Sep
25
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, September 25, 2008 10:30pm
 If you’re a Sling fan like I am, then you’ll be excited to hear that Sling has started to ship the Slingbox Pro HD. The Pro HD hardware allows you to stream high def content in HD. While the regular Slingbox will stream your HD channels, it doesn’t offer HD quality. So the Pro HD is a welcome addition for HD fans. If you’re confused over the different versions of Slingbox and what each one offers over the other, you should check out this comparison guide on Sling’s website.
Along with the new hardware, there is a new version of the SlingPlayer Windows software available. Version 2 adds support for the new Pro HD hardware along with an updated interface, live video buffer, and the new SlingPlayer Guide. The new software doesn’t require the Pro HD hardware, so feel free to download it and run it against your existing Sling hardware. You can see more details about this release, along with screenshots over at Sling’s website.
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Sep
25
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, September 25, 2008 9:30pm
 Paul from MoDaCo, is asking for input from readers on your level of interest in purchasing a group of applications bundled together. The expected retail cost of the bundle would be around $200, but the bundle price would be about $50. Assuming there’s 10 applications in this bundle, some quick math would give us an approximate price of $20 per app. So if there’s more than 3 (2.5 to be exact) applications that you would have purchased in the bundle, then the rest of the apps are essentially free.
This could be really good for new Windows Mobile users who don’t already have any of the applications in the bundle. Or for anyone looking at picking up a couple new applications at a discounted price. The down-side is that the developer is getting a new customer but at a fraction of the revenue that they normally would have had. So if even a tenth of these new customers contact the company for support, the newly found revenue is gone. Of course, the increased customer base is always beneficial.
I’m certainly interested in a good deal. I just hope the companies that signup for Bundle.One @ MoDaCo are offering worth-while applications. I’ll be watching what happens.
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Sep
25
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, September 25, 2008 9:45am
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on my status in the No Reboot Challenge. First off, I want to welcome another site - Mobi - gas - mic, to the challenge. As I’ve said before, it’s great to see such a wide reception for the challenge within the community. 
I had a close call on rebooting last week, the worst part is, it wasn’t intentional. I was slipping the phone into my pocket and I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was doing. I ended up missing my pocket and the phone fell towards the ceramic tile floor. Luckily, it bounced off my shoe and came to rest gently, or somewhat gently, on the floor. When I picked it up, the battery door had slipped pen, but not enough to fall off and allow the battery to escape. Needless to say, I have been much more careful about the handling of my device since this event.
My recent trip to New York also presented a little problem (besides the thumb issue). Typically I would swap SIMs from my Canadian Fido SIM to my US AT&T SIM. For obvious reasons, this just wasn’t an option. So instead, I just dropped my AT&T SIM into a spare phone and used that instead. I put my regular phone into flight mode and locked the keypad until I returned to Canada. Disaster adverted.
I started this challenge over a month ago (August 19th) and to-date I haven’t had a single issue with the memory management of my Windows Mobile 6.1 device. No reboots, no crashes, no odd behaviour. It’s pretty clear to me that Windows Mobile is and can be a stable OS. 1 Month down, and many more to go.
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Sep
3
Written by: Mike Temporale
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 8:00am
The No Reboot Challenge is growing in popularity! I would like to welcome Bambi from Windows Mobile Cool to the challenge. So we know have Chris Spera, Dieter Bohn, Bambi, myself, and all the readers from each site that have joined in which is simply amazing. I also want to thank Tariq from My Today Screen for posting about it on the site - I wonder what it’s going to take to get Tariq to join in on the challenge? And let’s not stop there, I would love to see others joining in as well.
 Now down to the details; It’s been 15 days since I started this challenge (August 19th) and so far things have been smooth sailing. Cellular reception has been top notch, there’s been no weird missed calls, and no abnormal behaviour from any applications - aside from IE Mobile using 25MB. Thankfully it’s down to a reasonable 5.6MB.  Windows Mobile has actually done very well at closing applications that are left open in memory. I regularly use the Task Manager to switch between applications and I have noticed that Windows Mobile will shutdown applications that haven’t been used in a while if it starts to get concerned about memory usage.
The phone was put into flight mode over the long weekend. My wife and I took the kids to the cottage and there’s no cell reception unless I put my feet into the lake and hold the phone just so. Instead of leaving the phone radio on and hunting for signal, I simply dropped it into flight mode and left it on the kitchen table. When we left the cottage I turned the radio back on and it picked up a signal pretty quickly and everything returned to normal. As a quick aside, when I did this a couple years back with a 2003 SE device, it didn’t come out of flight mode as easily. Something has changed over the years, and for the better too!
