MobileViews Blog

Although I was one of the people critical of Apple’s decision not to allow 3rd party apps at the launch of the iPhone last year, I understand and appreciate their decision now. My iPod touch has been much more unstable after the 2.0 upgrade (and presumably adding a bunch of 3rd party apps) that it was prior to the upgrade. It seems to spontaneously reboot at least once a day. And, today, it completely froze while browsing a web page. Pressing the power button didn’t do anything. And, the touch just stay on fully lit. So, I decided to force a reboot by pressing the selection button and the power button together for about 10 seconds. The screen blanked out and after about 30 seconds, it started to reboot.

Normally, this would be a cause to moan and groan and grumble about how bad Apple’s touch software is. However, because it was so stable prior to the 2.0 upgrade, I am willing to put up with it until Apple can issue a firmware upgrade. So, yep, it was smart of Apple to release a stable product with no 3rd party apps to create an initial happy user base and then let the instabilities start later with the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2.0 releases.

Using ActiveSync is such an unpleasant experience that I’ve found myself syncing less and less frequently over the past year. The fact that my iPod touch can now handle much of what I used to do on a Pocket PC or WiMo Smartphone and do it much better and sync without pain to iTunes on my Mac doesn’t help ActiveSync’s poor image.

Recently, I had to uninstall and reinstall ActiveSync to get it working again on my PC. I deleted all the partnerships during this process to make sure I had a clean slate. I finally got around to syncing my old (but reliable!) K-Jam. The screenshot above is the error message ActiveSync provided me (”Code 1″ is such a helpful message). It basically told me that it could not sync every single calendar event from Outlook. Huh? I tried a couple of things but finally resorted to rebooting. This fixed (I used the word loosely) the problem and K-Jam seemed to sync ok. I’m still looking through my data to make sure I don’t have dozens of duplicate calendar events or contacts. I’m sure the dreaded multiple birthday problem will be caused by this latest ActiveSync weirdness.

I didn’t look down far enough when I noted Evernote’s bandwidth limits the other day. It also has limits on the number of notes with separate counts for audio, inknotes, and images (photos). The limits seem pretty generous for the free account. So, I’m not going to worry about it. I wonder what their for-fee service will be like though.

The Bloomberg app for the iPhone 3G is much nicer and has more functionality than I expected. Thumbs up for this app.

There is no way I am going to install the just released…

Just Released: Windows Live for Windows Mobile

Why? The first listed so-called feature: Synchronize Live contacts with your contacts on the device. My Hotmail/Live Mail contacts list is a mish-mash of MSN (Live) Messenger contacts and other contributors I can’t remember. I do not want it accidentally polluting my less than pristine but still useful contacts list on my WiMo smartphone that has been maintained in various forms for nearly 20 years (starting with the MS-DOS based HP 95LX). And, looking at the rest of the feature list…

# Synchronize your Live email (msn, hotmail, live)
# View graphics, web links and contact photos in emails
# Respond to emails with voice recordings
# Upload photos to your Windows Live Spaces

…I don’t see anything particularly compelling to me.

Yet another major website created a site optimized for the iPhone. This time it is USA Today at…

iphone.usatoday.com

Wordpress for iPhone works great. Wish typing was easier and faster on my iPod touch.

I haven’t been using Evernote heavily for the past few weeks. However, I updated the Windows Mobile client on my TyTn this evening and noticed the Menu - Account Usage item and clicked on it. You can see from the screen cap above that there is a 40MB per month bandwidth limit. This is probably pretty reasonable for a free service. But, you may want to keep it in mind if you start using Evernote with audio of visual media (which would increase bandwidth requirements).

Sigh, here’s another example of Apple showing Microsoft “how to do it right.” The new iPhone 3G (and updated iPhone and iPod touch) got an enhancement to the original simple 4 function calculator. If you hold the iPhone/iPod touch in portrait mode, you see the simple calculator.

However, if you turn it to landscape orientation, you see the new scientific calculator.

Meanwhile, the calculator on Windows Mobile Pocket PCs has not changed since 1996 (see below).

The freeware version of Calc98 looks ok in portrait mode (see below). However, it does not rescale for landscape view. Apparently, the for-fee version does this correctly. Microsoft should just buy the rights to Calc98 and use it to replace the outdated calculator in Windows Mobile.

I’ve been using my iPod touch (upgraded to the 2.0 firmware) at a number of hotspots during the past week. I’ve also been carrying a variety of Windows Mobile WiFi enabled devices. One of the things that has become very clear to me is that the iPod touch acquires access points much much faster than any WiMo device I’ve tried. I’d say that that the iPod touch is generally ready to roll in under 10 seconds. WiMo devices seem to take 30 to 60 seconds just to acquire an access point and then be ready to use (browse, email, etc.). That, of course, is when a WiMo device acquires any signal at all. I’ve run into several public access points where the WiMo Pocket PC (Professional Edition) could not even lock into the WAP. The iPod touch, on the other hand, was working within seconds.

Since the Safari web-browser on the iPod touch is so much better than Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC or Smartphone, it is a no-brainer decision to use the iPod touch when wandering about hot spot areas.

If you head over to a LockerGnome web page at…

http://iphone.lockergnome.com/

…you can (after registering) vote iPhone apps up or down Digg-style.

I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that Microsoft renamed the Windows Mobile Owners Circle to Total Access. Some (3 to be precise) of the articles I wrote for Microsoft’s WindowsMobile.com site have been moved to the nearly impossible to find…

Windows Mobile Total Access Tips and Tricks

…section. You’ll also find articles from Jason Dunn, Tyson Greer, and reprinted tips from Smartphone/Pocket PC Magazine there.