Author: todd

I maintain another blog (OgasaWalrus.com) where I focus on one of my other personal interest topics: Freeware and Free & Open Source Software for proprietary systems (Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows). I decided to mention the cover story in the current issue of PC Magazine and wanted to include a photo of the cover. However, I was too lazy to go to the Mac where my scanner is connected to, scan the cover, convert the image from TIFF to JPEG and then post it to my blog.

So, instead, I brought out my Dash (Smartphone), took a handheld shot of the cover from OneNote Mobile, synced the Dash to my PC (using Bluetooth since I was also too lazy to connect a USB cable), and let ActiveSync take care of copying it over to OneNote on my PC. After copying it from OneNote to a photo editor, a quick rotation and crop, I posted the blog item. The cover shot is not nearly as nice as a scanned image (see a previous blog item about a PC World magazine article for comparison). But, it is more than good enough for a quick blog item. If you haven’t tried OneNote and OneNote Mobile for your Windows Mobile Smartphone, give it a try. You might find it as useful as I have.

The T-Mobile SDA (Windows Mobile 5) smartphone didn’t place any EXIF data in its photos. The T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6), however, does. It doesn’t store much EXIF data. But, the Dash at least identifies itself as the camera type. This means that if you use it to upload photos to sites like Flickr, statistics about camera types will tally it correctly and viewers of your photos can tell it is a camera phone. It also stores data, time, and resolution and file size. I noticed that flash information is also stored even though the Dash does not have a flash (or one that is evident to me).

The Dash’s camera controls are not as intuitive as the SDA’s. But, more on this later. For now, I’ll just add that I received my MicroSD card on Saturday and finally have enough storage space to test photos and video recording on the Dash. More later…

I found a minor display error in Excel Mobile running on a Windows Mobile 6 T-Mobile Dash (Smartphone; AKA Standard Edition). The “Look in:” selection box in the “Find” window is not completely displayed. It is still usable since I can see enough of the option to figure out what the choices are. But, it would be nice to see the whole thing. I suspect we’ll see a few more of these screen form format glitches as time goes by. The variety of resolutions and screen orientations (landscape or portrait) is bound to mess up some applications on the Pocket (Classic or Professional Edition) and Smartphone (Standard Edition).

Excel Mobile is probably a double whammy case since the Office Mobile components are seeing their first appearance on the Smartphone starting with Windows Mobile 6 and most people (including developers) probably think of the Smartphone as having a portrait oriented screen.

I had to rush out of my office early this afternoon after completing a 6 page memorandum draft. I didn’t want to use a USB thumbdrive or a take the notebook with me. So, I just emailed it to myself after saving the file to Word 97-2003 format (from Word 2007). The document does not have any unusual formatting (e.g., embedded images). But, I did use a Word 2007 theme (Header 1 is a large font in blue, etc.). So, I was quite surprised how good the document looked on my T-Mobile Dash. The edge wrapping was well done, the titles and text looked good and was easy to read on the phone’s screen. I kind of wish there was an option to view it at, say, 33% size to fit more on the screen. But, the 50% size view was reasonable to use. If you haven’t tried viewing a “real” Word document on your Windows Mobile 6 phone, try it out. You might be pleasantly surprised like I was.