MobileViews Blog

I’ve had my T-Mobile Dash for about a year now. I don’t switch phones very frequently although I often do have a couple of phones to play with. Why? I usually find a specific phone I like a lot and stick with it for a while. The Dash is a great phone and I haven’t seen anything that might make me switch away from it. I almost switched to the TyTn, but I decided a while back that I prefer phones that can be operated with one hand and one I don’t mind using in the rain. Touch screen devices do not meet those requirements.

I noticed my battery was discharging faster than usual a couple of weeks ago. At one point, it was down to 40% at 2pm in the afternoon with minimal use. At first I thought one of my connected apps might be the cause. Email and my RSS reader came to mind first. Adjusting their update frequencies helped but did not resolve the problem. So, I started taking a closer look at my battery. I always fully charge my phone in the evening and then turn it off until the next morning. I started checking my battery level right after turning the phone on. The first time I checked my battery was at 78% right after turning the phone on. Remember it was 100% the evening before and the phone was turned off during the night. I tried this again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. And, yep, the next morning, the fully charged battery was around 80% first thing in the morning.

My next guess was that something during the start cycle was burning up the charge. So, I plugged in my phone while it booted up. It showed 100%. So, I unplugged it and headed to the office. A few hours later, it was down quite a bit. It lasted longer during the day but still didn’t look normal. I tried this booting while plugged in the next morning and saw similar results. It finally dawned on me that this one year battery had already gone bad. So, I ordered a spare battery. And, yep, my battery was at 80% around 4pm in the afternoon. Phew. I am heading Seattle for the Microsoft MVP Summit and don’t want to worry about my phone’s battery.

I’m still surprised by the Dash’s battery lifespan. I’ve used a lot of phones. And, I think all of their batteries are still in pretty good shape. Still, it is a back to basics lesson to consider battery issues before looking at other possible causes for odd phone behavior.

Discussions (and sometimes rants) about camera phone photos usually steer towards pixel count, clarity, and color. However, there are subtler differences between camera phone photos and digital camera photos. Take the two photos above taken using a T-Mobile Dash cameraphone (left) and a Canon Powershot A710IS point-and-shoot digital camera. I’ve resized both photos from their respective 1.3 megapixel and 7 megapixel resolutions so that both images are 320 pixels wide.

The first thing you probably noticed is that when resized to the same width the Dash’s photo is much squarer than the A710IS’. Cameras vary slightly in aspect ratio. So, if something seems slightly odd in your cameraphone photos, compare it to the aspect ratio of the digital camera you normally use. Cropping the camera phone photo to match the aspect ratio you are comfortable with might help.

Although I did not take the two photos at the exact same angle, you can still see that the camera phone photo seems flatter than the digital camera’s. Seeing distinct people (mostly heads here) drops off rapidly after a row or two of tables in the food court. The digital camera has a slightly wider angle of view even though I took both photos from exactly the same spot.

So, if something about your camera phone photo doesn’t seem quite right to you. It may not be the resolution or even the sharpness of the photo. It might be some of the subtler aspects of  camera phone’s imaging characteristics that might be at play for you.

The blog item I wrote earlier about Google’s tip for assigning Google mobile applications to a Samsung Blackjack’s key pointed out that not all Windows Mobile Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) devices have this feature. However, all Pocket PC type devices (Professional Edition, Classic Edition) have this feature baked in by Microsoft. The problem is that because there is so much variation between Pocket PC type devices, key assignments can vary in physical position of the device. And, it may not be obvious to you which key is being referred to.

For example Ilium’s great freeware Screen Capture application (what I use for every WiMo screen capture you see in this blog) tells you that its snapshot key is assigned to the App1 key. For the last couple of generations, the App1 key has been the Messaging button (the one with the envelope icon on it). However, if you want to be sure, you can go to Settings and select the Buttons option to see which button is assigned to which application. From here, you can change the assignment of applications to buttons as well as the navigation pad.

The Media Player can assign individual functions to buttons and the navigation pad. However, this doesn’t always work as expected. The venerable Dell Axim X51, for example, would simply not allow any Media Player functions to be assigned to the four main buttons beneath its LCD screen. This made it very difficult to use Media Player without looking at the screen and using a stylus. Despite my otherwise high opinion of the Axim X51 (I think it is the best Pocket PC since the great HP Jornada 560 series), this problem along with the loss of ability to create playlists starting with WiMo 5, convinced me that I should buy an iPod an give up using WiMo devices as multimedia playback devices (they still are great for still photos and mini video clips though).

Have you ever found your Windows Mobile smartphone (Standard or Professional Editions) in a state best described as frozen? This can happen in several ways. The most common experience on a non-touch Standard Edition device is that it becomes so slow that I can’t seem to get any action to work on it. Can’t dial, can’t launch an application, can’t even navigate. Recently, my HTC Advantage touch screen device (Professional Edition) has refused to turn on once in a while (perhaps 3 to 4 times in the past month).

Personally, many of my apparent freeze ups are usually related to some kind of Internet Explorer related memory management problem. The usual problem is that the cache gets large and slows the entire device down. A little patience while slowly navigating to the IE option to clear the cache usually resolves the problem. However, when my Standard Edition seems completely frozen to the point where the on/off button does not work, I usually end up pulling the battery out, put it back in, and turn on the phone. I’ve never had a problem with this procedure. But, your mileage may vary. So, proceed with caution.

Pulling the battery out and putting it back in amounts to a kind of hardware soft reset. The difference between a soft reset and a hard reset is that a hard reset puts your device back in the state it was at the factory. Data, configuration information, and applications added after you received it will disappear. A soft reset restarts the system but leaves data, configuration, and software alone.

Pocket PC/Professional Edition touch-screen devices have a recessed dedicated soft-reset button somewhere on its chassis. The location differs from model to model. The button is usually very small and fit to the point of the stylus that came with the device. Ballpoint pen and other larger tips will not work. Pressing the reset on the HTC Advantage has brought it back to life each time. But, I’m not a huge fan of using this button. The reset on my old Compaq iPAQ 3650 actually wore out because I had to use it so much on that box. There are free soft-reset software utilities available. But, these don’t help if your unit is completely unresponsive.

Pocket PC (Classic/Professional Edition) users probably don’t notice any browser text box focus issue because they simply tap text boxes with their stylus and force it into focus. Smartphone (Standard Edition) users, on the other hand, probably have run into the following issue: Browse a web page with a text box entry (say a login screen). Focus on a text box (or so you think) and then start typing out a username or password. All of you sudden you notice that the first letter is not in the text box although subsequent characters are. What happened?

It turns out that focusing on (navigating to) a text box is not sufficient. You need to press your Select button to actually bring the text box into full focus. Actually, tapping on any key does this but the key itself (if it is a printable character) does not show up. That is why the first character frequently is missing in these text boxes.

So, the simple behavior to adopt is to tap the select button once you navigate to a browser text box before typing in any text.

I should actually place this blog item in a category named something like Preparing for Back to Basics.

Word Mobile didn’t exist for the Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) until Windows Mobile 6 devices rolled out earlier this year. For some reason I expected to it be the same as or very similar to Word Mobile for Pocket PC (AKA Classic and Professional Editions). One of the first things I did after getting my hands on both types of Windows Mobile 6 devices was to compare the menu structures for Word Mobile on the both editions. Although it may look like the Smartphone (Standard Edition, non-touch screen) Word Mobile has as many features as the Pocket PC Word Mobile from the diagrams above, they really do not even appear to share the same codebase let alone functionality. The reason the Smartphone Word Mobile menu has so many option branches is because of its modal nature. That is to say that Word Mobile on the Smartphone resembles vi from UNIX/Linux that it does Microsoft Word. So, there are two distinct mode branches that simply creates menu complexity rather than provide features. Word Mobile on the Pocket PC, on the other hand, has a much richer feature set and its branches represent unique functions rather than modal branching.

I had two recent touch screen issues that prompted me to write a bit about screen alignment.

The first has to do with the iPod touch. My daughter brought her touch to me and said touching the left side of the screen did not work. After fussing with it for a bit, I peeled off the $14.95 screen protector she bought recently from the local Apple Store. And, yep, the touch screen worked fine. I had to try twice before reseating the screen protector to the point where touching the left side of the screen worked. To make matters worse, this $14.95 screen (ouch!) is not even clear. It is translucent. I don’t like it at all. On the other hand, the $3 screen protector I bought from iFrogz is transparent and does not see to cause any touch screen issues. It is thinner than the one from the Apple store. This makes it harder to place it on the screen without bubbles.

The second screen issue cropped up with the TyTn (1st model). I found I couldn’t grab the scroll bar on the right side of the screen the other day. After fussing around with this device a bit and aligning the screen a few times, it occurred to me that I was one of the old styuses I had bought in the 1990s. It turned out that the tip was just a little to wide. The Pocket PC (Professional Edition) is a touch screen but not a fat finger or even a fat stylus tip touch screen.

