Happy 12th Anniversary Ilium!

Ilium Software has been celebrating their 12th anniversary this week. All week long they’ve been offering a discount on all of their products.  You can save $12 off any purchase over $12 – how cool is that?!  Head on over to this page on their website for all the details and to select what products you want to buy. I’ve been using eWallet since forever.  It’s a great app, just like all of Ilium’s applications, and I recommend it to everyone. 

And my apologies to Ilium (especially Julie) for not posting this earlier.  They sent me all the details last weekend, but I’ve been so busy this week that I totally forgot about this until now.  I hope the celebration has been great!

Mini Review: Spb Mobile Shell 3.0

Well, this isn’t really a review, more of an opinion piece.

After seeing the initial information about Spb’s Mobile Shell 3.0 I was very impressed and wanted to take a closer look. I started by taking a look at an in depth review from Remo at MobilityMinded.com. Take a look at his review when you get a chance.

In the past I have actually tried a lot of shell type applications and have just not been overly impressed. I like the idea of putting a new face on the today screen, and that has been pretty much been all that most shells are capable of. I generally just play around with a trial version and then get rid of it within short order. I am slightly manic (is that possible?) about keeping my gear running as quickly as possible and have mostly seen these kinds of applications as wasteful resource hogs.

Spb’s Mobile Shell 3.0 has been a wonderful exception! It doesn’t seem to affect system performance at all and is so fluid. It is certainly finger friendly and it is quite obvious that a lot of time and effort was put into its design.

Mobile Shell 3.0 actually goes fairly deep. It doesn’t make UI changes, simply includes a lot of functionality for commonly used actions. It really covers off some of the things you do with your smartphone everyday, such as looking at your schedule, looking up contacts, seeing mail, text and phone messages on one screen and a lot more.

Spb has really made Mobile Shell 3.0 VERY customizable. You can change the colour (theme) and select contacts for a quick view screen. Most impressively, there is a “today” screen for both professional and personal set up. The default is the professional one, but with the personal one it is kind of 3 screens together. You can place widgets on any of the 3 screens and change the background image. I am actually using this screen all the time and you can have it show all the info on the professional screen, but with the added benefit of being able to add to the 2 other screens. If none of that made sense, look at Remo’s review again. J

One of the things I really wanted to see was how this shell would run on my HTC Touch. The Touch is a slower processor than the latest WinMo devices and if it was laggy at all I would probably not be using it. I am happy to say and am impressed with how fluidly Mobile Shell 3.0 runs on my hardware. It is finger friendly and scrolls very well. It really made my Touch seem like an all new device!

The only negative I would say is that there is a noticeable delay in switching to Landscape and back. SPB knows all about this and is probably working on it. I think in their latest beta build it is better, but I haven’t tried that.

The price of Spb Mobile Shell 3.0 is $29.95, which I think is a little bit high for a mobile app, but they had done so much with this that I don’t blame them! As long as you aren’t digging change out of your sofa to buy diapers for your triplets you can probably afford the price and will feel good about it. Mobile Shell 3.0 is worth it.

Mobile Twitter - The PockeTwit Way

PockeTwit is one of the more popular Twitter clients for Windows Mobile devices.  I’ve written about this app a couple times in the past and the developers keep making it better and better and adding more and more features.  So it’s worth a re-visit.

PockeTwit works on both touch and non-touch screen devices.  When looking at a tweet, pressing left will bring up a menu showing you all the global options you can select.  And pressing right will bring up a menu with all the options you have in relation to the tweet you have selected. Over time, these menus have grown to include more and more options. Beyond the normal twitter client features, with PockeTwit, you can easily:

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Twikini - Taking a Look at a New Twitter Client

Do you tweet? Are you looking to tweet from your Windows Mobile device? You can always go direct and use Twitters mobile site – http://m.twitter.com, but today’s crop of applications offer a lot more than the basic web experience that Twitter offers. Over the next couple days I’m going to take an look at a couple of the major players for Windows Mobile. Today we’re going to take a look at Twikini from Trinket Software.

