Let’s start with how to turn on the speech feature. All you need to do, is open Settings and scroll down until you find "speech", and tap on it. This is where you can configure the speech engine for use. The first check box will enable the speech engine to work over the internet. This is important if you want to dictate text messages, as it needs to off load the processing of that audio to the powerful servers on the internet. They can rip through the audio and return accurate results quickly. If you’re are not going to send text messages, then you could leave this off. Personally, I would leave it on, even if you’re not using text messages. Who knows what other applications might start taking advantage of this in the future. It’s nice to have it on and ready, even if you never use it.

The second check box allows you to start the speech engine even if the phone is locked. This is a little confusing, as it’s not the regular screen lock that it’s talking about. It’s referring to the pin lock on the lock screen. If you have your phone protected by a pin code that has to be entered to unlock the screen, this feature will allow you to use some of the speech features even if the pin code has not been entered. However, you can’t do everything. It won’t launch applications, or search Bing. It will text your friends, or call contacts.

Turning on the Play audio confirmations feature will have the speech engine confirm things with you before taking action. For the first while, I think it’s best to use this feature. At least until you’re confident that the engine is accurate in listening to your words. I’ve been using speech for a while now, and I still have this turned on. I like having that confirmation, but that’s me.

The final option is when the speech engine should read out your text messages. By default, it’s set to Bluetooth only, but you can set this to Bluetooth and headsets, wired headsets only, always, and off. I have it set to always. When you get a text message, it will start by telling you who it’s from and ask if you want it to read the message. So you don’t have to worry that it will automatically start reading the message aloud. Also, you can quickly tap the volume button and it will cancel the speech engine. So it’s easy enough to stop if it’s not a good time to have it read out the message.

I wish that the Windows Phone team had given the speech engine a catchy name – like Apple did with Siri. Just think of how much cooler this article would have been if it was writing Jane instead of speech engine. It’s powered by Microsoft’s TellMe service, but you still can’t address it in the same way. Maybe in the future it will take on more natural feel and lose a little of the robot like instructions.

Now for some of the fun things you can do with the speech engine. I find it’s handy to use for launching FourSquare and doing quick searches on Bing. Another fun thing, is to set your buddy’s first name as "the" and last name as "devil". Then when you get a text message, your phone will say "New text message from the devil. You can say read it or ignore". Of course, you can do a lot more than just “The Devil”, but I’ll leave that up to you to play with. You can also use this service to update your Twitter status. Just make sure to setup Twitter for SMS support, then add it to your contacts, and you can now dictate your next status update!

First off, let’s get the availability questions out of the way. I’m writing this review based on Release Candidate of Carbon. If all goes well, the next step is releasing it in the Market Place. Hopefully there is no RC2 and you’ll be able to try it out yourself really soon.

What makes Carbon such a great twitter application? Features like: multiple Twitter accounts, Gesture support (for quick actions and replies), translations, username autocomplete, background updates, Live tiles and notifications, threaded DMs, and so much more. But perhaps one of the greatest features is that everything is available on the same screen. You don’t see a lot of windows opening. Most of the functionality is done with pivots.

When you launch Carbon the first time, you’re presented with the timeline view that will populate with the last 60 tweets in you stream. This number of tweets is configurable up to 100. This screen is pretty much what you would expect – scrolling up and down to view your twitter stream. Swipe your finger across the screen, and you’ll be looking at your mentions stream. A double tap on any tweet will kick you into the quick reply mode, or you can simply tap and hold the tweet for a list of actions like reply, quote, and retweet, that can be preformed on that tweet. Swipe your finger across the screen again, and now you’re looking at messages (DMs) and once more and you’re viewing the quickline. Quickline allows you to see any retweets of your messages, retweets to you, retweets by you, or select a list to view.

Along the bottom of these 4 main screens you have quick access buttons for creating new tweets, accessing the Carbon menu, searching, and refreshing the page. If you pull up drawer along the bottom, you will also have access to view trends (what’s trending on Twitter), go to @tweep, and accounts & settings. The really interesting one here is the go to @tweep. This will ask you for a Twitter account that you want to view. Just type in a name and it will take you right to that persons page. From here, you have access to all sorts of information like the person bio, location, and following status. You can also swipe to quickly view their timeline, mentions, friends, followers, favorites, and see any lists that they may be part of. You can also quickly tweet or DM them, and if need be, you can also report and block them.

