumblr.com/mobile

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Twitter Mobile

Do you Twitter? It seems like everyone is either Twitter-ing or Jaiku-ing these days. And, those who aren’t, seem to be life-casting. But, sharing your life via text seems a lot cheaper and easier to do than videocasting your life. The one exception may be those who chose to use Twitter via SMS and found a large text messaging bill the next month (unless they had unlimited SMS service, of course).

Twitter has a new mobile browser friendly site at…

http://m.twitter.com/

…that lets the rest of us (assuming a decent mobile data service bandwidth) twitter on the go using a mobile device with a web browser.

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BusinessWeek’s Mobile Experiments

BusinessWeek appears to be trying out two different approaches to providing content to mobile devices. Their original Handheld Edition (right side of image) found at http://pda.businessweek.com/ has a simple clean interface that provides a lot of textual content per click (think Google). Their newer dot-mobi site found at http://www.businessweek.mobi/ looks somewhat graphically richer (think Yahoo or MSN) but provides much less textual content per click. You need to make a lot of clicks and endure download pauses to read a whole article. Essentially we have form-over-content (the dot-mobi site) vs. content-over-form (the PDA site). I hope BusinessWeek maintains both presentation options since it is pretty certain that both will appeal to different types of readers. We can only hope other content producers follow BusinessWeek’s lead in experimenting with mobile content presentation.

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The Camera Phone Book: Comments on the Advice from This Book

The USA Weekend insert in my local paper has an interesting full page article title How to make the most of your camera phone that gets its information from the new book The Camera Phone Book: How to Shoot Like a Pro, Print, Store, Display, Send Images, Make a Short Film by CNet’s Aimee Baldridge and and National Geographic photographer Robert Clark. I haven’t read this book. But, based on the co-authors’ credentials, I’ll guess it is a pretty good book. I do have some issues and additional advice for the tips extracted from the book in the USA Weekend article though. I’ll go through the two lists of advice from the main article and its sidebar.
[Read more…]

Microsoft formally released its new Web-based email service,Windows Live Hotmail, and while it improves over previous Microsoft Web-based mail, it’s still not as good as Gmail.

The 72-hour conversation known as MIX 07 is over, and I’m home again, with a real lawn that’s filled with unplanned violets and dandelions and neighbors who are still asleep when I step outside to pick up the morning paper.

What’s the right Las Vegas image to press into service as metaphor for this “game changing” event, as Ray Ozzie and many bloggers have called MIX 07? The mouse colored hills and flats that give way to the flashing lights of Las Vegas Boulevard (aka “the Strip”) as you descend into McCarren Airport? The piles of chips changing hands at the Venetian’s roulette tables 24/7? The nearly full moon above MIX party-goers on the Roof of the Pure Nightclub at Caesar’s Palace on Tuesday night? The electronic din and the crowds milling about the Treasure Island casino at 2:30 a.m. as I headed for the airport shuttle Thursday morning?

Any of the above would do. But for me, the memory that stands out is a human one: the near standing ovation the 4000 conference attendees gave Scott Guthrie, General Manager of the group responsible for ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX, and now Silverlight, when he walked onstage at the Monday keynote to take the audience through the major announcements of the day.

Over the past few years, Scott has emerged as one of the most prolific and accessible of Microsoft’s bloggers, even as his responsibilities have increased. Like many of my peers, I often find myself going first to his site for a concise technical synopsis whenever a major announcement is made. You could sense a genuine warmth in the applause (and cheers, even) which took several moments to abate. What did it mean ? It struck me as both an appreciation for Scott as a person and for the steady stream of new frameworks and tools the UI Frameworks and Tools team he leads has released to the Microsoft developer community as the web has evolved.

The real star of MIX 07, of course, is the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (formerly known as “Codename WPF/E”), a new version of Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering so-called Rich
Internet Applications (RIA). Think of it as a new development platform, one that happens — by design — to play well with the HTML DOM, with JavaScript, and with the backend server of your choice, preferably ASP.NET, but also PHP or even Rails. With Silverlight, it’s now possible to write .NET applications that run on any of four tiers: a desktop client, a web server, inside a database (as a SQL Server 2005 CLR-hosted stored procedure) and, finally, in a browser. The achievement is made possible by development of a mini-CLR that runs in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers on Windows and Macs. Silverlight 1.1 runs a more complete version of the .NET runtime than the one that’s distributed with the Silverlight 1.0 Beta, which is primarily a tool for adding graphics and media to existing ASP.NET AJAX applications. With Silverlight 1.1, you can accomplish much more. Here’s a quick rundown of what you get:

• a refactored version of the .NET CLR, with memory management, garbage collection, managed exception handling, and just-in-time compiler and execution engine;
• a subset of the .NET base class library, including the type system, collections, IO, support for isolated storage, regular expression engine, reflection, and so on;
• a feature-rich presentation framework, as you would expect; but it’s worth noting that while Silverlight 1.1 will support custom controls, early versions do not include a ready-to-use control library
• a data framework, including LINQ and XML support; and
• a communications framework that ultimately will include support for web services, Atom/RSS and more.

The Silverlight CLR weighs in at roughly 4 Mb and installs on first download in less than 30 seconds. The execution environment is very fast, beating JavaScript handily, while providing functionality that’s just not possible without a runtime like .NET. This amazing, shrinking CLR was achieved by leaving some things out (like COM), by extreme refactoring (like reducing the color enumeration from hundreds to six or nine) and by assigning space budgets to the various feature teams. The goal is to keep the size below its current 4 Mb, but if future applications need more, Silverlight will allow them “pay for play”, enabling them to add types to the framework as required. Silverlight, says Guthrie, will allow “friction-free” deployment of .NET.

You program a Silverlight application with either C# or Visual Basic, or with one of the dynamic languages announced at MIX. IronPython, IronRuby JScript (a new ECMA 3.0 compliant version), or VBx (Visual Basic 10, which will include new dynamic programming features).

To get yourself up to speed on what all the excitement’s about, I’d start first with the Scott Guthrie interview on Channel 9 and then take a look at the SilverLight Architecture article on MSDN , a good overview of what’s included. Check out the handy visual it provides showing the differences between the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 packages. Also, check out the great Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference poster, which maps the collection of technologies and products lined up to support the new platform.

If you want to see slides and demos, there are some excellent developer breakout sessions posted at the MIX 07 site including (sorry, no direct links available):

• DEV 07 and DEV 22: Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)
• DEV 11: Building Rich Web Experiences Using Silverlight and JavaScript for Developers
• DEV10: Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight

To see the complete list of developer sessions, go to the MIX 07 sessions page, select “MIX07″ as the conference, “Breakout” as the session type, and “Developer” as the track type.

Finally, don’t forget to check out the new O’Reilly Short Cut, Getting Started with Silverlight, by Microsoft MVP and Silverlight insider Shawn Wildermuth.

There was more to MIX than Silverlight, but there’s hardly room to do the other announcements justice. Microsoft released the Visual Studio “Orcas” Beta, which now supports ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript, as well as Silverlight and the new dynamic languages. The “Orcas” Beta includes an ASP.NET Futures CTP package which contains new dynamic data controls that are distinctly Rails-like in their functionality, plus new controls for adding Silverlight media and access to XAML objects, new AJAX functionality, support for dynamic languages in ASP.NET and more. Also unveiled was the alpha of a project code-named “Astoria”, which is developing an approach to data access that moves the heavy lifting in data-centric applications out to the web where it can be exposed as web data services and accessed by clients using HTTP, JSON and XML. There is much to be unpacked here, and we’ll be taking a closer look in the weeks ahead.

In a MIX session that he led with Matt Gibbs (co-author of the O’Reilly ASP.NET AJAX UpDate Panel Short Cut and member of of the ASP.NET AJAX team ), Jeff Prosise, a Wintellect co-founder and consultant, said we would all remember MIX 07 as a revolutionary moment, the time “when the way we program the web changed.” We’ll have to leave that judgment to the future, but in bringing a new programming model to the table, Microsoft has at least broadened the web development game for everyone, regardless of your current platform of choice. And for Microsoft developers, Silverlight brings more than a measure of salvation, validating their investment in .NET technologies and tools and opening a way forward for them to lead the revolution as applications move from the traditonal Windows desktop to the web.

Configure Pocket PC Word Completion Your Way

A Windows Mobile Pocket PC feature that has always impressed me is Word Completion. It can help you get around the relatively slowness of pecking or writing in the SIP (Soft Input Panel) with a stylus or typing on a physical QWERTY keyboard by suggesting and auto-completing complete words.
However, you may not have found it very useful if you left it with its default setting of suggesting a single word after the two letters are entered. You can change these settings by getting to the Word Completion configuration screen:

• Start
  
• Settings
  
• Input
  
• Word Completion (tab on Input window)
  

I find that suggestions after just entering two characters doesn’t provide enough predictive information for word completion. So, I set mine to start suggesting words after entering the first three letters. I also found that a single suggestion doesn’t have a high enough hit rate. So, I have word completion suggest three words instead. These suggestions are displayed in a drop-down menu as seen below. You can use the arrow keys to navigate the list. So, you never need to take your fingers off of the keyboard use the list. Try playing around with the settings until you find one that fits your writing or thumb typing style best. You’ll probably find your Pocket PC becomes much more productive after tinkering with this setting.

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Google Calendar SMS Reminders
Google announced a new feature for their Calendar today…

Calendar on the go

You can now have Google Calendar send event reminders to your phone via an SMS message. You can find Google’s documentation here…

Google Calendar Notifications

Here’s a bit of advice before you try this service out. Check what your SMS text message quote is. You might get a surprisingly large bill if you have Google Calendar alert you to every event.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

*WOW*!

IronPython Running on Virtual Desktop � 21st Century Smalltalk

NOTE: Technically speaking, the title doesn’t perfectly match the above graphic, but as per below, it will soon enough…

Above is a test of IronPython running on a “Virtual Desktop” inside a browser.

I created the “Virtual Desktop” libraries to allow me to create a Smalltalk environment within a browser. As part of my porting Vista Smalltalk to Silverlight, I have modified the desktop to be compliant with any DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) based language; so it is now possible to run IronPython in workspace windows with Smalltalk-like interaction (”DoIt”, “ShowIt”, etc). This, of course, will also apply to IronRuby, Vbx and JScript.

Once I have an initial Smalltalk compiler working, I will attempt to run everything in Silverlight.

A while back I proclaimed Peter Fisk as a *ROCK STAR*. I would like to officially withdraw my position and change it to the following,

Now that I’m back from Mix, let me try to be slightly more coherent in my writing about Silverlight and why I believe it is so significant.

Before I begin, let me say in the interest of full disclosure, that Microsoft paid for my trip to Mix.

In the keynote, and in many of the breakout sessions, Microsoft demonstrated both Silverlight 1.0 (currently in Beta, due out this summer) and Silverlight 1.1 (currently in alpha, no release date announced).

As I see it, Microsoft’s strategy seems to be to release a product that creates media for cross-platform delivery through a browser as their initial offering (the inevitable comparison was to Flash). If this were all they were doing it would be interesting (allowing .net developers to achieve this functionality without learning how to work with Flash) but certainly not revolutionary.

In 1.1 however they add much of the CLR, the ability to program to Silverlight in managed code (e.g., , C# 3 and VB9) and much of WPF (read forms, text, etc.). This is big news, and the demos shown were very impressive. The obvious comparison again is to Flex, putting ORCAS / Visual Studio in a position to compete with Apollo and that was the big buzz.

Microsoft was eager to show that they have a designer product as well (see http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=blend) but I won’t even touch the question of the relative maturity or capabilities of that product vs. what Adobe offers, and never underestimate the ability for the landscape to change in a year in any case.

All of this is Interesting, intriguing but not revolutionary. And, admittedly, that was all they said. Now, let us speculate together.

Smug Mac lovers who point to Windows vulnerabilities now have something to worry about: A top security researcher claims that Windows Vista is more secure than Mac OS X.

No doubt you’ll be reading a great deal here and elsewhere about Silverlight but the question I’d like to address, or rather, start to address, is why I think this is the technology that “changes everything.”

The key is that with Silverlight you will, eventually, be able to create rich, media-intensive applications that will be delivered on virtually any browser, on any platform, with native performance, using most of the enormous WPF library,in managed space, writing in languages such as c#3 or VB9

The questions you have to ask are…

How soon do we get it all? Clearly this will be coming in pieces.
Once we get it all-whence ASP-NET?
Can developers keep up with all this??

More soon…

I posted a blog item titled Welcome to the… First Day Vista Updates? on Windows Vista’s first wide-release day (Jan. 30). For some reason, this particular blog item has attracted a number of comments with the same theme. Here are some samples (and, yes, none of these people appear to like to use the shfit key or turn off Caps Lock :-).

ANDREW CORIATY: MY NEW VISTA PREMIUM WILL NOT RUN ANY OF MY PROGRAMS.

Rhine: my vista computer sits in the corner collecting dust because no programs can be used on it

SHARON: I CANNOT LOAD ANY OF MY FAVORITE PROGRAMS

Jayson: none of my programs seem to work with vista

In my response to ANDREW CORIATY, I said, I’m certainly no Microsoft apologist. But, it is extremely unlikely that Windows Vista does not run ANY of your applications. Could you list ALL your applications?

It is certainly true that some software either does not function quite as expected or does not run at all. For myself, I’ve found that Grisoft’s AVG 7.5 Free Edition and the Roxio software bundled with a Dell Latitude D620 do not seem to work right. I also have some HP printer driver issues. I’m sure there are lots of other software that doesn’t run outright or quite-right under Windows Vista. But, I am kind of dubious of ALL of someone’s software collection not running under Windows Vista. So, does anyone (including the four people who posted comments to my Jan. 30 blog) have an example of an everyday PC (not some single purpose PC running Vista) where every single application fails under Windows Vista? Inquiring minds want to know. And, if you have major mission critical applications (say on the order order of “Intuit Quick Books”) that does not work under Vista, post that here as a comment too.

In 2000 I saw C# and knew at once that (wanted to set aside c++ and write exclusively in, and about, .net.

Today I saw Silverlight (WPF/E) and had a similar feeling.I believe that, in 1-2 years:

There will be few reasons to develop in WPF
There will be few (no?) reasons to develop in Asp .NET-AJAX
JavaScript will be dead

Recovering Windows Mobile Outlook Data?
Reader D.K. asks: not sure who to ask on this one, but on an htc device (imate sp5) - do you know if there’s a way to recover contacts on there if the device had them wiped off by outlook via activesync over usb? i have not done anythign to the device since it was wiped, im hoping that the data is still on there, but needs to be reassociated with its metadata.

First, ouch! I’m not even sure how something like that can happen. But, I won’t ask. I’ll assume some unfortunate accidental user error was the cause. Second, the data may or may not be there. But, I don’t know of any utility off-hand to recover from that sort of error. Third, this is a good time to get on the soapbox for a general message to my fellow users of Windows Mobile Devices…

Two weeks ago when writing about the recently released Windows Mobile 6 Reference Model, I noted that none of the four user categories noted in the manual included a consumer end-user group. Microsoft designed Windows Mobile for enterprise use, not for individual consumers. The by-product of this design focus means that there is an implicit assumption that the Windows Mobile user is part of an enterprise that uses Microsoft Exchange Server and has an IT staff that performs tasks like configuration, backup, and restore. If you, like me, bought one as an individual consumer without enterprise support, you need to be prepared to do things like think about issues like disaster recovery and business continuance as an individual without supporting staff. I plan to discuss how I’ve tried to plan for my own DR/BC in a post or two later this week.

A Blackberry in Your Windows Mobile Device
The Microsoft Windows Mobile interface and applications just don’t get any respect. When Palm decided to create a Windows Mobile version of the Treo, it made it contingent on Microsoft letting them allowing a custom interface to be used in place of Microsoft’s default one. Why? Palm’s is arguably faster and more intuitive to use. Now, RIMM (of Blackberry fame and network outage infamy) announced that they are working with AT&T Wireless to bring the Blackberry push-email capability to select Windows Mobile 6 devices. And, yep, they are bringing their own custom interface to swap with the Windows Mobile one.

RIM Announces New BlackBerry Application Suite for Windows Mobile based Devices

One interesting aspect of RIM’s press release is the inclusion of a quote from at AT&T Wireless Executive Director. I wonder if any of the network feature modifications AT&T made for the Apple iPhone will be used with the Blackberry app for Windows Mobile?

Backup Outlook 2003 Data on Windows XP (Because Windows Mobile Has No External Backup!)
Two days ago I responded to a question from D.K. who somehow managed to wipe out Contacts in both Outlook and a Windows Mobile Smartphone. This is easy to imagine since most people don’t back-up their Outlook data (or anything else for that matter) and Windows Mobile Smartphones have never had a backup via ActiveSync or to a storage card provided by Microsoft. Microsoft assumes that the persistent storage in the Smartphone (and Pocket PCs starting with Windows Mobile 5) keeps data safe from a battery rundown while the IT staff behind an Exchange server keeps your data safe from accidental erasure. But, oh wait, not everyone has an IT staff and Exchange Server to backup their data. Doh! So, why did Microsoft remove even the so-so ActiveSync backup/restore for the Pocket PC too? Remember, Windows Mobile devices are not intended for individual consumers. Look at the Windows Mobile 6 reference guide again. See the users categories? There isn’t one for consumers.

So, if you, like me, do not have IT staff and Exchange Server to safeguard your data, you better learn to be your own system administrator if you plan to keep using a Windows Mobile device. You can start by getting into the habit of making regular backups of your Outlook data so you don’t lose everything one day like D.K. The first thing you need to do is find it. Microsoft created ridiculously deep and confusing directory structures that make it difficult to find files (although Windows Vista’s find helps a lot). Let’s start with what most people use: Windows XP and Outlook 2003 (I’ll cover Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 later). Here’s how to find your data.

• Start Outlook 2003
  
• File
  
• Data File Management…
  
• Most people at home will have one data file named Personal Folders
  
• Open Folder
  
• Windows Explorer opens up to the directory with your Outlook 2003 files
  
• Copy all the files from this folder to one or more backup devices
  
• I back up my files to multiple places including a USB hard disk drive, CompactFlash card, and a USB Flash Drive. You might even want to burn a CD-R or DVD+R disc once a year or so.
  

You might also want to consider investing in a Windows Mobile backup software from Sprite or Spb that creates backup files on a flash card in your device. And, again, you should copy the file off the device to your PC in case you lose or destroy your mobile device.

Become a WiFi Provider from Your Home
Well, this was totally unexpected…

Time Warner Cable Teams Up With FON For Home-Based Wi-Fi

Who would have thought that the 2nd largest cable modem service provider in the US would team up with FON (not to be confused with Sprint whose stock ticker symbol is FON) to allow its customers to install a FON WiFi Router/AP to provide public wireless. FON’s router has a dual access configuration that lets you have a secure internal LAN separate from the public WiFi LAN service it provides.

GrandCentral Adds Mobile Interface
GrandCentral, the free web voicemail system (among other features) added a mobile web interface to let you check on voicemail from your phone or PDA. You can it at:

http://grandcentral.com/mobile

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).

My last blog entry, Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop, got a lot of pushback from Linux folks. Now I’m back with more reasons why Linux will never overtake Windows.

Streets & Trips 2007 vs. Pocket Streets
I never understood why Microsoft kept creating new map file types with each new release of MapPoint/Streets & Trips that were incompatible with earlier versions of Pocket Streets. Now add one more data point to this sillyness. Microsoft stopped releasing Pocket Streets after the 2005 map editions. However, Streets & Trips 2007 can still create maps for Pocket Streets. The gotcha? It doesn’t seem compatible with the version I’m running on my Windows Mobile 5 devices. Ah well. I really do need to find an affordable map applications for the Pocket PC and Smartphone that works with a Bluetooth GPS. Any recommendations?

Nokia N95
I finally saw the Nokia N95 smartphone up close and personal. And, it is quite a phone. The top (left in this phone) slides out to reveal the multimedia controls. The bottom (right on this photo) slides out to reveal a dialing keyboard. The lack of a QWERTY thumb keyboard is the only shortcoming to this otherwise remarkable looking phone. I wish Nokia had used an LCD soft keypad like Microsoft does in Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition devices and provided a pull out QWERTY keyboard at the bottom instead.

The web browser appeared to render much faster than my Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC Phone Edition devices. It uses a full-screen desktop-like view with a thumbnail navigation window that zooms in like the Microsoft Research Deepfish experimental browser does. Of course, the difference is that this is available in a production Nokia device. That said, the device is unavailable from carriers in the US at the moment. Navigation between applications seemed very crisp.

Speaking about applications, Nokia announced their Series 60 Web Runtime and Widgets for S60 phones today. I’ll have more to say about that later.

Tellme By Mobile
Microsoft bought the telephony company Tellme.com (best known for its VoiceXML work and early telephone speech recognition work). Tellme announced Tellme By Mobile during a keynote demonstration at the Web 2.0 Expo this morning. This client side software provides some added features when using it with Tellme’s backend voice server.

Couple of observations though. First, the service is only available to AT&T Wireless and Sprint PCS customers. The second observation is even more interesting for a Microsoft owned company though. Not being an AT&T or Sprint customer turned out to not be the main roadblock for me to try out this application. The problem is that I use devices based on Microsoft Windows Mobile which is not supported by the Microsoft owned Tellme application. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “Doh!” So, if you are fortunate enough to own a supported phone (including models from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, and RIMM (as in Blackberry)), check out the Tellme application. It looked pretty impressive during the demo this morning.

A Few Thoughts on the Nokia Web Run-Time for S60
I saw a demo of the Nokia Web Run-Time for S60 (aka Widgets) this past Monday. It is an interesting development technology for the Nokia Series 60 (S60) based phones of the future (current S60 models will not support it). The idea is to leverage web developer skills to create applications for S60 phones. Applications are developed using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The source code is compiled, placed into a Zip file, and copied over to the phone for installation there.

It seems like a sure-fire way to encourage quick generation of new applications for the next S60 models. There are a couple of interesting issues though. First, given the inherent insecurity of most browser based applications, will the Web Run-Time create security issues for the S60 phones? Second, the apps are installed unsigned. This would seem to eliminate the possibility for those with restrictive mobile phone service providers from participating in the presumed burst of S60 applications. Finally, how will all those owners of current generation S60 phones feel about seeing cool new web applets appear that they can’t use?

That said, I’m looking forward to seeing the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 based phones appear with Web Run-Time. It might give Windows Mobile 6 and even the Apple iPhone a run for the money.

ActiveSync vs. Zone Alarm Revisited
Reader H.D. wrote: Just wanted to thank you for this post: ActiveSync 4.1 for Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 devices released. It might be old - but its just solved my Xda sync problem instantly. The MS site implied I was going to have to upgrade Zone Alarm.

Microsoft Windows seemingly unending exploits requiring firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, spam filters, and other security bandaids causes all kinds of problems for its users. My old (November 21, 2005) advice for getting ActiveSync to work with PCs running the Zone Alarm firewall seems to still have some useful information. If ActiveSync stops working, take a look at your various security options to see if one of them might be interfering with ActiveSync’s network access.

I’ve found that after establishing a partnership between a PC and a Windows Mobile device, syncing wirelessly using Bluetooth seems to be more stable than syncing over USB for some devices (my i-Mate K-JAM locks ActiveSync when its syncs over USB but not over Bluetooth).

Just getting caught-up on some LONG overdue blog reading when I stumbled across this gem from Jeroen Frijters,

IKVM.NET Weblog

Via Lorenzo Barbieri (via Google blog search, I don’t read Italian) I learned that Microsoft decided to drop support for J# and the Java Language Conversion Assistant in the next version of Visual Studio (code named Orcas).

I’m glad they finally realised the futility of competing with IKVM.NET ;-)

*YES*! :D

For my next book, “The Big Book of Windows Hacks,” I’ve just written a hack about how to run Ubuntu inside Windows Vista. Great fun, great hack, and it’s great to be able to run Linux on a Vista machine. But it’s showed me, once again, why Linux will never take over the desktop.

Attending Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco This Week
I’ll be in San Francisco attending the O’Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 Expo this week. So, my blog posts may be lighter than usual this week (not daily). If you are at the Expo and see my name (Todd Ogasawara) on a name tag, say hello!

Want a 61 Page Windows Mobile 6 Reference Manual?
If you want to get a soft copy of the new 61 page (PDF) Windows Mobile 6 Reference Manual, head over to Jason Langridge’s blog (Microsoft’s Mr. Mobile) for a download link. The manual describes 6’s features in various categories. The New Features By Audience section starts on PDF page 4 and is categorized by Mobile Operators, OEMs, Business Customers, IT Professional, and Developers. Note Consumers is not a category considered at all. The bad news is that reading the first four columns of features may put you to sleep. The good news (features) tends to be in the Developers column. If developers take advantage like AJAX support, SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, and the new Sound API, we should see some interesting 3rd party apps in the future. But, out of the box, 6 doesn’t look like anything to write home about (and remember, I say this as a person who likes Windows Mobile).

There are a lot of screencaps to illustrate the features as they are described in detail throughout the rest of he document.

Let’s hope we see something more interesting in Windows Mobile 7. Maybe, the Apple iPhone and Nokia N95 will inspire Microsoft. Until then, 6 depends on the talent and marketing skills of 3rd party developers to make the platform interesting.

What Happens When You Search for “Windows Mobile 6? on Amazon?
I guess I’m just easily amused. It occurred to me that Windows Mobile 6 is generating zero buzz (or at least so little that I don’t see it). The iPhone buzz has died down for the moment (too much lead time between its announcement and summer availability). The phone that seems to be getting a lot of buzz lately is from good ol’ Nokia: The Nokia N95. Built-in GPS, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics (same as used by Sony’s digital cameras), nice new mini-browser paradigm, installable applications (unlike the iPhone), and a nice form factor. If the Nokia PC Suite can sync half decently with a Windows or Mac OS X box (I’d lean towards a Mac for syncing), it will get very high on the list of devices to replace my current Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone.

In any case, I decided to search for “Windows Mobile” on Amazon. The first result was my friend Frank McPherson’s great book How to Do Everything with Windows Mobile (How to Do Everything) (no doubt due to superb technical editing :-) . But, what happens when you search for “Windows Mobile 6? instead? Did you guess that the first hit would be the BlackBerry 8800 Phone (Cingular)? Yep, if you search for “Windows Mobile 6? on Amazon, it pops up a RIM Blackberry phone as its first hit. WiMo6 just can’t get any respect :-)

Another Pocket PC Bites the Dust: Dell Drops the Axim
Brighthand reported that Dell No Longer Offering Any Axim Models today. I hopped over to Dell’s website, and, yep, the Axim Pocket PC line is no longer there in the Handhelds, Tablet PCs, and GPS section. In fact, what you do find in the Dell Handhelds section are Palm devices (not the Treo though). Axim accessories are still there though.