With everything running so smoothly, I think the only thing that could knock me off course is Samsung releasing Windows Mobile 6.1 for the BlackJack II. Oh, and lookie here - they just did. D’OH! Must resist…
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Aug
26
Written by: Mike Temporale
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 10:30am
First off, I want to welcome Dieter Bohn from WMExperts to the No Reboot Challenge. It’s great to see others giving it a go and seeing how long they can run without having to reboot. For me, it’s been 7 days and things are going very well. I did see some weirdness this morning when I awoke, I noticed that I didn’t have the standard SPAM in my inbox, so I figured there was something going on. When I attempted to do a sync it failed. I then attempted to pull up a couple web sites and they failed too. This is either a problem with the device or the carrier. Next step was to disable the data network and then reestablish a connection and the pages still failed to load. So, if felt to me like a carrier problem. I put the phone down and started my regular morning routine. When I picked up the phone 30 minutes later the internet was up and running again. So it doesn’t look like it was anything to do with my device. Just my carrier playing games with me. Isn’t that nice of them? 
And for those keeping count; my first update was made to the original post. From now on I think I will just make a new post on the site. It makes it easier for everyone to follow along in their RSS clients.
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Aug
21
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, August 21, 2008 7:00am
 I was just posting an update to my progress in the “No Reboot Challenge” when I noticed something interesting; Internet Explorer Mobile is using almost 24MB on my device. What could be the reason for this? It’s not like the page I have open is huge or anything. In fact, it’s just the mobile home page of Twitter. Considering that the non-mobile version of the page is just 61,253 bytes, I can’t imagine the mobile version is somehow 22.9MB larger!
I wonder if this is some sort of error in reporting how memory is actually being used by IE Mobile, perhaps it should be 2.35MB? I’m pretty sure that it’s not showing the total downloaded via IE Mobile for that season. I might do a fair amount of Twitter, Netvibes, and Mobile Olympics coverage, but I can’t see it being 24MB in the last 24 or so hours since I hard reset the device.
At the Windows Mobile 6.1 announcement, Microsoft promised to release IE 6 on Windows Mobile 6.1. If this is any indication of what we can expect, then I’m happy without seeing the functionality of IE 6 making its way to my device!
Anyone have any idea’s what might be the cause of this weird memory usage might be?
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Aug
20
Written by: Mike Temporale
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 9:45am
 “…the newest version of Spb Software House’s has to be considered one of the best already. Version 2.0 of Backup builds on an already solid foundation that was set in version 1.5 but layers on key functionality that allows you to backup and restore literally any aspect of your device. Some of the new features include synchronization of your backup files to your PC, the ability to intelligently determine if you are restoring data to a new device or to a device in which you have upgraded the ROM, a new user interface and ability to unpack a backup file on your PC makes this application solid choice for your backup needs.”
Clinton has recently posted a review of the new Spb Backup 2.0. Backups are something everyone should be doing on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s your mobile device or your desktop computer. If it has anything valuable on it, you need to back it up. The latest version from Spb allows you to sync the backup files with your desktop computer. It sounds like a great idea to help keep a running history from your device. Check out his full review here.
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Aug
19
Written by: Mike Temporale
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 1:30pm
In my recent post about stability, I talked about Windows Mobile and how it is a stable platform. The source of all that instability is poorly written 3rd party applications. To help prove my point, I’m taking on the “No Reboot Challenge”. The idea is simple, no more reboots of my phone for any reason and let’s see how long I can go before it starts acting funny or crashing. Furthermore, I won’t be killing or stopping any process’s. I’ll leave that up to Windows Mobile and Microsoft to see if they truly know best when it comes to managing memory on the device. The only applications that I will close are ones that have an Exit option in the menu.
To get the ball started on the right foot, I’m going to hard reset my device so I can be sure that there’s nothing weird hanging around in there. I’m doing this on a Samsung BlackJack II with a near final build of Windows Mobile 6.1. From what I’ve been told, this is what will be shipped on upcoming BlackJack II’s from AT&T. If you’re following along and taking the challenge with me, it doesn’t really matter what version of Windows Mobile you have on your device. I just ask that it’s the production ROM and not something that’s been cooked up and downloaded from the internet. The changes added into those illegal ROMs could easily be a source of instability.