Twikini splashed down on Windows Mobile users around the middle of April. Twikini is currently in beta and is a free download. It has a super small footprint of around 100KB and it has to be one of the fastest Twitter clients available for Windows Mobile. The navigation is simple, pressing left of right on a message will automatically create a reply or direct message to that person. This feature gives Twikini the shortest number of key press’s or taps to reply to a tweet. And, of course, up and down will scroll through messages.

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Excuse Me, That’s a Nice Looking Phone

Over the weekend I spent some time at a birthday party for a friend’s son. Through all the noise and commotion I spotted another Dad playing a game on his i-mate device. It’s not uncommon to see parents with their face buried in their mobile device at these events. However, I don’t often see people with i-mate devices. I’m seeing more and more Windows Mobile, but not so much with i-mate. So I figured that this person was either a hardcore i-mate fan, or a Windows Mobile fan who just happens to have settled on the i-mate PDAL device. Either way, I decided to talk with him and see how he liked Windows Mobile and i-mate.

I asked him how he liked that phone because I don’t see many of those around here. I even pulled out my BlackJack II so he could see that I am also a Windows Mobile user and hopefully jump right into a nice geek conversation about mobility. Ha! What really surprised me was that he didn’t really understand that he was running Windows Mobile. In fact, he didn’t even know the name. Now, a lot of people don’t know the Windows Mobile name. But someone running i-mate hardware is typically more aware of the OS than the average user who picked out the device from the carriers line-up. This person went on to tell me how great it is because he can open Excel documents on his device. Which clearly tells me that he didn’t understand that my device, although different in looks, runs the same OS.

What I’ve been trying to figure out since then is if this was a problem with him not understanding that Windows Mobile runs on numerous different devices? Or was it more that my device looked too “BlackBerry-ish” so he took one look and figured I was using a BlackBerry based device and felt the need to tell me why his was so great? Both of these are growing problems. So much so, that Microsoft is now calling Windows Mobile devices “Windows Phones” (the actual OS name will still remain Windows Mobile) in hopes that people will better connect with the OS of the device. I’m not sure that this will help people better understand that their Moto Q is running the same OS as the BlackJack II, or that the HTC Diamond is running the same as the Samsung Omnia. Both HTC and Samsung are doing their part to build iconic devices. Microsoft needs to do their part to take their OS to a new level and educate the consumer about Windows Mobile. What do you say Microsoft? Are your product and marketing team up to the challenge?

Pocketwit is Still the Best Twitter Client for Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile has had a hard time when it comes to good Twitter clients. There’s a short list of clients, and a even shorter list of clients worth installing. Pocketwit has been atop of that list for a while and the latest version has helped cement it’s position even more. With version 0.68 Pocketwit has added some really cool new features. The one that really caught my eye, is the fetching of images from TwitPic or other Twitter image hosting solutions. The image isn’t displayed inline, but when you tap on a tweet and select to follow the TwitPic link, instead of having IE Mobile pop up and waiting for the site to load, you instantly see the TwitPic image. Then you can choose to continue onto the TwitPic site if you really want.

Another really awesome addition, is the ability to email a Tweet.  When you select “Email Status” you can pick which email account you want to send this message from and then you’re presented with a standard compose screen for email. I’ve just installed the latest version of Pocketwit and I’ve already used this feature a couple times. 

As you use Pocketwit, it tracks the people you receive tweets from and then displays them in an auto-complete fashion when you’re typing a message.  This is simply great when you’re on a mobile device and you’re trying to recall the exact spelling of someone’s account name. Not everyone’s address is as easy as MobileJaw. Read more

Microsoft’s New Recite For Windows Mobile Reviewed

Microsoft has just released a new application for Windows Mobile users called Recite. Recite uses search technology along with voice pattern matching to help locate an audio note and play it back.  Simply put, record yourself talking and then search through previous recordings to find the one you’re looking for. Think of it like this, a voice reminder application with search!