The Axim X50 and X51 were great Pocket PCs. My X50v still works fine and gets daily use as a portable news and email device connected to a WiFi network. It will be interesting to see whether this means Dell is getting ready to introduce another Pocket PC based device or is simply dropping the Pocket PC form factor.

Smartphone Calculator Keypad Shortcuts
The Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone calculator looks (and is) awfully weak. However, while it is an “old skool” 4 function calculator, it is reasonably easy to use if you know its keypad shortcuts. The Smartphone’s navigation rose provides the four functions as well as the equal function. Press the top of the nav-pad for + (add), press down for - (subtract), left for / (divide), right for X (multiply) and the center for = (equal; complete the calculation).

The bottom-left key on the numeric keypad (labeled * T9) types in a decimal point (.) while the bottom-right key (labeled #) can be used for addition (+).

And, that is pretty much all the Microsoft provided calculator can do on the Smartphone. No square root, no trig functions, nothing. Very 1971 “old skool”.

Microsoft support forums are abuzz with people complaining that Vista boots and launches applications far slower than XP — even though Microsoft said a primary Vista goal was faster boots. Have you noticed Vista booting slower than XP?

Email Documents to Google Docs
I’m sure the feature has been around for a while but I only noticed this evening that you can create document files in Google Docs by sending email to it. After logging in to Google Docs, click on the Upload link to read detailed information about how you can bring in foreign files (Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, for example) into Google Docs. If you move your eyes down the page a bit more, you’ll see instructions on how to create text documents by email (no spreadsheets yet). It works like this: Google assigns a unique email address to you in the form of username-secretstring@prod.writely.com (Google bought Writely to get their web based word processing techology). You can then either send a simple text email file or an attachment. The text on the subject line becomes the Google Docs document name. And, the text body or attached document file becomes the document text (translated to HTML).

The availability of QWERTY thumb keyboards on current generation phones makes this a simple and convenient way to quickly create easily accessible documents without the need to sync the mobile device by tethering it to a desktop or notebook computer. And, since I view the battle with Microsoft’s ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center to be a losing one, anything that gets me away from those sync solutions is a good thing.

Bev Howard’s Pocket PC Radar Finder
I tried to post a response to a question about weather radar images on Windows Mobile devices to a Microsoft newsgroup earlier this evening. But, the new Microsoft Mail in Windows Vista decided it didn’t have a clue on how to post it to the NNTP newsgroup. So, I figured I’d mention this very cool Pocket PC formatted site here created by a fellow Windows Mobile MVP, Bev Howard:

Pocket PC Radar Finder

Bev’s mobile friendly web page lets you quickly and easily find animated radar maps that can be viewed on your Pocket PC (or desktop for that matter). Check it out. Very cool and useful.

Microsoft Device Emulator 2.0-Standalone Release
Microsoft released a new version of their…

Microsoft Device Emulator 2.0 — Standalone Release

…on April 4. The release information lists 4 major changes (the 5th item is really for Microsoft - Customer Experience Improvement Program). The most important change is probably the performance increase.

Safely Disposing of Old Handheld PCs?
Reader T.W. writes: Hello, my name is […] and I have a very odd question. I work for […] and I happen to have lots of Sharp PV-6000 Pocket PC and the university doesn’t support these anymore. I am in charge of putting together older computers to put into this yard sale and I have to enter but I need to know something about them. Being that this is a state college before anything can be sold it has to undergo a Department of Defense wipe that wipes out the hard drive and I can’t help but notice that there is no way to put in a drive. So my first question is I was told that they wipe after the battery dies, is this true? I have one that I have had unplugged for about 2 weeks and I can’t get the battery to run down, mainly because I don’t have the time at work to sit and play with it. My next question is if it happens to not wipe the information how could I wipe the hard drive? Before they are sold I have to make sure that there is no State information on it and I am not sure how to go about this. Okay so now that I have asked a lot of questions and confused you (I’m sure) please let me know how to go about this. If I am going into about a computer that you know nothing about I would please like any information you can give me about who to get in touch with that might know. I have checked on Sharp’s website and they don’t have any info.

First, let me say the following weasel words :-) My response does not constitute advice and does definitely not ensure compliance with any DoD recommended procedures. The main problem is the confounding of assumptions made. So, let’s look at these issues…

• The Sharp PV-6000 is not a Pocket PC. It is a Handheld PC and a rather large one at that weighing in at several pounds and about the size of a small notebook computer.
  * The DoD approved wiping procedures mentioned applies to hard drives. The Handheld PC does not have an internal hard drive. It might have a removable PC Card or CF form factor hard drive that was modestly popular before flash drive sizes increased dramatically. But, these removable storage cards can be dealt with separately. If one needs to follow DoD policy for this particular device, you need to look at their procedure for ensuring data deletion from volatile memory (if such a procedure exists). Volatile memory, btw, loses all its data when power is removed from it.
  
• There shouldn’t be a need to let the PV-6000’s batteries run down. The Handheld PCs I used (including the Vadem Clio that is very similar to the PV-6000) all had removable batteries. Removing the battery should return all settings to factory defaults. An alternative is to check if the PV-6000 had a specific hard reset procedure.
  

Use the T-Mobile Dash Smartphone as Modem for a Mac (sort of)
If you have a T-Mobile Dash (or some other Windows Mobile Smartphone) and a Mac, take a look at this article and video demo by Brian Jepson…

HOWTO: Tether Your Mac and T-Mobile Dash with Parallels

He explains how a Dash can be used as a wireless modem for an Intel based Mac with Parallels for Mac (virtualization tool) running Microsoft Windows XP as a Guest OS.

T-Mobile Drops the MDA: Is the Pocket PC Phone Edition Doomed?
Too melodramatic a title, I know.

T-Mobile has never had much of a Windows Mobile line-up to start with. They recently dropped the only Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition model they carried: The MDA. This leaves them with two Windows Mobile Smartphone models: The SDA and the Dash.

The most likely reason for dropping the model is because T-Mobile is getting ready to introduce a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC Phone Edition (now called Professional Edition) to their lineup. But, wouldn’t it be interesting if they were the first of the mobile carriers to drop the Pocket PC Phone Edition altogether. Ok, it is unlikely. But still, this is something that will happen in the next year or two IMHO.

Paul Graham made a simple statement that is stirring up a lot of commentary on the net…

Microsoft is Dead

His conclusion is: But it’s gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money–so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous. He makes a pretty interesting case for his statement in his blog and provides four reasons for its demise: Google, Ajax, Broadband Internet, and Apple Mac OS X.

I have a different take on this subject though. Here’s my premise: Microsoft is a big company and different components are in different stages of age and health (not necessarily correlated, btw). So, here’s a start to a health report on the various parts of the Microsoft Community/Ecosystem. Feel free to jump in with your own health estimate on parts I mention or parts I left out. I’m structuring my list more-or-less on Microsoft’s own list of Products & Related Technologies.

Microsoft is being sued for deceptive practices for branding PCs a being “Windows Vista Capable,” even though those machines could only run Windows Vista Home Basic, which doesn’t include the most important parts of the new operating system, including Aero. This isn’t an example of lawyers run amok — Microsoft is wrong here.

Audacity Personal DVR for Pocket PC (freeware)
Every so often I think about starting a podcast or videocast. This lasts about as long as it takes me to remember how much work it takes to put one together on a regular basis :-) If I create a mobile themed podcast someday, it would seem appropriate to actually record it on a mobile device once it a while. Here’s a freeware tool for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs that might make this task a little easier.

Audacity Personal DVR for Pocket PC

Windows Mobile 6 Storage Card Encryption
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.

Pocket PC Today Screen Calendar Tip
The Windows Mobile Pocket PC (I refuse to refer to it as “Professional Edition”) defaults to displaying on the next upcoming appointment on its Today screen. Did you know you can change this? Here’s how…

* Start
* Settings
* Today
* Items (tab)
* Calendar (from list)
* Options (button)
* (select) Upcoming appointments
* (tap) OK
* (tap) OK

If you head back to the Today screen, you should see a list of appointments for the current day and often spilling over to the next day’s appointments.

Microsoft Live Labs: Deepfish Windows Mobile Browser
Microsoft’s Live Labs has a preview release of an enhanced browser for Windows Mobile 5 (or, presuably, 6) Pocket PCs and Smartphones.

Deepfish Technology Preview: Enhanced Browsing for Windows Mobile

The website says Deepfish is currently only available by invite only to a small number of beta users. However, download versions for both the Pocket PC and Smartphone appears to proceed without any issues. You can see a video demo of it on Microsoft’s On10.net website.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: New mobile web browser - Deepfish!

gubb.net: Lists to Go
I find lists very useful. So, I use Ilium ListPro, Excel Mobile, Tasks, and (with some embarrassment admitting this), 3×5 index cards (I buy them in bulk). I also use Wikis a lot to jot down information in a semi-structured way. But, I didn’t really see any web based solution that worked with my phone the way I wanted to work.

Today, however, I learned about gubb.net. Like many things that I find interesting and useful, it does variations on a single theme: Manage lists online. What really impressed me though were the options it gave me from a mobile perspective. You can use SMS like other mobile services do. But, I don’t like to use SMS because my provider charges for each one and I generally do not use SMS enough to justify an add-on service with more SMS units. You can also use email to add to or request a list. Now, this is something that seemed very useful to me. It would let me add to a list even in a disconnected mode (e.g., on a flight somewhere) because I could just add things to a list in email messages and then send them off when connectivity was reestablished. It also has a nice simple mobile formatted site at http://gubb.net/m. This stripped down site looks and works fine on my Smartphone. And, it works from a desktop too. So, you can use it even when in bandwidth challenged situations (e.g., on a notebook connected to the net via an EDGE connection).

I’m looking forward to seeing how this site’s service develops.

What’s New for Developers in Windows Mobile 6
Microsoft’s MSDN site has an article titled…

What’s New for Developers in Windows Mobile 6

You might want to take a look at this article even if you are not a developer. You might get an idea of the possibilities for new or upgraded software for Windows Mobile 6 devices.

Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft’s PowerShell Architect posted a slidedeck and PowerShell cmdlet samples on the PowerShell team’s MSDN blog today…

MMS2007: Managing Systems Using PowerShell

If Snover has something to say about PowerShell, I definitely want to read it. So, I downloaded it to the old notebook (running Win XP Pro) I happened to be using at the time. But, um, the slidedeck in the ZIP file turned out to be a PPTX (PowerPoint 2007) file and this notebook didn’t have that version of Office on it. Fortunately, Microsoft provides a free…

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

…that works with versions of Office as old as Office 2000. The file is 27.735MB large and downloaded and installed relatively quickly (no reboot needed).

What did the PC future look like back in 1989? Take a trip in the Wayback Machine in this speech from Bill Gates. Gates and his execs should listen to it as well, because there’s an unintended warning in it for the future of MIcrosoft.

Google Mobile Changes?
Google Mobile seems to have changed quite a bit since I mentioned it last October. If you browse google.com, it automatically redirects to a mobile device friendly page google.com/m. Unlike the full-sized personalized page, the mobile friendly version can only have up to six page modules added (weather, movies, news sources, etc.). There aren’t any links to other mobile friendly Google properties, but other Google sites redirect to mobile friendly pages too. gmail.com and news.google.com look fine on my Windows Mobile Pocket PC. One nice touch is that GMail can be used over an SSL encrypted session on a Pocket PC or Smartphone by using https://gmail.com instead of http://gmail.com.

Philips HN060 Noise Canceling Headphones

I bought the Philips HN060/37 Noise-Canceling Earbuds for a recent trip. For a relatively low price (US$50+) headphone, it did a pretty good job of delivering sound while reducing the background noise while on a plane. It comes with three sets of buds in different sizes. None really fit my ears well. But, they fit well enough for use. I wouldn’t be able to run or exercise with any of the buds though. They tend to fall out (unlike the Sony earbuds I usually use in non-noisy settings). The neckstrap is handy when stuck in a plane for a long time. But, the cords to the buds tend to get tangled up a lot when taking the headphones out of its pouch or putting them away. The 124 ratings of it on Amazon gives it 3 out of 5 stars. I tend to a agree. It is a relatively decent earbud headphone. It would get a lot better rating for me if the earbud fit well in my ears and if the strap didn’t get so tangled up so often.

Pre-Windows Mobile Office Files vs. Windows Vista WMDC
Reader Patrick (PHH) says:
WMDC imports all my Word and Excel files (I have over 1200 on my pda) in ppc format (pws and pxl). I thought it was the fault of Office XP vs Vista (I could read those files fine on Office XP installed on an XP pc)and that when I bought Office 2007 I’d be able to read the ppc files on my PC. No such luck.

It will import rtf files directly, so I’ve translated literally hundreds of doc files into rtf format; however I don’t see any workaround for the spreadsheet files. I even tried openoffice on my Vista machine. It won’t read those files either.

I’m running ppc 2003 on an iPAQ 2755. Have been using them FINE for over a year on XP and using various versions of ActiveSync.

I’m close to paying the computer shop that built my machine for me to revert to XP from on my brand new machine unless I can get some answers.

Is there any way to get Microsoft to talk about these problems for brand new software?

Patrick: Welcome to the wonderful world of poor initial design decisions! The original Windows CE Handheld PC designers decided to create unique Word and Excel file formats a decade ago. When Mobile Office components came to the Pocket PC, they kept the same broken design that required a translation before the files could be read on the desktop. This led to all kinds of problems for Windows CE/Mobile users for years. This finally changed in Windows Mobile 5 based Pocket PCs. But, that was too late for your aging Windows Mobile 2003 based iPAQ.