After hard resetting the device, I need to ActiveSync it with my laptop to get all my Contacts, calendar, etc.. synced to it. Also, there are a couple applications that I can’t do without. So I’ve installed the following: Ilium’s eWallet, Sling Media’s SlingPlayer Mobile, Modaco’s Smartphone GPS Utility, and Microsoft’s Live Search. I use these applications on an almost daily basis and can’t imagine being without those. I also need to add my the data settings for my network so I can actually use data on the device. The last thing to do is configure email on the device. I’ve added 2 email accounts and both are set to pull email from the last 3 days and will do that every 60 minutes.
That’s it - that’s all the changes / additions I’ve made to the default configuration of this device. From now on I won’t reboot the device or close programs. I’ll be making updates to this post on a regular basis over the coming weeks reporting on how things are going. The success of my mobility is in the hands of Microsoft.
UPDATE (August 20 @ 10:10pm) - Everything has been going very well so far. I always forget how much there is to setup and configure on a freshly reset device. I went to use my JawBone Bluetooth headset only to learn that it hasn’t been paired with the phone since it was reset. Not a big deal, but it does make it a little hard to use. ;) I also noticed that my mobile favorites had not synced back to the device. If I recall, this is a bug with the Windows Mobile Device Center. Annoying, but again, not the end of the world.
I’ve included a screen shot of the task manager so you can see what applications are running on the device. The items that are below the fold are Ilium’s Screen Capture tool and the Task Manager itself.
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Aug
16
Written by: Mike Temporale
Saturday, August 16, 2008 11:33pm
 I know I’ve talked about it a couple of times around here, but I’m going to mention it again - I’m hooked on watching the Olympics. Unfortunately, today we had plans to take the kids to Canada’s Wonderland (the Canadian version of Disneyland). That means leaving early and missing out on watching the Men’s 100m race. The current Olympic record was still held by Canada’s Donovan Bailey from his race 12 years ago when he won Gold. This time, a Jamaican runner by the name Usain Bolt almost broke that record in the qualifying and he wasn’t even running full speed. So there was a huge chance that this record might fall and I wanted to watch that. The solution was easy - SlingMobile.
I was able to watch the moment live on my cell phone thanks to SlingBox. We stopped for gas and to grab some cash from the ATM machine shortly before the race was to begin and just across the street from our destination. Using SlingMobile I was able to tune into my TV back at home and watch the race live. As expected, Usain Bolt blasted down the track smashing Donovan’s previous Olympic record of 9.89 from the 1996 Olympics with a 9.68 run - AMAZING. It’s a really great feeling to know that I can be out spending time with the family and still keep track of what’s happening half way around the world. SlingMobile rocks!
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Jul
24
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, July 24, 2008 2:15pm
 There are a number of different applications out there that will backup your Windows Mobile device. Some do it over ActiveSync from your desktop while others actually run on the device and save the backup to a storage card. Most of these apps are pretty good and provide a great way to create a 100% image of your device. However, for me, I just want to backup my contacts and appointments - my PIM data. If I’m out roaming the world and my device has some major crash, having a copy of my contacts and appointments that I can restore to the device after a hard reset is imperative. I already keep a folder on my MicroSD card with all the CAB files for the applications I use. So I can reinstall them without much concern. The other advantage of backing up just the contacts and appointments is that they can easily be restored to a different device in the case where my device meets an early demise.
To do a complete backup of your all your PIM data on a device, I’ve been using a free application from “Dot Fred”. You can download a copy from his website - www.dotfred.net. It’s not that pretty an application, but when it comes to functionality, it’s top notch. If you’re looking at running this on a Smartphone, be prepared for a little more work as the interface is clearly designed for tapping on. It can still be used, but there’s a lot of scrolling and tabbing around at times.
 PIM Backup doesn’t just backup your contacts and appointments, it also backs up the speed dial settings you’ve created along, call logs, messages, and there is even a custom option that allows you to select individual files or folders that you want to include in the backup. Once you’ve selected everything, you can select the destination for the backup along with creating a schedule for when you want it to run.
The only drawback that I have found in my use of this app, besides the poor interface for non-touch screen devices, is that it on restore it doesn’t create the mailboxes for the messages to go in. If you create the account first and then run restore, it will put them back into that inbox, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t create that account. I’m hoping that this is something that can be added in the future. For me, it’s the only thing missing on an otherwise great backup application. Regardless of that, you can’t go wrong for the price! Dot Fred has done a great job on this utility.
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