 If you tap on a tweet in your stream, you’re taken to a new screen that shows you tweet, and if there’s a link to Twitpic or the like, it will automatically load that image below the tweet. So you don’t have to jump out of the app to see the image. If you pull up the bottom drawer on the tweet screen, you have the added ability to share the tweet over email or SMS. You can also copy the text of the tweet or even kick off a translate

Swiping on this screen takes you between the Tweep and their message. This screen is the same screen you would see if you used the go to @tweep feature I mentioned earlier. The only difference here, is that you have the individual tweet you tapped on, showing on the screen next to the users details.

If you happen to tap on a tweet that is part of a conversation, there is a new screen inserted between the individual tweet and the users details that shows you the entire conversation thread.

With the release of Mango for Windows Phone, developers have so much more that they can do with their applications. It’s nice to see that Carbon is already integrated some of those features into the product. The animated live tiles that flip between your avatar and the Carbon logo are pretty slick. Plus, you can pin the timeline for each account right to your home page. So with a single tap I can launch into the Mobile Jaw stream. If you enable the live tile updates, it will even populate the tile when there are new mentions or DMs. You can also pin the compose window on your home screen. So a single tap on that tile, and you’re able to start tweeting – quick and easy.

 If you do have multiple accounts in Carbon, the compose screen will let you tap on the account name, and quickly switch between accounts. Unfortunately, there is no way to post the same tweet from multiple accounts at the same time. You’re only able to select a single account to post messages from. However, considering how often I do something like that, and given the ability to Copy and Paste (thanks to the NoDo update!) I can quickly copy the text of my post before sending and then paste it into a new compose window so it can be sent again from another account.

Windows Phone limits you to one Twitter account. I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of accounts you can setup with Carbon, but you can certainly see that it allows both of my accounts to be set-up, and it’s still allowing me to add another one. So it’s at least, 3 accounts.

There’s just about everything you would like to find in the settings for Carbon. You can customize and fine tune the experience to be just what you like – define the retweet style, change the number of new tweets to download, after refreshing what should have focus, and even support for things like TwitLonger, bit.ly and bit.ly Pro.

For my usage, Carbon has proven to be the most reliable, the fastest, and the easiest to use Twitter client on Windows Phone. The developers were more than happy to work with the beta group and listen to all their feedback. The end result is a really solid version 1 release that is loaded with features and functionality. Give it a try when it appears in the marketplace – I think you’ll be impressed as well.

First off is Twitter integration into the people hub. Much like the way Facebook has been integrated, Twitter will also see a close integration in the people hub allowing you to easily see what your friends are tweeting about right along side of those Facebook updates.  Full SkyDrive integration is also coming before the end of 2011. This will allow you to get those Office documents from the cloud to the phone without the hassle found today.

IE mobile will be moving to the IE 9 engine by the end of the year. The same engine used in IE 9 on the desktop will be powering IE 9 Mobile on Windows Phone, with full support for HTML 5 and hardware acceleration. During the demo, they showed the a Windows Phone 7 device running the IE9 Fish test page above with 50 fish swimming around versus the same page on an iPhone 4 device. No question, the Windows Phone device was swimming circles around the iPhone. The end result is a super rich browsing experience on the mobile platform and once again, coming to Windows Phone before the end of 2011.

Another addition heading to Windows Phone users before the end of 2011 is “full” multi-tasking. Steve was quick to poke the stick at competitors that offer a half baked multi-tasking solution, but failed to elaborate on how they will be offering multi-tasking without run-away apps and the battery hit that Windows Mobile suffered from. Microsoft did talk about how this has been specially designed to minimize the impact on the battery. But we really don’t know much more than that at this time. Along with multi-tasking comes fast application switching with a long press on the back button. The current behavior of the back button will not change, but the addition of application switching will be possible with a long press on the back button. This will result in a series of cards that pop up on the screen allowing you to scroll between each of the open applications. All in all, it looks very slick and very promising.