I’m not syncing old 2003 or 2003 2nd Edition Pocket PCs with my Vista box. So, I can’t test your situation at the moment. However, it looks like Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) actually reverts back to ActiveSync 3.8 code when old legacy devices are partnered. This means that there should be an option that becomes visible when you sync an old device that lets you check or uncheck the Office Mobile translation feature (it is turned off by default since Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices use native DOC and XLS [but not DOCX and XLSX] file formats).

You might also want to consider upgrading two or three generations and move up to a WiMo 5 or 6 generation device.

Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000: Who Designed the Useless Clip?


I bought the relatively new Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 Webcam designed for use with notebook PCs on a whim last week. The 2 megapixel camera and USB microphone components seem to work well. The image is quite a bit better than Intel 0.3 megapixel webcam I bought years ago. There is one little problem with the NX-6000 though. The clip that was presumably designed to clip on top of the LCD lid of a notebook is a fixed size. There isn’t any width adjustment I can see or feel. So, unless your notebook lid is an exact fit for the NX-6000’s clip, the webcam won’t sit on top of your notebook. I can tell you for sure that the clip is way too narrow to use with a Dell Latitude D600 notebook. And, I suspect it will be way too narrow to use with the D620 notebook that will replace it.

And, why is it that the so-called business notebook models have fewer features than the consumer models? No webcam. No Firewire port. No SD card reader, etc.? But,that is for a different blog rant.

Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000: OK, the clip kind of works
I took another whack at the LifeCam NX-6000 earlier today. I sort of shoved it on the top of a Dell D600 notebook LCD lid and found that the clip slides out a bit (Did I mention there is no useful printed documentation for this thing?). It sort of sat on the cover at an somewhat odd but mostly workable angle. I had to move the LCD cover around a bit to frame objects (me) correctly.

One other thing became apparent as I played with it for a bit. The NX-6000 becomes pretty hot to the touch after using it for a few minutes. This surprised me. Of course, this is the first webcam I’ve bought in 4 years or so. Do all current generation webcams heat up?

Windows Mobile Screen Formats
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.

We Need a Good Non-Microsoft Windows Mobile Sync Solution
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.

Think you can’t do something about global warming? In fact, you can. Putting your PC into sleep mode when you’re not using it, such as is the default in Windows Vista after it’s idle a set amount of time, can reduce your carbon dioxide emissions by more than half a ton annually, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft recently made four new DreamScenes (animated desktops) for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I created a short (86 seconds long) video briefly showing each of the new DreamScenes on my PC.

What’s the Difference Between Windows Mobile 5 & 6
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”.

Large Hotel’s 2 T1 (what?) Lines Saturated. Thank Goodness for Phone Data Service
What happens when you place a large number of techies (Microsoft MVPs in this case) in a large relatively modern hotel? Well, if the hotel (35 floors or so with 20 rooms per floor) only has two T1 lines (1.544Mbps per T1), you have saturated network access.

Fortunately, my SDA Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone has EDGE service. Unforunately, the SDA doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard. But, my i-Mate K-JAM does. And, since both have Bluetooth, I used the SDA as a wireless modem and typed email messages from my Pocket PC.

The MVPs also seemed to saturate a number of cellular carriers’ cell sites around Seattle’s Convention Center during the day. So, that meant even my EDGE connection was lost for much of the day. Kind of strange to be in middle of a geekie techie fest and being without wired or wireless data access during the day and part of the night (just got back online to the hotel’s network minutes ago).

Bluetooth: Safety First

With all the discussions about WiFi safety, we sometimes forget that the other wireless protocol, Bluetooth, needs to be secured too.

I was trying to pair a new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse with a MacBook over Bluetooth this evening in my hotel room. I was a bit surprised to see someone else’s Bluetooth enabled notebook show up in addition to my new mouse. I shouldn’t have been, of course, Bluetooth has a 10 meter range (or greater depending on the hardware used) and can penetrate walls. And, this person left his notebook’s Bluetooth radio in Discover mode. Since 10 meters is a bit larger than 30 feet and these hotel rooms are not larger than 30 feet long, I could see the notebook.
The moral to this story is to check your devices: Notebooks, PDAs, phones, etc. Then, make sure Discover mode is turned off except when you need to have the device probed by some other Bluetooth device for pairing.

Getting Out of Cell Phone Contracts
Yesterday’s USA Today had an article titled…

Consumer website offers tips, guides on getting out of contract

…that features info from Meghann Marco from The Consumerist website who provides tips on ways to get out of cellphone contracts without incurring a penalty. There are actually three related articles on page 5B in the March 15 (Thursday) issue. The impetus for these contract breaking articles is, of course, the impending release of the Apple iPhone sometime this summer.

Being Mobile Still Isn’t Simple for Everyone

After spending an intense week at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit, being faced with a 12 noon hotel check out and a 5:20pm flight out of SeaTac, I decided to spend a bit of change to purchase a one-day pass that lets me hang out in an airline club lounge that provides a work desk, A/C outlets, and WiFi access (and snacks and soft drinks too).
The person at the lounge’s front desk handed me a WiFi brochure. My MacBook didn’t need any special instructions to connect. It simply told me that my preferred access point was not available and asked if I wanted to connect to one that was. After approving that action I was online.

Looking through the troubleshooting section of the brochure turned out to be interesting. It seems that Linksys 802.11G and Dell TrueMobile (1300 and 1400) WLAN Cards. I found it interesting that products that, I would guess, are in a large percentage of notebooks would be problem cases.

Digital Photography Weblog: 13 best tips for Improving CameraPhone Pictures
Just ran across an interesting entry in the Digital Photography Weblog…

13 best tips for Improving CameraPhone Pictures

I’m a huge fan of cameraphones even though the ones I’ve tried don’t even come close to the quality of a conventional digital camera. I even wrote a couple of cameraphone hacks for the book Digital Photography Hacks. You can find a free PDF of one of the hacks I wrote for that book that discusses creating panoramic scenes using cameraphone photos at: Get the Big Picture with a Little Cameraphone.

A little-noticed item is big news for Microsoft: The The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is putting Microsoft Office 2007’s Open XML format on a fast track to become an ISO standard. This may not sound like much, but big money is involved.

I’ve written before that the confused Microsoft “Live” brand is an unholy mess, costing the company millions of dollars. Now it looks as if Microsoft may kill the brand, or at least take away its life support.

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Reader Tip:Omega One 1-Calc Lite Free from Microsoft
In response to a rant of mine, reader Thomas R. Hall pointed out that Microsoft has made Omega One’s 1-Calc Lite calculator available free of charge. You can find it at:

Applications for Windows Mobile: 1-Calc Lite

There are separate links for the Pocket PC and Smartphone versions (registration required). Try it and let me know what you think of it. Good enough to replace the Calc-98 I’ve been using for years?

SMS Notifier for Pocket PC
Here’s an interesting Open Source-ish app for Pocket PCs based on Windows Mobile 5 and .NET Compact Framework 2.0. The project description reads: SMS Notifier watches for incoming calls that are missed (i.e. not answered). Depending on configuration settings it does the following things: 1) Send an SMS message to the caller (configurable contents), possibly containing also the end time of current appointment (configurable). 2) Adds an item to calendar (containing the caller info).

SMS Notifier

You’ll find a CAB file installer at the page linked above (Microsoft’s CodePlex site).

More About the Zune Phone: Part II
My old friend Frank McPherson and I have some minor differences of opinion about the rumored Zune phone. He posted an interesting op-ed-piece in his blog about the rationale for a Zune phone. I responded in my blog. And, he volleyed another set of discussion items. To summarize Franks original points:

• The Zune Phone is in response to the Apple iPhone
  
• Microsoft Voice Command is the secret weapon to counter the iPhone’s multi-touch feature
  
• Microsoft doesn’t need a Zune Phone. It just needs to make the Windows Mobile Phone better
  

Frank fired back with a follow-up blog titled: More About Zune Phone.

As far as I can tell, I think Frank and are converging towards mostly agreement. The only remaining issue is Microsoft Voice Command. Voice Command is a Microsoft add-on application for Pocket PC/Phone Edition and Smartphone that provides voice command faetures. In other words, you can use specific words to launch applications or dial a phone by saying a person’s name or the individual phone number digits. It is not a continuous speech recognition system that lets you, for example, dictate your weekly report into a text editor. Like handwriting recognition, voice command recognition is just too error prone and requires a change to the way you speak. Depending on your microphone, you may also have issues with ambient noise levels. It is not something you can trust while, for example, running through a busy airport and trying to reschedule a connecting flight. Voice Command is not going to be the killer feature.

In fact, the Apple iPhone’s main issue may be its own high price and its mobile phone carrier choice which for the past few years had its shares of customer relationship management issues as well as a relatively high data plan for smartphone.

The Zune is a non-starter. It has not even dented the iPod’s market share. I doubt if a Zune Phone will do anything more than reduce the market share of Microsoft’s own Windows Mobile phone devices. That said, after my own irrational exhuberance about the Apple iPhone, I’m beginning to agree with other mobile device observers that the Apple iPhone may implode on itself if its initial rollout is not handled properly this summer. It should be interesting to watch what happens to the phone market this summer.

Handwriting Recognition is Not Ready for Prime Time Either
My previous blog dismissed Microsoft Voice Command as a useful tool under optimum conditions (something one blog reader disagrees with). Those of you use use Voice Command regularly and successfully probably also disagree with me. And, that is fine. I’ll chalk that up to differing user experiences.

The more surprising thing that occured to me as I wrote a response to the Voice Command fan is that Handwriting Recognition has also failed. I’m somewhat surprised to find myself saying this since I often use HWR myself daily. However, I only use it for short entries (entering a short calendar appointment). It is too slow and error prone for taking notes at a conference or during some other information-rich (take lots of notes) meeting.

The real slam against against HWR is the move towards mobile devices with thumb keyboards (following the lead of the Blackberry and Treo devices). The lack of update on the Tablet PC may be another indicator that the good ol’ QWERTY keyboard (whether full or thumb sized) still rules the input of data into computing devices.

Jott.com: Speech to Text via Email
In case you missed Frank McPherson’s comment on my previous blog rant on both speech and handwriting recognition losing to thumb keyboards…

Frank mentioned a web service I had not heard of before: Jott.com (not to be confused with JotSpot which has a jot.com URL).
Founded by two ex-Microsoft-ies, this web service lets you call it from your mobile phone, transforms your voice message into text, and then emails the text back to you.

I’m tempted to try it except for one little problem… I’m always leery of giving out my phone number to any web service. The thought of a security breach that reveals all phone numbers stored by a service or an errant piece of software that starts dialing madly concerns me a lot (obviously). The Jott service requires you to provide your phone number. It probably uses Caller ID to identify you to determine which email address to send text of your voice message.

If you are less paranoid than me and have tried this service, let me know how it is working for you.

BTW, you can find Frank’s own blog covering mobile technology at: Pocket pC Hints and Tips.

Mike Neil, GM of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft wrote up a statement on the Windows Server Division blog which touched on some really interesting points in regards to where Microsoft is heading with virtualization.

Some of the highlights…

When thinking about virtualization, people so commonly just think of virtualization software (e.g. Virtual Server 2005 R2), but as Mike state’s, this is only one small piece of what makes up virtualization as whole.

One of the biggest pushes with virtualization is to make it more manageable overall. What is the point of a technology that is supposed to increase business productivity if it is a management nightmare? Easier management has already come with MOM support, but the big thing on the horizon is System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Changes in licensing of the VM technology itself are being made in order to achieve maximum interoperability with other operating systems. You have the Open Specifications Promise (OSP) model to thank for this.

Virtualization licensing is really on the ball when it comes to providing an incentive for people to think about switching to a virtualized infrastructure. The move from installation-based licensing to instance-based licensing has really led to a bang in virtualization adoption. Figure up the potential savings yourself by using the Windows OS licensing calculator.

Security is still really not where it needs to be for mass adoption of server virtualization. Work needs to be done to the virtualization layer in order to provide an extra means of data protection. There are talks of doing this through both hardware and software based solutions.

It is really great to see articles like this in regards to the future of virtualization technology. With the level of commitment Microsoft has expressed, it is clear that virtualization is not only here to stay, but that it will eventually become the de facto standard in server and client operating systems to come. Anyone who isn’t using some form of virtualization in their IT strategy will be left behind by those who are.

Read Mike’s full blog posting by clicking here.

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Native Windows Mobile Google Maps Application

Google released a Google Maps client for Windows Mobile that installs from a CAB file that can be downloaded and installed directly from Google (no need to sync with a PC). It is also a native application. No Java Midlet needed. This means it is fast and looks good on a Windows Mobile device. I tested it on an old Dell Axim X50v running Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. As you can see from the screen cap, the satellite image view looks nice and clear on its screen and the menu looks like most other native applications.

You can download it directly to your device from: http://google.com/gmm/

The application can also show a traditional looking street map, locations of businesses, real-time traffic for certain cities, and driving directions. I’m very impressed by what I’ve seen. I hope we see more native Windows Mobile apps from Google in the future.

PSA: Windows Mobile Daylight Saving Time 2007 Update
On the odd chance that you don’t read the many other (and better known) sites and blogs that discuss Windows Mobile devices (ok, you may stop laughing and rolling around now), I thought I’d do my bit and offer this public service announcement. Last year the U.S. Congress decided to change the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time in the US. This, of course, is causing all kinds of cyber hand wringing (for good reason I should add). Fortunately for we Windows Mobile users, Microsoft provides detailed instructions for dealing with this on a Pocket PC/Phone Edition or Smartphone. You can find the page linked below…
Daylight Saving Time 2007 Update

A Use for Those Old 802.11b WiFi Access Points
If you are like me, you probably have your old (and slow) 802.11b Access Point lying around somewhere.

