Mobile
Seesmic Mobile Recording on my HTC Touch
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008I have been using seesmic for a couple of months now. The more I use it, the more I like it. I just wish there were more hours in the day.
Seesmic recently launched their mobile service, using ShoZu as the upload mechanim. ShoZu is a great service, allowing you to upload to a huge amount of sites, ftp, integrate with MMS and SMS direct to FTP lcoations. A great service.
So I tried this out on my HTC touch and it works. Nice 
The great iPhone pink elephant
Friday, November 9th, 2007Regretably, the general feeling I have from the online community is that there is pretty much no buzz about the iPhone release in the UK today.
I put a question out on twitter, asking if anyone was standing in a queue at an Apple or O2 shop, or any reports on sightings of queue lengths. The general feedback, is that there were more staff than customers at these stores.
O2 and Apple forgot an important factor in the UK market. Paying a huge amount of money for the handset and monthly contract is never going to work. If I am moving my mobile phone business to a new operator, I want a handset and all the goodies. My monthly spend is worth alot from a subscription point of view. You should be paying me to move over not the other way round.
While I love the iPhone, I love the iPod Touch far better. But then it begs the question, will I use it when I have my HTC touch with unlimited web n walk, plus wireless? Probably not. That is why I have bought neither at this point. Let alone the fact that the iPhone does not give you enterprise grade mobile email and communications. It’s a great toy, but I’m not sure it wil have much fun in the UK market.
Note to HTC
Sunday, October 28th, 2007I have had so many phones over the last couple of years: Pocket PC 2003, Mobile 5, Mobile 6, Crackberry. My new HTC Touch kicks the ass of all those phones. Especially the Crackberrys.
However, there are a couple of things I would like to see on the HTC that are simple fixes to make this phone perfect - perhaps they have been addressed in the HTC TouchII?
I want a button on the phone for the start menu - the start menu is the beginning of everything windows related for the majority of end users. We need it! OK, I can programme other buttons, but at the sacrifice of what? I want a button with the start logo for point and click for dumbasses like me.
The HTC today theme is very cool and I really like the weather display and quick launch icons to everywhere. But you take up so much real estate on the “desktop”, or should I say “pda top”?
I want the ability to minimise the display that takes up half the screen with either the time, weather or quick launcher. I like to know the time, but top right digital is enough rather than a half screen digital display. I like to know the weather and I like to have quick launch icons - but make them icons on the desktop or a fold-away widget that I can choose to show or hide rather than eat up my desktop experience and force me to uninstall.
I really like this phone, on face of it, these are small modifications for what I think is the perfect phone and the best mobile I have ever owned, combined with the best mobile operator with an excelent Web ‘n Walk internet service. I have arrived.
In the mean time, please forward any and all mobile devices for honest review and you will be very welcome to videos on my kyte.tv/yellowpark channel and blogs.
My new phone one week on
Saturday, October 27th, 2007Essential apps for my new Mobile 6 device
Monday, October 22nd, 2007Just over a week ago I upgraded my mobile to a new HTC Touch Mobile 6 device. Today is the moment of truth when my number transfers over from Orange onto my new provider, T-Mobile and I’ll start hammering it with both incoming and outgoing calls.
I have spent the last week setting the phone up, installing mobile applications, configuring direct push for my email, calendar and contacts, downloading new themes to change the appearance and generally playing.
So far, I am really happy with this. I’d even go so far as to say that it is my favourite phone yet. So I thought I’d put together a list of the mobile applications that I have installed and make some general comments about it.
Out of the box, Mobile 6 devices come with a few handy programmes pre-installed:
Office Mobile: Excel, One Note, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word
Adobe Reader LE
Windows Media Player
Internet Explorer
And a range of utilities that are really helpful for things like bluetooth, streaming video etc.
I have installed the following applications:
Gizmo Project - An IM for AIM, yahoo, MSN and SIP calls
Google Maps for Windows Mobile
Live Search for Mobile
Remote Desktop for Mobile 6
Skype for Mobile
del.icio.us plugin by Dale Lane
Tinyurl plugin by Dale Lane
Online Mobile Apps I use daily:
m.bloglines.com
m.facebook.com
m.flickr.com
Google Mobile
m.twitter.com
cnnmobile.com
I have had probaly more phones than most in the last couple of years. Including a couple of Blackberrys and about 6 different Windows Mobile devices. This phone beats all the rest of them for a number of reasons:
The Touch is small enough not to be a PDA which means that it fits comfortbly in the hand. I have always found that a PDA as a phone tends to drop out the hand as often as possible and is broken within a matter of weeks. The Touch is better. It has a tactile rubber exterier, without appearing rubberish. