Category: Mobile Devices

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.

I could never get my T-Mobile SDA Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone to work with ActiveSync over a wireless Bluetooth connection. There was nothing wrong with the old Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter on my desktop or ActiveSync since other Windows Mobile devices could sync with it over Bluetooth. Fortunately, my new T-Mobile Dash with the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade doesn’t suffer from this problem. The new WM6 communications center has an ActiveSync button (unlike WM5’s comm center) to make the whole process of wireless syncing Bluetooth a bit easier. I recorded a brief video (1 minute 28 seconds) this evening to give you an idea of what the Bluetooth ActiveSync process looks like. You can find the YouTube link to the video below…

Video: Windows Mobile 6 T-Mobile Dash Bluetooth ActiveSync Demo