If you have a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP portable gaming console, you might want to dust off the old 802.11b WAP and put it to use. Neither the DS nor the PSP support WPA encryption. So, you probably can’t use it with the 802.11g WAP you use for your notebook. They do, however, support WEP. So, you can dust off your WAP, put it on a different LAN segment (something like IPcop might do the trick) and use it exclusively for portable gaming net access.

More ActiveSync 4.5 Annoyances

More ranting and grumblings from this blog. Sorry ’bout that.

When you install ActiveSync 4.5, it deletes all your existing Windows Mobile device partnerships. But, wait, that’s not all. If you previously synced wirelessly using Bluetooth (Microsoft removed the option to sync via WiFi way back in AS40), you have to rebuild that set of connection settings too.

This means you need to verify which serial port the Bluetooth adapter on your PC is using (COM4 in my case), set it, set the desktop BT to discoverable, then head back to your Pocket PC to BT pair with the desktop (or notebook). You should probably delete your old BT pairing setting before setting up the Pocket PC.

Copying Your Outlook Data from One PC to Another

I upgraded one of my PCs from Windows XP Media Center Edition to Windows Vista Ultimate Edition last month. However, that PC was not my main PC (the one I sync my Windows Mobile devices to). If you go back through this blog, you’ll find that I did sacrifice a WM Smartphone to sync with the Vista box to test Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC). So, how did I get the data over to the Vista box for testing? I just copied the files over. There are a number of ways to find where your Outlook.pst and other Outlook files are stored. Here’s how I do it (since I can never remember where it is from one time to another).

• Start Outlook 2003
  
• Click on File, then Open, the Outlook Data File.
  
• Click on the pull-down menu at the top left
  
• Note the path for your Outlook files
  
• Exit Outlook
  
• Copy the files to a thumb drive or some other sufficiently large
  storage device. If you use Outlook for email (I don’t), it may be large. If you don’t use it for email, it will probably fit on a small thumb drive. My Outlook.pst is just a bit over 5MB large. And, I turned off archiving.
  
• Make sure Outlook 2003 (or 2007) on the Windows Vista PC is activated and ready to go.
  

I took my Outlook 2003 Outlook.pst file and plopped it in the Outlook 2007 folder on my Windows Vista PC. This migration process seemed to work fine for me. Your mileage may vary.

MyCalculator: Free Calculator for Pocket PCs
Each time I look at the calculator Microsoft provides on the Pocket PC or Smartphone, I am amazed at the fact that they have not improved it one bit in over a decade. The Pocket PC is a natural form factor for a great calculator. Fortunately, there are a number of freeware solutions available. Here’s one you might want to take a look at…

MyCalculator

There are versions for Windows Mobile, Windows, and Palm OS.

Trying to get a reality check here. Does anyone visit Microsoft’s MSDN site http://msdn.microsoft.com/ which, for me, redirects to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx? It took about a half hour for what you see here to render with rendering errors. I’ve tried it from five PCs running four Windows versions (XP Home, XP Pro, Media Edition, and Vista Ultimate Edition) in two locations (home and office) using two different ISPs with the same results. Other Microsoft sites (e.g., Port 25, CodePlex, Technet) come up quickly and without rendering issues. I figured I should gather more data before trying to contact Microsoft. So, anyone else seeing this problem when trying to browse the MSDN web site? Thanks for any feedback or explanation you might have.

PC Tools is touting a new study that claims Windows Defender can’t detect nearly half the spyware threats it encounters. But the company glosses over two facts: The study was in fact paid for by PC Tools; and a beta version of Windows Defender was tested, not the final version.

Microsoft likes to point out the fact that its firewall in Windows Vista is superior to the one in XP because it includes outbound as well as inbound filtering. What it forgets to say, however, is that the outbound filtering is turned off, and pretty much impossible to configure to kill spyware.

I’ve received quite a few comments to recent posts whining about how hard it is to keep up with Microsoft’s onslaught of developer technology (.net 2, 3, AJAX, etc.). While I’m not in the business of defending Microsoft, I do think they can’t win: if they were not innovating they’d be accused of sitting on their “monopoly” being in need of competition to force them to create new technology….

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Use Bluetooth with ActiveSync instead of USB
Microsoft took away ActiveSync over the network (wired and wireless) a few versions ago and did not give it back with Windows Mobile Device Center. But, the sometimes flaky USB connection is not your only alternative.

My K-JAM Pocket PC Phone Edition, for example, syncs on the first attempt over USB. But, it somehow corrupts ActiveSync on the desktop for subsequent syncs unless I reboot my PC (and, yes, I’ve tried terminating and restarting the ActiveSync service). None of my other Windows Mobile devices causes this problem. Just the K-JAM. My solution has been sync the K-JAM using Bluetooth exclusively. This does not corrupt ActiveSync for subsequent sync sessions. The only downside is that I need to initiate ActiveSync from the K-JAM.

The GeekZone has detailed information on setting this up….

Bluetooth ActiveSync Guide for Windows XP Service Pack 2

If you have ActiveSync Bluetooth issues, take a look at this Microsoft Bluetooth FAQ…

Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Bluetooth-enabled devices

Windows Vista Windows Mobile Device Center Illustrated Tour

I installed Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) 1.0 on a PC running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. You can find an illustrated guide through the WMDC partnership creation process at…

Illustrated WMDC Partnership Creation

Couple of quick notes before you click on the link above…

Installing WMDC took a very long time… Many minutes. I have no idea why this process took so long. Other applications have not taken very long to install under Windows Vista. To make matters worse, the installation process instructed me to reboot after it completed. ActiveSync (such as it is) did not require a reboot after installation.

The process of partnering (see Step 4 in the illustrated guide) also took a long long time (many minutes). This is not too unusual for Windows Mobile 5 devices. But, I was synching with a Windows Mobile 2003 device which normally does not take as long to create a partnership.

The menus have a kind of hybrid Xbox/Vista look. Lots of white space (or green space as the case may be). I would prefer a set of legacy pull-down menu lists going across the top or a ribbon navigator like Office 2007 apps. It would be much faster to navigate.

The decision to go with a Xbox-y consumerish WMDC design doesn’t make sense since Microsoft is aiming their Windows Mobile device at the Enterprise (vs. the Apple iPhone consumer market).

That said, the process was reasonably smooth (though very slow). I did, however, get a bunch of duplicate recurring events in my calendar. WMDC did not ask how it wanted me to handle events in the Outlook 2007 calendar in relation to the existing items in the Smartphone’s calendar. I also see a small number of duplicated contacts in my Contacts list.

Windows Mobile Calendar Events That Don’t Stick
What do you consider to be your master calendar? Your PDA or your desktop calendar? For many of us, the answer is clearly our PDA (or phone). It is always with us and the most likely thing to be updated first. But, for many of us this rule more a 95/5 rule rather than a 100/0 rule. If you use a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC, watch out for this gotcha…

I sometimes create an event using Microsoft Outlook on my desktop. This usually happens for an event with a lot of information that I’m copying and pasting from email or a vCal file. Sounds reasonable, right? But, what do you think happened in the following situation?

1. I created an appointment for the next day in Outlook on my desktop
   
2. I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone with the desktop
   
3. The appointment is now on the Smartphone
   
4. Early the next morning I was told that the meeting was postponed until tomorrow
   
5. I changed the date for the event to the next day and checked to make sure the change was visible on the Smartphone
   
6. The Smartphone was then synced to the same desktop with Outlook again.
   

What do you think happened? If you guessed that the desktop Outlook appointment setting took precedent over my Smartphone and changed the event on the Smartphone back to the now wrong day, you guessed correctly. Try this yourself. I can reproduce this on various generations of Windows Mobile devices.

The moral is that you might think that your Pocket PC or Smartphone is your master calendar. But, ActiveSync has other ideas. Changes made to a calendar appointment on a Windows Mobile device only sticks after ActiveSync if the event was originally created on the device. It unsticks and reverts to the original date/time if the event was created using Outlook. Yuck.

Windows Mobile 6?

The wraps are off of Windows Mobile 6 (WM6). Other sites will give it much fuller coverage than I will. So, I won’t focus on new features. If you want to read about that and see more screenshots, take a look at some of the items on the Pocket PC Thoughts site as well as many other great sites that focus on Windows Mobile. ModernNomads, for example, has a detailed WM6 description for you to read in the article What will Windows Mobile 6 bring for the highly mobile people?
My limited experience with WM6 left me lukewarm. I suspect it is because I am not a Microsoft Exchange Server user. From a non-enterprise user perspective, WM6 will probably seem like Windows Mobile 5 Second Edition: Nice little enhancements, a smattering of new features in the mail and PIM areas, and a slightly different start page look.

With WM6 devices set to roll out after the Apple iPhone, WM6 may look like less of an upgrade by the time devices get past the FCC, through the carriers’ test cycles, and actually are available for purchase by consumers and businesses. Businesses, especially those using Exchange Server, will definitely prefer a Windows Mobile 6 device to the Apple iPhone. They won’t be limited to a single carrier (only Cingular will carry the iPhone), be able to add custom applications, have a wide-base of third-party applications to choose from, and have reasonably well documented practices to manage the devices in an enterprise setting.

But for consumers? That will be interesting. Although we’ve heard howls of protest at the iPhone’s $499 and $599 price points, consider this… The Cingular 8525 and Palm Treo 750 (both touch screen Windows Mobile 5 devices) cost $399.99 (after subsidizing is figured in). That is not much less than the lower-end iPhone. And, neither one has 4GB of storage like the low-end iPhone.

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition Developer SDK
Microsoft released…

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition Developer SDK

…about a month ago. The kit includes a CAB file to install SQL Server 2005 Compact on Pocket PCs and Smartphones running Windows Mobile 2003 and newer.

You can find a Microsoft document about upgrading from SQL Server CE 2.0 to SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition at…

Upgrading from SQL Server CE 2.0 to SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition

Zune Phone? A Blog Dialog with Frank McPherson
My old friend and author of How to Do Everything with Windows Mobile, Frank McPherson, has an interesting take on the much rumored Zune Phone on his blog: What’s With the Zune Phone? It is kind of amusing that Frank and I may have arrived at a similar conclusion but are taking different paths to get there. So, I’ll pick out what I see as his main points and discuss them one by one. BTW, I’m not saying I am right and Frank is wrong. It is just a different point of view. So, here we go. I’ll highlight Frank’s points in italics.

• The Zune Phone is not a reaction to the iPhone. It is an internal competition with Windows Mobile devices. I think the Zune itself is a reaction to the iPod (and the failure of the various WMA/MP3 players to challenge the iPod). The Zune Phone (if it exists) is not so much a reaction to the iPhone as announced at MacWorld but the rumor of the iPhone before it was announced. It takes a long time to design a phone, get it through the FCC, and strike a deal with a carrier. If a Zune Phone is announced soon, it was in the works many months before the iPhone was announced. Quite honestly, I don’t think the Zune group cares about anything produced by other Microsoft groups. The Zune group looks a like a rogue group to we outsiders. They didn’t support Plays for Sure. They don’t appear to work with Vista’s Windows Mobile Device Center. They don’t appear to have anything to do with the very similar Portable Media Center devices.
  
• The Windows Mobile secret weapon is Voice Command for the Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphone. Voice recognition (not full continuous speech recognition) is pretty cool indeed. And Microsoft Voice Command is also pretty cool. But, there is one problem… Even though voice command/voice dialing is available on many many phones, and has been for years, hardly anyone uses it. When was the last time you saw/heard any of the thousands of people you’ve seen using a phone use voice dialing? Generally speaking, most people don’t bother to check if their phone can do it. If it can, it is often a pain to set it up. And, if you set it up, it generally only works in a relatively quiet environment (even with a headset on). And, if you are running down a street, your voice sounds different enough to it that voice dialing usually doesn’t work. Even handwriting recognition has essentially lost the race. That is why most popular devices now have a thumb QWERTY keyboard. Voice and handwriting recognition is a lot harder than most of us think. And, neither one has reached the point where they are truly useful on small somewhat underpowered mobile device.
  
• Microsoft doesn’t need to create a Zune Phone. It just needs to improve Windows Mobile. I agree with Frank completely. But, it not only won’t happen, it has actually lost functions with each new version. Check out my earlier blog item: Windows Mobile Loses Features With Each Upgrade??? Microsoft is only responding to carrier and enterprise customer feature requests. And, that is, in fact, why I think the Zune group will create a consumer focused Zune Phone that needs to answer to carrier needs but not enterprise needs. As an aside, try this experiment if you have both an iPod and some Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone: Close your eyes. Then, take the iPod and navigate through various features such as volume control or going through a playlist (forward, backwards, pause, restart). Now, try the same thing with whatever Windows Mobile device using only one hand and, again, not looking. Pretty difficult, if not impossible, right? BTW, try creating a playlist on the Windows Mobile device? If your device is within two generations old, it is impossible. This feature was removed a while back. Now, try creating a playlist on your desktop/notebook and get it to your WM device. Cough cough. Done yet? Try it on your iPod using iTunes. Windows Mobile lost the race as a media device long ago. And, removing features didn’t help it over the past couple of upgrades.
  

It should be interesting to see if the Zune Phone arrives. Here are a couple of predictions (and I’m pretty bad at predictions, so don’t put much weight on what I say. This is just for fun :-) :

1. It will be sold exclusively through Verizon Wireless. It wouldn’t make sense to give AT&T Wireless (Cingular) the exclusive and compete head-to-head with the iPhone in the same retail store. It may be available as a GSM phone outside of the US.
   
