MobileViews Blog

I went on a rant a few months ago chiding Microsoft for their assumption that most of their Windows Mobile customers live in an IT Utopia where mobile devices are managed by dedicated highly trained IT mobile device support staff with exactly the right management tools. Well, according to this Information Week article…
Trouble Ahead: Most Companies Don’t Have A Mobile Device Management Plan

Not only have most organizations in InformationWeek’s recent survey of 307 business technology managers not adopted mobile device management strategies, most of them–52%–don’t even have plans to buy or implement tools that would help them corral proliferating wireless devices.

The article goes on to report: Those who haven’t adopted such products and don’t plan to cite three reasons: lack of need, cost, and complexity.

So, it looks like most of us, whether inside or outside the enterprise, are on our own when it comes to mobile devices.

I’ve spent the last few days using either a K-JAM or TyTn Pocket PC Professional Edition (Phone Edition) device. If you scroll down to the last couple of blog entries, you will know why: My T-Mobile Dash smartphone (Standard Edition) went bonky, froze on my this past Sunday, and went into a repeating boot cycle after putting the battery back in it.

After two days of using a Pocket PC Phone Edition, I remember why I switched from the more powerful touch-screen based device to the non-touch Smartphone. Both Pocket PCs are not huge compared to other touch-screen devices like the Universal or Advantage (great data devices). But, even the relatively small K-JAM and TyTn are huge and heavy compared to the Dash or many other non-touch smartphones. The need for two hands and stylus also became kind of annoying after having used a number of smartphones over the past couple of years (the SDA preceded the Dash I use now). One handed operation is the way to go when on the move.

That said, I hope we always have some kind of touch screen Pocket PC type device to carry around as an additional device. I use mine a lot as a sit-down data device and would hate to give it up for that kind of work.

My T-Mobile Dash (HTC 620) couldn’t break out of its endless boot loop. So, despite my dislike of hard resets, I went ahead and reset the Dash. Here’s how you perform a hard reset on one of these things, btw.

1. Press the left and right soft keys simultaneously
2. While pressing the soft keys, press and hold the On button for a couple of seconds and then release it
3. You will see a screen that tells you to press Send to reset the device. You can sort of see a blurry picture of this screen above (sorry ’bout that). The Send button is the green Call button

I just deleted the former partnership with ActiveSync and then re-partnered the Dash with my PC. Everything looks ok so far. The problem might be related to one of the beta apps I tried recently on the unit. But, I’m not assigning blame until I can find more information.

The bad news is that I lost the OneNote Mobile notes after re-partnering. Everything on the PC side was deleted. I think I backed it up a week or so ago. So, I should be able to recover most of my notes though.

The good news is that the phone looks like it is working. I will use my TyTn as my main phone for another day or two until I get a better feel for how the Dash is behaving after its hard reset.

My T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 smartphone) started acting oddly about 6 weeks ago. I turn it off each night and it started taking a while to cold start in the morning. It started cycling through the boot process repeatedly every now and then about a month ago. It locked up last night (WiMo screen visible but unresponsive to any button presses. I had to pull the battery to shut it down. Placing the battery back in and starting it up (pressing the power button works), it started cycling through the boot process but never completed. After pulling the battery and repeating this process a few times, I pulled the SIM out and tried it with two other phones. The SIM works with both phones. And, the Dash shows the same power cycling power without the SIM it. So, the SIM is not the problem.

The odd thing, though, is that both phones show me as roaming even after verifying that I’m on the T-Mobile network. Not sure what is going on there yet since I’ve never seen this happen when switching to unlocked phones before.

My WiMo smartphone loses all connectivity every once in a while. Once in a while is defined as once every week or two. It has happened three times in the past month. I noticed that a SIM message was on my screen when it happened the other day. I opened the battery cover, pulled the battery, and reseated the SIM card. Actually, I did this about three times before my phone booted normally. It kept recycling through the boot process the first two times never displaying the Windows Mobile Today screen.

The problem is too intermittent to test cleanly. I’ve been thinking about switching to another WiMo phone for a while to see if the problem is the SIM itself or the connector in my main phone (a Dash). The SIM is about 4 years old. So, it has been in and out of various phones over those years. It may be that its connector is wearing out. Ack.

Hmm, the Windows Live for Windows Mobile (Windows Live Hotmail, Contacts, and Spaces) download is unavailable until May 15. I wonder why???

I noticed that Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta became available for two of my Windows Mobile 6 smartphones (non-touch): The Dash and the the Vox. None of my professional edition (touch screen devices) are supported by this beta release. After bad-mouthing the Go 2.0 release and suggesting it go away if the Microsoft-Yahoo merger happened (which it will not now), I have to say that 3.0 Beta looks and feels a lot better. It is still extremely slow after testing it over both EDGE and 802.11g WiFi connections. However, the navigation seems to make more sense now (though I still have issues with it) and the Widget technology looks reasonably good. It looks like Go Widgets are stored in the cloud since my widget add-ons moved over to my Vox after adding it while using the Dash. Go 3.0 is a much sticker app than 2.0 was. And, I’m giving it a tentative thumbs up. It is staying on my phones for the time being.

I received a text message about the Skyfire beta a few days ago. It had been so long since I applied for the beta that I couldn’t remember what Skyfire was. A visit the site reminded me. So, I clicked on the link in the text message and downloaded the CAB file for my Dash smartphone. Skyfire is definitely a work in progress. It is incredibly slow and took forever just to start up. Once started, it was slow to render sites and didn’t seem to do anything more than what Opera Mini 4 already does. And Opera Mini does it better and faster. Bringing it up subsequent times resulted in either it not being able to detect my net connection and exiting without letting me retry or telling me my phone was out of memory (it was not) and refused to start.

Totally unimpressed, I uninstalled it from my Dash after struggling with it for a day. I tried to test the touchscreen (Pocket PC) version. But, it wanted me to apply for the beta again. Forget it. I’ve lost interest in Skyfire. You might want to wait for something closer to a 1.0 release before testing it out on your Windows Mobile device.

The Microsoft Windows Mobile Connection site says it is a community site for anyone who sells mobile phones or works in the mobile industry. It looks like a social network for people in the Windows Mobile industry. It let me sign up with my Passport account even though I’m not affiliated with any mobile firm.

Quick! Name a web service that is as flaky as a bowl of breakfast cereal that doesn’t seem to generate hate even though it seems to be down half the time. Did you say Twitter? I learned about Tiny Twitter from Mobility Site’s Jack Cook. There are versions for Windows Mobile (native code) and Java-enabled phones. So, I downloaded the Windows Mobile Smartphone (Standard Edition) version (there’s a separate download for Pocket PCs — Classic/Professional Edition) and tested it on an HTC Vox smartphone. The one thing that might bother you at first is that you don’t see your own tweets in the display as you do on a desktop or even Twitter’s mobile web site. You do, however, get a richer Twitter experience using this freeware client than you do with Twitter’s mobile friendly website.

Gerado Dada points to a sleep inducing Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard Edition (produced by marketing) video demo at…

Windows Mobile 6.1 Video Demo (Standard Edition)

Note that what is shown only applies to the non-touch Standard Edition devices. Professional Edition does not have any dramatic visible changes with Windows Mobile 6.1 on it.

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.