Before leaving the stage, Microsoft shared a video showing just one of the ideas they are working on for a greater sense of integration between Windows Phone and the Xbox. This early sample shows the Windows Phone running as a extension of the Xbox and Kinect allowing others to be part of the experience.

The following video’s show off the multi-tasking demo and then the extensions for Xbox with Kinect. However, if you want to see the full keynote, you can watch it in its entirety over on Microsoft’s site.

The winner will receive a brand new Palm Pre 2, a touchstone charger and a very nice leather case.

Be sure to follow our Palm Pre 2 coverage and reviews to learn more about this great little smartphone.  Detailed review will be coming soon and a video review shortly after.

This Palm Pre 2 is locked to the Rogers network and must be activated with them to use. The giveaway does not include any airtime. This contest is only open to Canadian residents and will only be shipped to a valid Canadian address.

This contest begins on December 25th, 2010 and will run until January 1st, 2011. A winner will be picked at random on January 2nd, 2011.

Rules: To qualify all you need to do is:

1. Follow us on twitter, @mobilejaw and RT the following:

I just entered to win a free Palm Pre 2 smartphone from @mobilejaw, open to all Canadians! http://bit.ly/gKbMOP

or…

2. Post on our facebook page wall at facebook.com/MobileJaw. Post the following:

Throwing my name into the hat for the Palm Pre 2 giveaway! [You can add anything else you want after this but keep it nice! ]

You can do either of these to be entered but doing both will enter your name twice! You can only enter once for this giveaway (from each of twitter and facebook), so don’t bother spamming it. If we suspect that the winner has acted fraudulently (posting multiple times from various accounts) we can, at our discretion choose a new winner. Before announcing the winner we will contact them either on twitter or facebook and they will have 48 hours to respond. If the winner does not respond in that time we will have to choose a new winner. If you have any questions about the contest please fill out our contact form here or simply reply to this thread and we’ll do our best to answer your questions.

We hope everyone is enjoying the Holiday Season. Stay safe, have fun and please share this giveaway with others.

Buzz looks to be an interesting service that is somewhere between facebook and twitter. Who knows if it will be the social network of the decade, but I’m jumping in to try it out.

One obvious thing that is missing is a way to post to twitter from Buzz. Well, you had to know someone would figure out how!

Here is the step-by-step on how to send Buzz posts to twitter:

1. Click the following link: http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/buzz
2. Connect it to your Twitter account using OAuth
3. Click this link again as the redirected page is not the correct one: http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/buzz
4. Add your Google Profile Number ID from the bottom of your profile
5. Make sure “Sync” is On and hit Submit
6. Done!!

In number 4 above you are shown your profile page, scroll to the bottom under “Profile URL” and select the link for “see other options” to show your Google Number ID. Paste the whole number in the box.

The service is powered by Pubsubhubbub and seems to work quite well.

My twitter account can be found here
My Google Buzz profile is here

Many thanks to George Millington for the link to Louis Gray’s post!!

Update: Either this service is choking on all the new content or has been shut down. I am not seeing any content getting to twitter now. Anyone else having success?

Update again: Looks like it is still working but is spotty. Let’s hope there is an official solution from Google sometime soon.

If you haven’t read my past review, it’s right here. For something a little more recent, I also recommend you take a look at the review posted by Clinton Fitch. Clinton does a great job of going over the features and showing you all the screen shots you can manage. It will give you a full understanding of what you can expect from Twikini before you even download it.

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:

• update your location based on the GPS in your device,
• email the selected message to someone that’s not on Twitter,
• search or view the public timeline,
• build a custom theme or select one of the pre-loaded themes,
• use Skweezer when following links in IE Mobile,
• set custom notifications,
• click and follow @names and #hashtags,
• create groups for different topics of conversation,
• merge tweets from multiple accounts into one timeline for easy management,
• and so much more.

PockeTwi t is easily the most feature packed mobile Twitter client I have used. How can someone go wrong with such a feature rich product? Well, there are some shortcomings. The first is the speed – PockeTwit has always suffered with speed issues. While things did improve since the early versions, the latest version has been a significant step backwards. It takes far too long to launch PockeTwit, especially the first time. On top of that scrolling through your timeline can be very painful.