Touch screens used to be even finickier in the old days than they are now, believe it or not. We used to have lots of problems with dust going under the screen and even a small bug or two taking up residence under the first screen layer. So, perhaps a few alignment issues now and then is not so bad.

It was, I believe, at the 1997 Fall Comdex that I first saw Bill Gates announce ClearType technology for notebook LCD displays. The ClearType anti-aliasing technique’s purpose was to render easier to read text on LCD displays. I looked down at my HP 320LX and wondered if we would ever see this technology trickle down to the Windows CE Handheld PC (which had just emerged at the previous 1996 Fall Comdex). It took a few years, but we eventually saw it become available for the Pocket PC (but not the Smartphone). After it became available, I regularly turned it on for each new Pocket PC. After a while (a year or two perhaps), it began to dawn on me that text on the Pocket PC screen might actually be easier for me to read with ClearType turned off.

I’ve tried toggling the ClearType setting on a number of Pocket PCs over the years. And, in general, I’ve been leaving the option unchecked (turned off). My non-expert guess is that as I became older and Presbyopia (a reasonably normal part of aging) set in, a kind of natural anti-aliasing was created by my visual system. So, turning on ClearType just resulted in fuzzy looking font that was harder to read than a font with aliasing.

This probably varies greatly from person to person. So, you might want to test using your Pocket PC with ClearType turned off and on a couple of times to figure out which setting looks best to your eyes.

Windows Mobile devices are not limited to the native or managed (.NET Compact Framework) code for applications.

Although Microsoft does not provide a Java runtime, many manufacturers add a Java Midlet Manager to their WiMo products. You’ll need this if you want to use products such as the Operamini browser or some (but not all) of Google’s WiMo products.

There are also a few programming languages that actually allow you to develop on a WiMo device itself. NS Basic/CE is one that comes to mind since I actually first tried it on my old Apple Newton Messagepad. It lets you create applications using the BASIC programming language. The “CE” part of its name comes from “Windows CE”. I’ve heard about ports of Open Source programming languages such as Python and Ruby for Windows Mobile. But, I have not tried them myself (though I used to write in Python a lot on Linux boxes before I switched to Ruby).

Some 3rd part Windows Mobile database applications let you create what amounts to an application (from my point of view) with screen forms generator to build graphical interfaces to the database. Syware Visual CE and HanDBase are two database products that I’ve tried and enjoyed using in the past.

I’m sure I neglected to mention a few things like an add-on scripting/macro tool or an application with built-in scripting. Please let me know if you have recommendations for other products that provide application or app-like building capabilities for Windows Mobile.

You might think this a trick question. How could figuring out what applications run on a Windows Mobile device be difficult? You run Windows Mobile software on Windows Mobile devices, right? Kind of…

There’s a number of factors that makes answering this question a bit more difficult than it ought to be. First, there’s the Professional vs. Classic vs. Standard Editions (aka Pocket PC Phone Edition, Pocket PC, Smartphone). Software designed to run on a touch screen device (Pocket PC) might not work well or at all on a non-touch screen (Smartphone).

Second, the basic graphical user interface (GUI) for the Pocket PC line changed dramatically starting with Windows Mobile 5. That’s when Microsoft took away the bottom area to use it for the two giant (relatively speaking) soft keys to match the Smartphone UI. This bottom area of the Pocket PC screen was used for menus prior to WiMo 5.

Third, you might run into legacy software designed for older Windows Mobile/Windows CE devices such as the Handheld PC, Palm-size PC and old Pocket PC veresions. For many years, Windows CE devices used multiple processor architectures. If you see applications that have versions for the SH3 and ARM processors, you are probably looking at very old software. There is, however, a decent change that old ARM based applications might run on your current generation Pocket PC. However, it may look odd or not run 100% correctly.

Fourth, and this might surprise you, Microsoft actually drops features with each succeeding WiMo generation. For example, the current WiMo 6 does not have a way to use ActiveSync or WMDC to sync and transform Access databases from the original MDB format to CDB. This means that older database applications that depended on this transformation feature won’t work.

Fifth, different generations of devices had different or no support for the .NET Compact Framework. So, .NET CF based applications won’t work on those older devices.

Sixth, there are other kinds of applications besides native and .NET CF apps such as Java. Stay tuned for Part II of this discussion about running applications on a Windows Mobile device.