2. Like the iPhone it will not allow 3rd party applications to be installed.
   
3. It will have basic email, sms, and PIM functions (like most phones these days) but will not sync with Outlook. It may have its own little desktop PIM for Vista-only.
   
4. It may have some VoIP features. Perhaps through a Live Messenger interface.
   
5. There will be a horrid looking brown colored version :-)
   
6. I will stick with Windows Mobile based devices and not buy a Zune Phone :-)
   

Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Home Server will most likely be a runaway success — it solves a problem that tens of milllions of households have. Statistics Microsoft cites on the Home Server blog back that up — and the numbers are even bigger than I imagined.

I’ve been blogging observations (on a personal site) about upgrading a $500 eMachines desktop PC from Windows Media Center Edition to Windows Vista Ultimate Edition over the past two weeks. Here’s a summary of what I’ve jotted down. Note that I’ve been using various Beta and Release Candidate versions of Vista for about 18 months. So, I’m not new to Vista. But, I was still surprised by a few things after the upgrade nonetheless.

Upgrading a Cheap PC to Microsoft Windows Vista
Choosing the PC to sacrifice to a real-live upgrade: An eMachines T6420 (about $500 after the rebate)

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (~2.2GHz)
1GB RAM
200GB C: drive
160BG D: drive (added after purchase)
No graphics card. Uses shared video RAM

Cheap PC Vista Pre-Upgrade Preparation
Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor results. Backups. More than one and different methods.

Cheap PC Vista Upgrade Timeline
This is an upgrade of a real PC used over the past year or two. This is not a test PC. It has real applications and data on it (backed up, of course). 90 minutes later…

Full Aero Glass on a Cheap PC?
Aero Glass effects using an integrated nVidia 6600 with shared video RAM. Very nice!

The Cheap PC, Vista, and AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
A small surprise. Not a show stopper. Easy fix.

Cheap Vista PC Vs. McAfee SpamKiller Detect
I uninstalled McAfee AntiVirus long before the upgrade. But, it had other ideas. Night of the living SpamKiller time.

Cheap Vista PC: In Search of a Printer Driver
Aren’t HP Photosmart printers kind of popular? Apparently, mine is not :-{

Cheap Vista PC & ReadyBoost
In theory, this is one of the cooler sounding new Vista features. In reality, what exactly does it do?

Microsoft Vista Sidebar

Hated this feature in Beta releases. Warmed up to it in the Release Candidate phase. Must-a, gotta have it now.

If you are in a rush to buy Windows Vista or Office 2007, it looks like Costco has had it available for purchase since Jan. 27 (two days ahead of the Jan. 29 release). I received one of their weekly emails and noticed the two sets of products featured prominently.

Since I hadn’t followed the pricing for Vista or Office 2007, it was interesting to see the regular and upgrade prices listed.

Microsoft’s confusing and incomprehensible use of “Live” branding does more than just baffle users — it is also costing the company millions, because people don’t bother to visit Live sites because they can’t figure out what the sites do. When will Microsoft finally fix this nagging issue?’

IBM today announced today it’s bringing Web 2.0 features into corporations via its new Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr applications. The software allows employees to find those who share similar interests, and easily share information and collaborate in a variety of ways. Why isn’t Microsoft releasing this kind of software?

In getting ready for the launch of Windows Developer Power Tools today, I’ve been trading email with Jim Holmes and James Avery, the book’s visionaries and co-authors, to get their answers to questions that readers might well ask about their content. Here are their responses, in mock interview format.

[WinDev Center] Why did you decide to include tools from Microsoft, such as the Visual Studio Express products and Power Toys, in the book?
[James] Microsoft developers have created some of the best free and open source tools (yes open source!) around. The WiX toolkit, Express products, and the Visual Studio Power Toys are just some examples. Microsoft developers often create tools that fill gaps in the same commerical product they worked on, which gives them the distinct advantage of having inner knowledge of that tool. We don’t care who writes the tool, just whether or not the tool is useful!

[WinDev Center] Given all the support that’s provided in Visual Studio 2005, especially Team
System, why would any Microsoft developer need to know about free and open
source tools?
[Jim] The .NET platform and Visual Studios’ various versions, including Team Systems, are great environments, but there is plenty of room for developers to increase their productivity and the quality of their products. There are a great number of testing tools, code libraries, and utilities which can really help out developers — and don’t forget that this book isn’t just for .NET developers. Any developer working on the Windows platform, regardless of whether they’re working in Java, Ruby, PHP, or some other language, will find helpful tools in this book!

[WinDev Center] Can you give a couple of examples from your book of tools that plug holes in
Visual Studio support?
[Jim] NDepend and Reflector.Graph are great for showing dependencies between .NET components. MbUnit gives you the ability to do combinatorial testing to cut down required data for large test matricies. CoolCommands gives you a wealth of neat, immensely helpful additions to context menus.

[WinDev Center] I know O’Reilly has made much in its promotion of the tools you document for Windows, .NET and ASP.NET developers, but, as you say, you also include tools that will be useful to developers who use Windows for building non-Windows applications, such as Java and PHP applications. Can you explain why you did that and name a couple of the tools that fall into that category?
[James] While our book will mostly apply to .NET developers, there are plenty of tools that really apply to any type of developer on the Windows platform. Some of those tools are: Subversion, the best source control around in my opinion. Trac, an open-source feature and bug tracking system. And even FileZilla, a free FTP client.

[WinDev Center] Given the pace of change out there, isn’t putting this information in a book
risky? Won’t the book be out of date as soon as I buy it?
[Jim] Two bits here. First off, this book will introduce you to tools you might not have known about, so you’ll find new ways to bring value to your development process. Secondly, our book’s format shows you where to go for the most current versions and information for each tool. Lastly (and yes, that makes three bits), our companion website will give you a central spot to go for updated information about all the tools in the book.

[WinDev Center] What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing this book?
[Jim] Searching for, playing with, and discovering the value of a bunch of great tools. I (Jim) also enjoyed writing the preface and introduction because it gave me a nice opportunity to try and lay out a good case for how FOSS tools can really help out developers.

[WinDev Center] What was the hardest part about writing this book?
[Jim] The sheer amount of writing we had to do in a short timeframe was pretty amazing, especially considering the book grew from an estimated 800 pages to over 1200.

[WinDev Center] What do you think will surprise readers the most about Windows Developer Power Tools?
[Jim] I really hope readers poke through the book and find themselves frequently saying “Holy smokes! I didn’t know there was a tool to do that!”

[WinDev Center] What’s your favorite “undiscovered gem” in the book?
[Jim] I absolutely love SlickRun, even though it’s not directly a developer tool. SlickRun saves me scads of time each day just through its simple, quick launching of apps, folders, and sites I use all the time. Plus its Jot feature is a great way for me to keep a short tear list for priority tasks I’m on at the moment.

[WinDev Center] What’s one tool you’d like to see created?
[Jim] I’m drawing a complete blank. It’s not that there aren’t remaining pain points for development, it’s just that my head is still stuffed full of all the great things we’ve worked with for the last year!

[WinDev Center] What are your plans for the future?
[Jim] I’m currently heavily involved in putting on a huge software developers conference (www.CodeMash.org), and am then transitioning over to pick up my end of coordinating a regional Code Camp in the Dayton-Cinncinati area. After that I’m going to focus on diving more deeply in to the .NET 3.0 platform, BizTalk, and SharePoint. I also owe my wife an evening at a REALLY good restaurant to make up for all the late hours I spent over the last year working on this book.

[WinDev Center] Thank you both.

When Windows Vista finally ships in a few weeks, don’t expect your PC to run fast and trouble-free, warns Microsoft officials — depending on the PC you buy, it may be weighed down with “craplets.”

Good news for anyone who hates Vista’s exceedingly annoying UAC prompts: Symantec has said it will develop a Vista add-in that delivers UAC-level security without UAC-level annoyances.

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Happy New Year! Get Organized & More Out of Your PDA!
Fellow Microsoft Mobile Devices MVP Jaap van Ekris has an article to help you get started with 2007 on his MobileNomads.info site…

Get more out of your day using a PDA

The article focuses on maximizing what you get out of the PIM (Personal Information Management) and Communications features of your PDA.

After reading Jaap’s article, you might want to consider visiting an article I wrote for Microsoft.com last year…

Get Organized with Windows Mobile

In it I point you to some third party applications you can add to your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone to organize your life in 2007.

Have a safe and happy New Year everyone!

MobileViews iPod Troubleshooting Reference Page
Way back on May 11, 2006 (forever in Internet time), I posted a blog item on the MacDevCenter asking…

Cause for iPod nano Spontaneous Reset?

Although the cause of the problem is now known and resolved, this blog item continues to attract questions from people with, apparently, all kinds of iPod issues. It doesn’t seem appropriate to use that blog item as some kind of general iPod issues forum (especially since there are other sites better suited and more focused on that topic). So, I put together a page here (look at the left side bar area under Pages) titled…

MobileViews iPod info

…to help people find iPod troubleshooting information and discussion areas.

I’ve listed a small sampling of the questions my original blog item attracted on that page and will, as time permits, provide specific pointers for some or all of them. Hope this helps the various people with iPod issues that posted to my old blog item.

Flickr Popular Cameraphones List Missing Phones without Exif Data
If you scroll to the bottom of…

Flickr Camera Finder

…you will find a list of popular cameraphones used to take photos submitted to Flickr. In a list of 5 there are 2 Nokia phone models and 3 Sony Ericsson phone models. One would guess that these phones are listed because they all have good cameras (for a cameraphone). But, I began to wonder why there were more Sony Ericssons since Nokia claims to make the most digital cameras in the world. Shouldn’t Nokia have a slight edge just based on total cameraphones sold? Ok, maybe not. The next question was why no Windows Mobile Smartphone had made the list. They seem to be selling well. I submit photos from my Windows Mobile Smartphone (a T-Mobile SDA at the moment) to Flickr. So, I know it can submit photos.

One possible reason may be that many popular cameraphones do not provide EXIF data in their photos. I took a look at photos from a number of phones I’ve used over the last couple of years and noticed that photos taken with the Nokia 3650 (Symbian), Motorola MPx220 (WM2003), and T-Mobile SDA (WM2005) all lack EXIF data in the JPEG files. Photos taken using an i-Mate JasJar and i-Mate K-JAM Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition devices did have EXIF data in their JPEG image files.

So, it may be this lack of EXIF photo identifying information may be the reason why some very popular phones will never be listed in social network sites collecting camera model information. Too bad.

Akihabara News Mobile Display Format is Back
Akihabara is the part of Tokyo known as Electric City where nearly every floor of every store is crammed with electronic goodies.. Every gadget geek should try to make a pilgrimage there at least once in a lifetime. You’ll see things in Akihabara, and Japan in general, that never get outside of Japan and is miles ahead of what we see in places like the U.S. A good way to keep up with the goings-on there is to read…

Akihabara News

…which has news and commentary in the English language. A recent redesign lost the PDA formatted pages. But, fortunately, a tweak to their new design restored it. And, the announcement specifically states that: AkihabaraNews Mobile was designed for Windows Mobile 5 (and previous versions). Just use the link above on your Pocket PC Phone Edition or Smartphone. It automatically detects the PIE browser and reformats the page appropriately.

You can find an article I wrote for O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter about my trip to Japan back in 2005 to get an idea of what a tech geek can expect when visiting that amazing country.

Japan Primer for the Mac Techno-Tourist

Windows Mobile Email: Which One Works Best?
Windows Mobile Pocket PC (Phone Edition) and Smartphone users have at least six broad techniques to work with email. The problem is finding one that works the way you do (or would like to).

• Microsoft Outlook Sync: This is the way most of us used to deal with email on Pocket PCs in the old days. Unfortunately, this tethers us to the PC running Outlook. There was some relief in the ability to use ActiveSync over WiFi until that option was removed with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5 and ActiveSync 4.
  
• Microsoft Exchange Server: If you are fortunate enough to have a mobile-enabled Exchange server and support staff help you with your device, this is a pretty good option. But, I suspect that this is not an option for many of us. There are some web/mail host services that provide Exchange Server services to individuals, however.
  
• Proprietary Client: A number of these are popping up these days. Good Technology for enterprise solutions probably comes to mind. But, there are also add-on clients from Google and Microsoft itself. I’m not a fan of this solution. It is just one more piece of software to take up valuable RAM space on my Pocket PC or Smartphone. And, it is redundant since we already have Inbox.
  
• Webmail: This is an if-fy area. Some work, some kind-of work, and some just don’t work at all. Of the big three (Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!), I like Yahoo!’s mobile web email solution the best. However, it is also the only one that does not have session persistence. So, I am forever slowly and painfully entering my account name and password.
  
• POP3: Windows Mobile Inbox retrieves POP3 email fairly well. The problem is that email maangement doesn’t seem to work (at least for me). Deleting email does not delete from the server (though some people say it deletes things they want to keep). Sent mail is not saved. And, if you like to keep lots of email on the server, don’t try to send email from Windows Mobile Inbox using SMTP. Everytime you try to send email, Inbox will try to check all the POP3 email first (hundreds or thousands of messages) before sending email out through the SMTP gateway. Google’s Gmail provides POP3 support. Yahoo! provides POP3 support if you upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus for $19.95/year. And, I still have no idea what happened to Microsoft’s Hotmail/Live Mail. It kind of sort of works with Inbox. But, it doesn’t look like POP3 to me.
  