The next major drawback with PockeTwit is focus – PockeTwit has always been great at keeping your position in the timeline during updates. You’ll never need to worry about losing your place. However, after large updates, the indicator shows that you are at the top of the list, but in reality you are at the bottom of the list. You need to scroll up 2-3 times before the application figures this out and correctly draws your location and the corresponding tweets. This problem also shows up when you reply or quote someone and you are not near the top of the timeline. After you submit the tweet, the screen will show tweets that are above your current position while it updates the timeline and then jump back to the correct location. This isn’t a killer problem, but it sure does get annoying.

The last issue that I’m going to focus on is the address book – PockeTwit will keep track of the people that tweet in your timeline so that you can quickly create new tweets that reference those people. It works like this; as you’re typing your tweet and enter the @ symbol, PockeTwit will pop up a window with people’s accounts making it very easy to select someone and continue. The problem here is that the popup doesn’t always draw correctly which makes it extremely hard to find the person you’re looking for. Furthermore, sometimes the person isn’t in your list yet, in which case PockeTwit has a hard time letting you enter the name. Again, it’s not a killer problem, but it sure can be annoying.

Select problems aside, PockeTwit has the best feature set and offers functionality that others can only dream of right now and is well worth the download. The single biggest issue with this client is speed. The developers need to focus their energy on getting PockeTwit to run and navigate faster.

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.

Light weight and easy to use are only part of what makes a great Twitter client. Twikini also supports updating your location using your devices GPS (although this doesn’t seem to be working with my BlackJack II ), a favourites and replies view, and a “Tweet this song” feature that will automatically tweet the song and artist that is currently being played from Windows Media Player on your device.

While Twikini is a great piece of software, it’s missing some key features before I can make it my default Twitter client. Fixing GPS on the BlackJack would be a good start, but more importantly, Twikini needs to address the following items:

• Support for Skweezer – Skweezer makes TwitPic work on Windows Mobile Standard devices. Otherwise there’s no way to see that picture. Plus it’s an all around good idea since links being sent around are not always mobile friendly.
• Remember your location in the timeline – When Twikini updates, it automatically scrolls to the top of the list and highlights the most recent tweet. It should stay focused on the tweet you had highlighted before updating.
• Send Direct Messages – This feature is coming soon, according to the Trinket website.
• Display the full tweet – Long tweets get truncated. You have to tap on or press the action button with the tweet selected to open a detailed view of the tweet just so you can read the last couple words. In cases like this, Twikini should automatically grow the window allowing you to view the whole message.
• Multiple Account Support – Ok, Twikini supports multiple accounts just as long as you don’t want to be logged into both at the same time. Twikini really needs the ability to have multiple accounts open and merged into one timeline.

It’s already got the speed and size nailed down and with these 5 features along with the fix for GPS on the BlackJack II, it would make Twikini the Twitter client to beat. Keep your eye’s on this hot up-and-comer.

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.

Of course, there’s always a little pain with changes. The first problem I’m having is that sending a tweet with a picture doesn’t seem to work. The tweet goes through, but not the image. I’ll have to play with this a little more and see what’s going on. But the bigger issue, at least in my opinion, is the menu layout. With the addition of Email Status, some things had to change in order to display everything on the menu. Unfortunately, the decision was to add a submenu for reply. That means, for me to reply to a tweet, I have to scroll to the right, then select “Respond To” and a new menu pops up. From here I select either “Reply To” or “Direct”. That’s a lot of clicking for a simple reply. I think it would be better to leave Direct and Reply as first level menu options and instead compile some of the lesser used items under a “Other”, “Continued” or even “More” menu item. I could easily have the Follow, Timeline, and Profile options moved to a submenu as they are used a lot less than Reply and Direct.

Even though I would like to see the menu layout changed, it’s really a small beef when you consider all the things you get by using Pocketwit. It’s still my Twitter client of choice for Windows Mobile devices. If you haven’t installed it yet, then give it a try. I think you’ll like what you find. You can download the latest version here.

As an aside, I’ve setup a Twitter feed for Mobile Jaw. If you’re looking to get the latest Mobile Jaw posts in your twitter feed, simply follow http://twitter.com/MobileJaw