Recite requires Windows Mobile 6.0 or newer and can be downloaded for free from Microsoft’s website at http://recite.microsoft.com or directly on your phone by visiting http://recite.microsoft.com/download. Currently the application is a “technology preview”, basically a beta state.  Microsoft is encouraging customers to download it and give it a try.  So I did! The download is about 800KB and the install is straight forward.

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Top Applications of 2008 for Windows Mobile

“2008 marks the 5th year that I have published a end-of-the-year Top 10 applications for Windows Mobile.  I enjoy doing this little round up each year as it allows me to take a look back at all of the new and exciting applications that came out in 2008 and narrow them down to the ten applications that I think every Windows Mobile owner should have on their device.  The trick, however, is narrowing it down to 10 applications!  2008 marked a banner year for many developers in the community as virtually every major application available at the beginning of the year had been updated once if not twice by the time December rolled in.”

Clinton Fitch has posted a list of the top 10 applications released this year for Windows Mobile. It’s a pretty interesting list when you consider that the list is dominated by 3 different companies.  There are 4 applications from Spb, 2 from Vito, as well as 2 from Illium. Resco and Astraware both have just 1 application.  There’s no question in my mind that these companies make top-notch applications.  I do wonder what’s happened to the software marketplace for Windows Mobile.  Have all the small guys packed up shop and moved on to Apple or Google’s mobile platform? Or is this just a result of the best getting better?

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Finally An Excellent Twitter Client for Windows Mobile - Pocketwit

I’ve talked in the past about how there are no good Twitter clients for Windows Mobile, especially on the Standard or Non-Touch Screen devices. That’s all changed thanks to Pocketwit. This is hands down, the best Twitter client I have seen. The user interface is unique and stylish, yet still very easy to use. It fully supports both touch screen and non-touch screen devices. And while those things are nice, it’s just the tip of what makes Pocketwit such a great Twitter client. When you post a reply or an update, Pocketwith will automatically grab your GPS co-ordinates and update your location information to reflect that. As well, it fully supports TwitPic allowing you to either include an existing image or snap a quick shot with the camera while typing up your post.

If that wasn’t enough, Pocketwit will automatically check for updates on startup and ask you if you want to download and install them. I’ve been running Pocketwit for a couple weeks now, and I’ve seen 4 or 5 updates in that timeframe that add new features and fix the odd bug too. My point is this, the guys behind Pocketwit are working hard at updating and improving this app. Which hopefully means that this is only going to get better as time goes by. Pocketwit also has support for multiple Twitter or identi.ca accounts. This is great for those of you that are managing a personal twitter account along with a company or blog account. Read more

Customize the New Sliding Panel Home Screen on Windows Mobile 6.1

I’m sure that everyone with a Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touch screen) device has been busy playing with the new sliding panel home screen. The question routinely comes up on how to modify the panels and their order as well as add new panels. The answer was easy – simply edit the corresponding xml and registry settings. Unfortunately, the answer may have been easy, but actually doing it can be difficult for some.

Enter CHome Configurator from mind of tlogix over at Smartphone: Nuts & Bolts. This utility will ease the pain of customizing the new sliding panel home screen to your liking. CHome Configurator allows you to add new panels, and modify or delete existing panels without having to mess around with xml files and registry settings. Best of all, this utility is FREE! So you can easily and affordably customize your 6.1 home screen. Now, I would love to see a home screen theme that takes advantage of the sliding panel design. Who’s up to that challenge?

Once you’ve download the 2 CAB files (one for the application and another for the Icon Pack), copy them to your device and install them. Both of these CAB files are pretty small and I would recommend installing them to the device and not the storage card.  I’m sure it might be possible to place them on the storage card, but you wouldn’t want to risk any problems using the home screen if the storage card becomes corrupt or is removed.

So, download CHome, customize your home screen and share with us the changes you made. I’ll be playing around with it over the course of the next couple days and I’ll post back with the additions and changes that I’ve made. 

One thing to note; If you are running a Windows Mobile Professional device, this application will not work for you. The sliding panel home screen is available on Standard (non-touch screen) devices only. This is due to the fact that Pro devices do not use the same XML based configuration for the today screen.

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