• IMAP4: This work moderately well though delete and savings sent mail doesn’t work for me. However, sending mail using SMTP works as expected (mail goes out without rechecking the server’s incoming mail again). This is my personal preference for Windows Mobile email service.
  

GSPlayer: Free Audio Player for Pocket PC
I’m going to try to find and mention at least one freeware or Open Source application each week. No shareware, trialware, etc. Just no strings attached stuff (maybe an online registration required now and then). Here’s the first one for 2007…

GreenSoftware GSPlayer

This Open Source audio player for the Windows Mobile Pocket PC can play a number of formats including MP3 (of course), Ogg Vorbis, and SHOUTcast streaming. It also has a 10-band equalizer for MP3 playback and a sleep timer among other features.

Microsoft and Ford are about to announce a new software suite for cars — Sync, which will offer navigation, as well as the ability to talk hands-free on your cell phone, check your email, and download music. Get ready for a spike in traffic accidents.

David Pogue is the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. With 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world’s bestselling how-to consumer-technology authors. In 1999, he launched his own series of comprehensive, witty computer books called the Missing Manuals, published by O’Reilly Media. While Pogue writes many of these books himself, he also has a core of hand-picked authors for the series. Missing Manuals now number 30 titles, including Pogue’s upcoming Windows Vista: The Missing Manual. Here’s a recent conversation with David, where he explains why he wrote the book, and what’s new in Windows Vista.

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Why Does Microsoft Confuse its Windows Mobile Customers?
In response to a blog item about Microsoft Money being unavailable for Windows Mobile devices, reader Marcos asks: Good information but SPB Finance is only compatible with Windows Mobile 5 not smartphone. I had purchased Money 2007 and also SPB Finance and now that I upgraded my cell phone for a smartphone (Dash)I am in trouble with no sync. Any idea how can I have Money 2007 in my Dash?

Before discussing it in detail, let’s see what I wrote in my earlier blog that he is responding to:

If you plan to upgrade to Microsoft Money 2006 or 2007 and use it with your Pocket PC, don’t. According to the Microsoft web page Money for handheld devices and Palm Pilots, Money 2007 will not sync with any Pocket PC version and Money 2006 only synchronizes with Pocket PCs that run versions preceding Windows Mobile 5.

If you want something to help manage your finances on your Pocket PC and can sync with both Microsoft Money and Quicken, take a look at Spb Finance.

It would be easy to play the role of an uppity self-proclaimed expert and diss Marcos for not reading blog or to send him to Microsoft’s web site to explain that the Windows Mobile branding applies to both Pocket PCs and Smartphones. But, I’m aiming the dissing where it belongs: At Microsoft’s marketing of the Windows Mobile brand and its effort to unify the Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms.

Microsoft Windows Mobile consists of two main branches: Pocket PCs with touch screens that may or may not have a cell phone radio (CDMA or GSM) and Smartphones without touch screens and always with some kind of keyboard for dialing and other input. Back when the first generation Smartphone 2002 launched, it was pretty easy to tell the difference between a Pocket PC Phone Edition and a Smartphone. In 2006, we have an entirely different story. Go take a look at a Treo 700w, Motorola Q, T-Mobile Dash, and Samsung BlackJack. Which ones are Pocket PC Phone Edition devices and which ones are Smartphones? Ding! Yep, only the Treo 700w is a Phone Edition among this very similar looking bunch of devices. No wonder Marcos is confused. Even Cingular appears to be confused. Take a look at their product page for the BlackJack. Their ad copy for the phone Mobile Word, Excel, and PowerPoint support. And, yet, Microsoft doesn’t provide those applications for their Smartphones. It may have a reader/displayer for those files, but you can’t edit Word or Excel documents on a Smartphone using Microsoft applications.With Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft even changed the bottom of the screen to require two giant softkeys at the bottom tied to two hardware buttons for both the Pocket PC and Smartphone. This took away an enourmous amount of screen real estate from developers who had used that bar of pixels to display menus, status, and other useful information. Now, we just have two giant softkeys wasting space most of the time on a Pocket PC device.

The Pocket PC/Phone Edition and Smartphone should be clearly differentiated so that people like Marcos and the vast majority of customers don’t need to become Windows Mobile experts to figure out which device they should buy and use. This lack of product differentiation is biting a lot of disappointed consumers. Look at my response to Meg’s question just a few blog items ago: Office Mobile for a Smartphone?

This is basically the same issue Marcos faces: People who are interested in or already bought a Windows Mobile Smartphone when they really need a Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition. Why? Because most Windows Mobile Smartphones that were sold prior to the Motorola Q didn’t have QWERTY keyboards. That made them less than useful for applications that are data-entry intensive like Word, Excel, and Money from Microsoft as well as many third party applications. This means you don’t see as many data-entry intensive applications for the Smartphone since their numbers are probably still small compared to the Smartphones with more traditional dialpads.

So, Marcos. Please read my text again. There is NO Microsoft Money 2006 or 2007 compatible with ANY Windows Mobile 5 platform. And, if you want to perform that kind of task with a 3rd party application like Spb Finance, you should look at a Pocket PC Phone Edition or Pocket PC (no phone), not a Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone device like the T-Mobile Dash.

typepad mobile
I don’t use TypePad for blogging. However, if you do and you would like
to use a mobile device to blog from, take a look at…

typepad mobile

There are versions for Palm OS 5, Windows Mobile 5, and Symbian Series
60 (free download). The online manual provides step-by-step instructions
for posting text and photos from a mobile device.

Pocket & Phone SharpMT: Mobile Blogging
I guess this is my mobile blogging topic week. Here’s another mobile blogging client…

Pocket SharpMT and Phone SharpMT

…are freeware mobile blogging applications for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones (with .Net CompactFramework 2.0). As you might guess from the MT part of the app name, this client works with the MoveableType API.

Blogger Mobile
Unlike the previous mobile blogging client-side products discussed, Blogger Mobile uses the more familiar mail-the-blog-in model. Actually, there is a twist. It actually uses a gateway instead of mailing directly to a specific blog address. If you use Blogger as your blogging service, head over to read the following two items.

On the Go with Blogger Mobile

Blogger Mobile FAQ

According to the FAQ, the service works with AT&T/Cingular, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless in the US. An email or MMS message is sent to the address go@blogger.com to make the magic work. The message can include a photo as well as text.

Moblogging on Yahoo! 360
I discussed moblogging using Google’s Blogger yesterday. So, it only seems fair to mention Yahoo! 360 today.

If you login to your Yahoo! account and head over to http://mobile.yahoo.com/mblog, you will see simple specific instructions on how to email text and photos directly from your cameraphone to your Yahoo! 360 blog.

Moblogging to Microsoft Live Spaces (aka MSN Spaces)
Continuing on with Moblogging week… MSN Spaces got a web facelift and renamed Windows Live Spaces earlier this year. Like Blogger and Yahoo! 360, you can email text and photos from your cameraphone to your blog. Unlike the other services, it doesn’t have an external write-up you can read without logging in. So, here’s some information in case you are considering using Live Spaces.

• Login to Live Spaces with your Passport account
  
• Click on Options on the upper far right side of the window
  
• Click on Email Publishing in the left sidebar
  
• Fill out the web form and read the instructions about moblogging to your Live Spaces blog
  

If you are a MSN Soapbox video beta-tester, you can post videos from it to your Live Spaces blog (though you cannot post video directly from your cameraphone).

Windows fans may think Jim Allchin has gone over to the dark side — an email from 2004 just surfaced in which the Windows chief wrote “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.”

The email was in part an extended rant by Allchin about all that was wrong with Microsoft. The email was made public this week as part of a lawsuit against Microsoft. In the email, Allchin says, “I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products.”

Ouch!

When he wrote that email, Allchin certainly didn’t expect it to see the light of day, and certainly not at a time when the next version of Windows was about to launch, especially when Vista is the most Mac-like interface Microsoft has yet created.

As you might imagine, Allchin has backed away from the memo. He writes on the Vista Team Blog that in his email, “I was being purposefully dramatic in order to drive home a point. The point being that we needed to change and change quickly.”

He says that the email served the intended effect, that Microsoft changed, and that the result is Vista, “a phenomenal product, better than any other OS we’ve ever built.”

I believe that Allchin was being purposely dramatic in his memo. But, in fact, the most damning thing in the memo wasn’t saying he wanted a Mac. It was, instead, his criticism of how Microsoft had in essence lost its way.

Like Allchin, I’m a big fan of Vista. But I’m not quite as sure that Microsoft has solved its problems. The company has gotten so large, with so many layers of middle management, and is headed in so many different directions, that it’s not clear yet whether it can regain the vision it once had. Vista is a step forward, as is Office 2007. But key will be whether the company can get a new version of Windows out the door in a shorter time than five years, and still make it a great operating system.

If it doesn’t, Allchin might not be the only one saying he wants a Mac.

Thanks for listening…

Sun goes multilingual with Java SE 6 | InfoWorld | News | 2006-12-11 | By China Martens, IDG News Service

Sun’s approach used to be that Java was the solution for all developers’ problems, he said. But it has since become clear to Sun that developers want to use other languages in conjunction with Java to create hybrid applications. Sun has created a collection of scripting engines on its Web site, and Java SE 6 includes a preconfigured version of Mozilla’s open-source Rhino JavaScript engine.

… and then responding accordingly.

Dear rest of WW:* : Want a definition of what it means to be a Web 2.0 company?

Despite Steve Ballmer’s anti-Linux bluster, the Microsoft peace pact with the Open Source world has begun to pay dividends. Novell just announced OpenOffice.org’s support of Office Office 2007’s Open XML format. Novell joins Corel, which has already said that the WordPerfect Office suite will support Office Open XML as well.

Not too long ago, Microsoft signed a deal with Novell, which showed that Redmond’s siege mentality when it comes to Linux is finally over. But now Steve Ballmer has essentially told Linux users that they’re infringing on Microsoft intellectual property. What’s going on inside Microsoft when it comes to Open Source?

Rumors have been rife that Google plans a nationwide free Wi-Fi network — and it looks like Microsoft is jumping in as well. Yesterday the company announced that it was partnering with to build a citywide Wi-Fi network in Portland, Oregon.

Firstly, a quick shout out to the folks on irc://freenode/conary, in particular mkj_wk, jtate, and Tybstar for helping me to quickly get to the bottom of a build problem I was having —

And when I say quickly I mean from the time I logged in to the time the problem was solved was less than two minutes.

TWO MINUTES!!!

NOTE-TO-WWW: If you know nothing about rPath and/or rBuilder — you need to fix that and you need to fix that *FAST* else get left behind by the rest of us that took the time to learn about all the wonderfullness that is rPath, rPath Linux, rBuilder, the conary build and distribution system, and the rPath Appliance Agent (among other things.) To truly understand virtualization and appliance-based computing, you need to get to know *EVERYTHING* you can about all of the above mentioned products and services made available to the world at *ZERO* cost by the good folks @ rPath.

More on the above soon, though I would *HIGHLY* recommend watching this two minute clip and be a smarter, more informed human being because of it. I would alsp recommend learning more about rPath, the company, in general. Contact information is located @ that same link. :)

In the mean time,

As per my recent check-in notes to the nuXleus project repository (*PROUDLY* hosted and developed by the same mentioned technologies by the same mentioned folks).

Here’s the weekly summary of a mix of Windows Mobile and general mobile tech related items from my personal blog.

Windows Mobile Loses Features With Each Upgrade???
The Microsoft Windows Mobile platform turns 10 years old next week (more on this topic next week). Mike Calligaro’s most recent blog item which bravely (Mike blogs about a lot of hot button topics on behalf of Microsoft) tries to explain Microsoft’s rationale for removing the ability to use ActiveSync over Ethernet (wired or wireless) reminded me of an interesting fact about Windows Mobile: It may be one of the few products that actually lost functions across a series of upgrades. Let’s take a look at just the features I can remember losing in no particular order (I don’t claim this is a comprehensive list. So, feel free to let me know about lost features I neglect to mention).

• ActiveSync over Ethernet
  
• Microsoft Access Database Importation
  
• Printing (with add-on driver)
  
• Microsoft Reader
  
• Creating a Media Player Playlist on the Device Itself
  
• Ability to Manually Disconnect from ActiveSync while connected over USB
  
• AvantGo Reader in firmware
  
• Menus at the bottom of the screen (replaced by two giant soft-buttons)
  
• Ability to add to Tasks on the device (Smartphone)
  
• Ability to encrypt Word or Excel documents/spreadsheets
  
• Backup entire device to PC using ActiveSync
  
• Pocket Money (add-on Microsoft application)
  
• Pocket Streets (add-on Microsoft application)
  

The Windows Mobile Pocket PC (perhaps soon to disappear in non-phone configurations based on sales declines) and Smartphone are still my mobile devices of choice. But, even with explanations from people like Microsoft’s Mike Calligaro about various design choices, it is difficult for an ordinary end-user like me to understand why I’m losing features and options (even software add-ons) which each new Windows Mobile generation of devices.

Q&A: Excel Mobile Unsupported Content & Formatting
Reader P.L. asks: I just purchased a Treo 700W from Verizon. Excel Mobile will not let me save updates to most of the Excel files that I have synced to the handheld. It gives me a window that says unsupported content and formatting will be lost if I save the workbook and then it will not let me save it. I’m forced into a ‘Save As’ function. I cannot figure out what is unsupported and cannot find any documentation on the subject. Can you help?

I’m guessing a few details are missing from this story and will assume the following additional details…

• The problem spreadsheets were created using a full version of Excel on a desktop or notebook.
  