Little known fact: One of the Windows Mobile Smartphone’s (Standard Edition) features that rarely gets featured is its ability to make a voice call. Really. No kidding. Open a second tab in your browser and go visit a bunch of great sites that discuss Windows Mobile devices and take a look at the articles. Heck, scroll down and take a look at my own blog items here. Not much discussion about voice calls on most of those sites. Weird, huh? Well, not really. The thing is that Windows Mobile devices can do so many interesting things that we often forget perhaps the main reason we bought a smartphone: To make voice calls.

The interesting thing about making calls on a WiMo Smartphone is that it can be done in so many ways. There are three main places we make phone calls most of the time.

Contacts: This is probably the most obvious since you can see names and phone numbers right on the screen. Just start typing a name (first or last) and Contacts will try to figure out the name by matching everything that matches as you keep adding characters. The unusual thing about this screen is that you can’t actually dial a phone number from here… Just names.

Call History: This is where I personally initiate a lot of calls. Why? It turns out that most of us regularly dial just a handful of numbers (hence T-Mobile’s Fave Five service). So, the numbers I usually call are almost always already in my Call History. As you press keys on the keypad, Call History tries to match both phone numbers and names (if on the list). And, of course, it is easy to just scroll down the list to select a number. If the number of the Call History list is in your Contacts list, you can select an alternate number to call by just pressing left or right on the navigation pad to go through the list of different phone numbers for that contact. You can also press the Select button to see the full contact information. Press the green Call Button to start the call regardless of which way you selected a number from Call History.

Home Screen: If you start typing a phone number or name from the WiMo home screen, it searches for names and numbers in your Contacts list and begins narrowing down the list of possible contacts to call as you press more keys. Of course, if the number is not in your list, you can just type all the numbers until you are ready to dial. Just press the green Call Button to dial the number (whether or not in the contact list).

Dialing Something That Looks Like a Phone Number: A feature unique to the WiMo Smartphone (not available on the Pocket PC Phone Edition AKA Professional Edition) is its ability to dial strings that look like phone numbers from a few unexpected places. One unexpected place: Tasks. You cannot create or edit a task on a Smartphone. However, if a task synced from Outlook on the desktop has a string that looks like a phone number (e.g., 555-1234), you will find that it is underlined as a dial-able phone number on the Smartphone. You can navigate to it, select it and dial it. If you have a bunch of people you need to serial dial (one after another) for an event (e.g., all the parents for your kid’s sports team), just type them all in (interspersed with names is fine) in a task on your desktop and sync it with your Smartphone. I seem to recall that some simple text editors also display this feature. Here’s a big caveat though: Microsoft’s own Word Mobile, Excel Mobile and OneNote Mobile do not provide this feature. Boo.

There are, of course, third party applications that provide additional dialing features and alternatives. If you have one that you find particularly interesting/useful, please let me know about it.

Battery life on any device is way too complicated for a brief discussion. But, this is a Back to Basics blog entry. So, I’ll just stick to simple and easy to apply battery life suggestions for Windows Mobile Smartphones (Standard Edition).

First, head over to the Power Management applet to optimize backlight and display times that fit your Smartphone usage style. Press Start->Settings->Power Management. The two key settings there are Backlight time out on battery and Display time out on battery.

Second, learn to use Keypad Lock features (see my Nov. 12, 2007 Back to Basics entry) to prevent the backlight turning on because of accidental key presses (or accidental dialing for that matter).

Third, turn off the Bluetooth radio if you are not using it with a headset, keyboard, or some other BT accessory. BT is actually pretty efficient. But, why waste even a little battery power if you don’t need to?

Fourth, turn off WiFi (wireless LAN) if you are not using it. WiFi is a huge power drain. This is especially true if it is continuously searching for a WiFi access point (WAP) to connect to while wandering around.

Fifth, learn how third party applications work on your Smartphone. You may have some misbehaving apps that are draining power because of their behaving (bypassing the keypad lock, pinging over WiFi, EDGE, EVDO, UMTS, etc.).

Sixth, don’t ignore other potential factors. For example, my blog entry yesterday discussed how Google Gmail’s glacially slow IMAP4 email server caused a huge battery drain on my phone because it took so long to connect and sync compared to other IMAP4 mail servers.

There’s a lot more that could be discussed about getting the most of your Smartphone’s battery. But, the six tips above should provide some things to think about your phone’s battery life.