Oct
2
Written by: Mike Temporale
Thursday, October 2, 2008 10:30pm
 There’s been talk of a Zune phone since the very first day Zune shipped. The Zune interface is done remarkably well and naturally, people have longed to see a phone integrated into it. In case you’re not familiar, there’s another popular MP3 player that had a phone added to it within the last couple years. That device has been a huge hit for the parent company. Microsoft would be crazy to ignore the publics demand for a good MP3 player / Phone all wrapped together nicely.
Steve Ballmer has made your dreams a reality - almost. In a recent interview with CIO magazine, Steve didn’t go as far as announcing a device or release date. He did say that the Zune software is going to be ported to Windows Mobile devices and that the software will play a more important role when it comes to the PC and Windows Mobile devices.
But Does Windows Mobile really need Zune software? Windows Media Player comes installed on every device. Sure, many find the mobile version of WMP to be limiting and a horrible experience - those people can install any one of the third party media players available for Windows Mobile. Also, most Windows Mobile devices have the ability to use external storage cards. That means you can have about 8GBs or more available to store your music, videos, and pictures on. It’s not anywhere near the 120GB you can get on the latest Zune models, but it’s more than enough music for a day or two.
So what is it? Why would you want the Zune software on your mobile device? There are a number of reasons like User Experience (ease of use), Zune Marketplace, and a Sync that actually works without creating duplicates!
You can read the full interview with Steve Ballmer at the CIO webiste. [Source = WMPowerUser]
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Oct
1
Written by: Mike Temporale
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 10:30pm
 If you’ve been following the talks about HTC’s upcoming devices - Touch HD, Touch Viva, and Touch 3G, then you’ll be happy to hear that Windows Mobile Italy has got the inside scoop on pricing and availability. The Touch HD is set to launch in Europe in Q4 of 2008 (yes, that means very soon) for about €849. That works out to about $1,200 USD. It will then be made available in other markets around the world. So Europe in Q4, then other places at some point there-after.
The Touch Viva is expected to launch in Europe this month - October 2008, for a mere €279 (about $390 USD). And lastly, the HTC Touch 3G which will be available in a number of different colours, should also become available this month - October 2008, for €499 (about $699 USD).
Check out more pictures and details over at the Windows Mobile Italy web site.
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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
12
Written by: Mike Temporale
Friday, September 12, 2008 8:45am
 A couple months ago I published an article that details the steps required to remove the network settings lock that has been turned on by AT&T with their Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM update for the BlackJack II (and PanTech Dual - if it’s ever released). The steps require you to application unlock the phone and install a registry editor so you can modify a couple values in the registry. While it’s not very difficult, I can imagine that some people are nervous about editing the registry or even application unlocking the phone. Now there’s a quick, easy, and downright simple solution to removing the read only lock placed on the network settings. Follow the steps below and you will have that locked removed in no time!
- Open the File Explorer (found under Start \ All Programs \ Applications \ File Explorer) and browse to the Windows folder. Once in the Windows folder you are looking for an application called “UAMgr”. The quickest way to get to this file is to push the letter U on the keyboard and the phone will jump down to the files that start with U.
- Run UAMgr by highlighting the file and pressing down on the action button. When the application opens you will see a screen that says “UAPMgr/Streaming” in the top title bar and “UA/Streaming Manager 2008″ in the center of the screen.
- Press the Menu \ Tool \ Unlock ReadOnly. The phone will then present you with a confirmation screen indicating that Read Only has been unlocked. Press OK and then Close and you’re done.
Special thanks to encece for helping locate this tool. I’ve tested it on a couple of my phones and it works great.
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Sep
9
Written by: Mike Temporale
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 8:30am
I recently made some server changes to one of my email accounts. Basically, the mail server changed from mail.ServerA.com to mail.ServerB.com. A completely new server name and new DNS entry, but everything else stayed the same. It’s the same email address, same account name, same password, etc… So it should have been a really simple change to make on my various email clients. I changed the server names on my desktop Outlook client without any problems. Simple / easy are not terms that I can use for the switch when it comes to Outlook Mobile.
 The required DNS changes were made at approximately 2pm on Saturday. I went into the Send/Receive settings in Outlook Mobile for the account in question and changed the server names. Then I attempted to do a send/receive. Unfortunately, it just sat at the “Connecting…” prompt for a long time and eventually came back and said it was unable to communicate with the server and that I should check that I have an active data connection. Normally, I would just restart the phone and that would force Outlook Mobile to re-read the server settings and all would be good. As you may already know, that’s not currently an option for me. So I needed to find a way to have the device pick up the changes without killing Outlook Mobile or restarting the phone. [more...]
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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
30
Written by: Mike Temporale
Saturday, August 30, 2008 8:00am
 Earlier this week, HTC announced a new Smartphone called the s740. This new device is a non-touch screen version of the Diamond-like Touch Pro. Unlike most other devices these days, the s740 came as a complete surprise to many. The s740 sports a 528MHz processor from Qualcomm (could this be the fastest Smartphone we’ve seen to-date?), 256MB of ROM, 256 MB of RAM, Quad band GPRS, HSDPA/WCDMA , GPS, WiFi, and a 3.2 megapixel camera! Overall, the phone looks very nice with a standard 12 key layout on the face of the phone and a slide out QWERTY. (Real world picture from NewMobile’s quick hands on impression and pictures taken at the IFA in Berlin. Product specifications are taken directly from the HTC web site.)
However, if you’ve been using HTC Smartphones over the last couple years, the general design of this phone should be pretty familiar for you. It’s the exact design as the s710/720 Smartphones. Of course, this version has much better specifications and has some serious style. But underneath the same problems that lead me to hang-up on the s710 are still present in this new device. The whole “rotate-slide-wait” procedure every time you want to use the keyboard can get a little annoying - especially for those of us that do a lot of email from our devices. The keyboard design and layout leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. I never did get use to the off center screen.
Instead of wasting their time with this device, I think HTC would have been much better off creating 2 other Diamond like devices. The first is a simple phone with the regular 12 key number pad. Just take this device, slice off the keyboard part and offer a super thin Smartphone. Heck, I would buy one of these just to drool at the thinness of the device! The other device would be more like the Excalibur / Cavalier devices that we saw years ago from HTC. Just rotate the screen 90 degrees and add a full BlackJack-like keyboard on the front. No silly sliders and no rotating.
Maybe I’m wrong, but you can’t argue with the increase in people using messenger style devices. Samsung, Motorola, and even RIM, all have devices that allow quick and easy access to the keyboard. I can’t imagine that all these companies are making these devices if there wasn’t a market for them. I want to see HTC return to the messenger field and make a device that I would be proud to carry.
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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
25
Written by: Mike Temporale
Monday, August 25, 2008 10:15pm
Marc over at Ilium Software made a great post commenting on the “No Reboot Challenge” that I’ve been running. There are so many factors involved in doing this challenge that I can’t possibly rule them all out and create a truly controlled environment for this test.
Ultimately, it would be best if the OS protected us from unsafe and instable applications. But the truth is that we are dealing with a mobile OS and there just isn’t the resources to handle this correctly. Heck, the full blown desktop OS still doesn’t do an amazing job at this. Although, it’s getting better but there’s a long way to go.
And just to be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that all 3rd party applications are bad. In fact, the reason I selected a few apps to install is because I wanted to show that there are good developers and that you can find good products that won’t compromise the stability of your device. IMHO, Ilium is one of those companies that I know I can trust to build a solid app.
Head over the Ilium’s blog and read what Marc has to say. Be sure to come back and share your comments here with us!
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