• This spreadsheet was copied to the Pocket PC Phone Edition (Treo 700w)
  
• The spreadsheet was modified (new data and/or change existing data in cells)
  

If this is the case, then this is, believe it or not, normal (though undesirable). Word Mobile and Excel Mobile only provide small subsets of the features available in the full version for Windows XP. And, despite years of pleading from many users (including me), neither Mobile application provides what is called non-destructive round-tripping. So, if you use, for example, unsupported features like macros or unsupported statistical functions on the original version created using the full version of Excel 2003, these features will not be preserved if the spreadsheet is modified on the Pocket PC and then saved back to the same file.

The workaround is to adopt a workflow model that takes this into account. For example, let’s say we have an Excel 2003 spreadsheet file named FOO.XLS. Instead of copying it directly to the Pocket PC, we make a copy named FOO-MOBILE.XLS on the desktop first. This renamed copy is copied over to the Pocket PC where it is worked on. When saving the modified spreadsheet back to the Pocket PC, you can ignore the warning and save it. This modified FOO-MOBILE.XLS is then copied back to the desktop PC where the data can either be manually or automatically (using additional macros or VBA scripts) merged back into the original version.

I am not pleased with this situation either. A number of people including me have been telling Microsoft’s Windows Mobile product management group that it is critical to have non-destructive round-tripping for Excel Mobile and Word Mobile. However, we have always been told that major customers have not identified this as a high priority issue. If this is an issue for you (as it is for me), you should definitely let Microsoft know through your Microsoft account executives, at conferences, or the Microsoft wish request.

CNET’s Top 6 Business Phones
CNET lists their…

Top 6 phones for business users

7.7 - Palm Treo 700p
8.0 - Cingular 8525
8.0 - T-Mobile Dash
6.6 - Nextel i930 by Motorola
7.0 - Sprint PCS PPC-6700
7.3 - Nokia E62

It is interesting that half of this list is based on Windows Mobile (Cingular/Sprint devices are based on the HTC Wizard Pocket PC Phone Edition while the T-Mobile Dash is a Windows Mobile Smartphone). The three Windows Mobile devices have an average Editor’s rating of 7.67 while the other three devices average out at 7.2.

All You Need is… a Pocket PC?
(with apologies to Lennon & McCartney)…

It’s not unusual to see me taking notes in a meeting with just a Pocket PC (with a thumb keyboard or add-on keyboard) although I will take a notebook too depending on what needs to be done at the meeting. But, I rarely see other people take anything other than a notebook (I also rarely see Tablet PCs for that matter).
Fellow Microsoft Windows Mobile MVP Jaap van Ekris asks Can a PocketPC replace a laptop in real life? on his Modern Nomads website. Jaap reaches the conclusion that agrees with the original philosophy of the Windows CE team way back when the Handheld PC was introduced 10 years ago: Ultramobile devices are PC Companions.

That didn’t stop another friend and also a Microsoft Windows Mobile MVP Bev Howard from turning that idea on its head though. If you really want to travel with just a Pocket PC, head over to Bev’s site where he provides The Minimalist Road Warrior’s Guide to Traveling Light” using a PocketPC. If you want to just leave your notebook behind while on Travel, Bev lets you know what you need to do and what you need to take with you to stay mobile while, well, being mobile.

I found the following in my current feed reader of choice yesterday, installed the Windows Bits, and even finished cooking the Linux bits into the nuXleus project earlier this morning (still working on the next release, though its within spitting distance of being ready — two more apps to finish out.)

Mono 1.2 Released - Mono Project News

Mono 1.2 Released

Mono 1.2 has been released.

Go to the downloads page to get a copy.

Very Cool! Congratulations to the Mono folks for yet another amazing milestone!

That said, to whomever came up with the following feature in the latest Windows installation,

Those who believe that Microsoft only pays lip service to Open Source may be surprised by the mega-deal Microsoft just signed with Novell, which shows that Microsoft has finally decided to come to terms with Linux.

I just tried to install Vista RC-2 Build 5744 on two production PCs (vs a test box). Here’s how it went down… The hard drive in the Dell Lattitude D600’s notebook PC I use in my office died this past Wednesday. Fortunately, it still has three months left on its three year warranty. The replacement hard drive arrived on Friday and I figured I might as well install Vista on it instead of XP Pro since Vista has been running pretty well on my test PC (a Dell Optiplex GX-280). The installation went quickly (about 30 minutes) and everything except the integrated Bluetooth radio was recognized by Vista. The D600 has an ATI Radeon 9000 with 32MB of video RAM. Decent for a business notebook. But, not enough for Aero Glass (128MB required). So, no Bluetooth, no Aero Glass. But, good enough to consider this installation a hit.

Next on a my list: My home low-end but serviceable PC with an Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM, and nVidia GeForce FX5200 board with 256MB video RAM added in (Microsoft’s Vista upgrade checking utility said the card was ok for Vista). I figured this would be my chance to play with the Aero Glass interface and little tweaks like 3D-Flip (the test PC Optiplex GX-280 does not have a dedicated graphics card). I decided to perform a clean install since all the data was backed up to external drives and all the applications CD/DVD discs were on hand to reinstall applications. The installation seemed to go smoothly. So, I left the room to let it complete the process and go through its auto-reboot. However, when I came back to the room, the display was dark. I powered the system down, rebooted, and watched what seemed like a normal post-install reboot until the LCD flashed that it was getting a sync signal greater than its 1280×1024 maximum. I tried a couple of reinstallations to see if Vista would let me know force a lower resolution. But, I didn’t see any such option during the installation process. I installed XP Media Center 2005 on it. It did what Vista should have done: It set the resolution to a relatively low one and let me reconfigure it after starting up. So, let’s call this Vista install a miss.

I could probably pull the nVidia card from my PC, install Vista, and then re-install the graphics card. But, that seems like such a hassle.

I wonder what the overall Vista upgrade experience will be when the personal retail versions become available in January 2007?

Until RC2, one of the best features of Vista was its speedy, exceedingly powerful Search features. But with RC2, Microsoft essentially threw Search under the train, making some of the most bizarre user interface decisions imaginable. Why did Microsoft decide to decimate the great Search tool?

While its easy to see the simple genius of Project Blackbox (the simple genius represented by the “why hasn’t somebody already thought of this?!” statement when you first see something of this nature), there was one question that I had in the back of my mind that left me wondering if this would become a *nix niche market leader, or a true pioneering platform bound to take the Lions Share of the data-center market.

The question: What are my operating system options?

The answer is contained in the following 2minute:22second clip from Jonathan Schwartz,

[video] Schwartz on Sun’s new movable server | CNET News.com

From Oracle OpenWorld 2006: Sun President Jonathan Schwartz discusses his company’s new movable server and supercomputer, the Sun Blackbox.

For those of you who don’t have the same mentioned 2:22 to spare (though when you do, it’s worth every second of your investment to watch)…

In my last blog, I wrote that Microsoft has abandoned the power user. But there’s also some possible good news: The company says the next version of Internet Explorer will include features dear to the hearts of power users.

Attribution Lineage: Dare Obasanjo < PaoloM < Some Genius @ Apple Support < Some BlackHat Hacker @ Some Contract Manufacturer Somewhere Else In The World (if I had a link I would provide it.) < Some BlackHat Hacker(s) Who Wrote The RavMonE.exe virus (ditto)
---

Inoculation Effect

In communication theory, the inoculation effect refers to a strategy of prejudicing one’s audience against an opposing argument they may hear in the future.

Inoculation Theory

The application to persuasion is apparent. If we want to strengthen existing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, inoculation theory suggests that we should present a weak attack on those attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Again, the key word here is, “weak.” If the attack is too strong, it will cause the attitude, belief, or behavior to get weaker or even move to the opposite position. The attack has to be strong enough to challenge the defenses of the receiver without overwhelming them.

Here are the steps of effective inoculation:

Warn the receiver of the impending attack.
Make a weak attack.
Get the receiver to actively defend the attitude.

Inoculation Instance

Small Number of Video iPods Shipped With Windows Virus

We recently discovered that a small number - less than 1% - of the Video iPods available for purchase after September 12, 2006, left our contract manufacturer carrying the Windows RavMonE.exe virus. This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it. So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

So here’s my question,

The upcoming final releases of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 make one thing exceedingly clear: Microsoft has abandoned the power user, allowing fewer and fewer customizations and tweaks. By doing this, they’re leaving behind a very loyal audience.

The biggest skeptic about Vista shipping on time has finally thrown in the towel and said it looks like Microsoft will make its ship date. Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, who previously has said Vista wont make ship date, has backed off, and sent a note to clients saying that Microsoft will most likely hit its November enteprise ship date, and January consumer launch.

I’ve been using every build of Vista I can get my hands on for quite some time. But I’m staying away from 5728 — I’ve heard it’s got troubles. What have other people found?

Want to check out Microsoft’s new Windows Vista Tips & Tricks site? If you’re a Vista user, don’t bother — the list of top tips is posted in a .pdf Acrobat file, and Acrobat doesn’t ship as part of Vista. What was Microsoft thinking?

The Vista RC1 build is solid and speedy, although there are still plenty of issues with it. But no matter what, it will ship on time — Paul Thurrott points out a clever way for Microsoft to ship Vista, even if it’s not ready for prime time.

The timeline for Vista ship is this: Code finalizes on October 27, and Windows Vista Enterprise edition ships as a volume-license version by the end of November. Then at the end of January, 2007, Vista ships on new PCs, and is available via retail.

What about all the driver issues, hardware glitches, software incompatibilities, and related problems most likely to still be around on October 27?

No problem. Because Vista isn’t due until January, Microsoft can work on fixes for several more months. Then when someone fires up Vista in January, those fixes will auto-update directly into the OS.

In Thurrott’s words, “This is the software equivalent of pulling a plane away from the gate at an airport and then claiming an on-time departure: It feels deceptive, but it gets the job done.”

Don’t be surprised if this is exactly what happens.

I’ve installed Vista RC1 and am putting it through its paces, and after hours of review, it’s clear: RC1 is a winner. Up until now I’ve been a skeptic, but this version of Vista is fast, clean, well-organized, and with plenty of driver support. Microsoft may well meet its shipping date.

I downloaded RC-1 this morning and decided to note how long it took to install and how many reboots are involved. Why? I’ve installed Vista many many times over the past 18 months or so. It seems to have gotten much smoother and a little bit faster. But, it also seems like there are more and more reboots involved. So, here’s what I noted this morning.

Want to know how much Vista will cost when it’s released? Microsoft isn’t talking, but if you check out the Amazon pages for Vista, you’ll find the pricing revealed, in black and white.

Admit it, so do you!

NOTE: Please tell me I’m not the only one on the planet who thinks that,

a) Jordon is funny.
b) Jordon is HILARIOUS!
c) Jordon is *HOT*, *HOT*, *HOT* (probably married), but she’s still *HOT*!

EXTENDED NOTE: Just in case, the above is not a multiple choice question. ;)

Okay, back to the grind stone… Just needed to get that out of my system.

I feel better now, don’t you? :D

EXTENSION-TO-EXTENDED NOTE: Just in case you’re not already subscribed, as per her note in the above linked bio,

If you’d like to sign up for my newsletter click here and check the box beside “Code Project Insider”.

I promise… regardless of whether you share my crush, her daily tech briefs are something you will look forward to none-the-less.

Shove over, desktop - BumpTop to play fast and loose with digital media - O’Reilly Digital Media Blog

Imagine BumpTop used as a way of organizing tracks for a sequencer, or of storing and retrieving video clips. We would have entirely new ways of working with this kind of data. I invite you to apply your imaginations to this now, because there is serious interest in developing BumpTop as a real product.

I can hardly wait.

Why wait?

Bad news for those concerned about Windows security: At the Black Hat security conference last week, hacker managed to crack into the system — and this before it’s even released.

and apparently thats the exact situation I’m faced with,

BetaNews | Microsoft Kills Virtual PC for Mac

What has been a foregone conclusion for many Mac users has finally been confirmed: Microsoft’s Virtual PC is dead. In a statement provided to BetaNews Monday, the company said its Macintosh Business Unit has decided not to go forward with a version of the software native to the Intel platform.

Well, wasn’t the first time I was wrong, and it most certainly won’t be the last. Of course, there are *MUCH* worse things in life than being wrong about something.

For example, not being right (or making things right, as is the case with this.)

A J2EE Moment of Zen - Miguel de Icaza

Avalon marks the end of the American Dream.

Which dream would that be? Or better said, which “American Dream” are you refering to?

See, the way I see it is this: The “American Dream” is itself paying for its sins. But not because the “American” dream is a bad thing in and of itself, and instead because ‘Dreams’ and ‘Reality’ — Well they’re just not always the same thing, now are they.

Miguel, you know better than I do that the “American” heritage began *CENTURIES* before the United States came into existence. As such, it is my belief that the *REAL* “American Dream” is not represented by that in which the average citizen of the USA believes it should be, and instead by the foundation of *FREEDOM* in which the “American Heritage” has been built upon since the day the *HUMAN SPIRIT* entered the *AMERICAS* and called this same claimed land — *HOME*.

So I’ll ask again….

The “American Dream”?

Which dream would that be?

Steve Ballmer recently issued a mea culpa when he admitted that Microsoft bit off more than it could chew when it embarked on its Vista upgrade that was to change virutally everything about Windows. Unfortunately, though, he went on to say that Microsoft will succeed by going in many directions, and being a “multicore” company. He’s got that exactly wrong.

Is this a radical idea?

I’m about to publish an article advocating that ASP.NET programmers should be able to use Atlas controls to obtain Ajax client-side capabilities with zero Javascript programming. Is this really a radical idea?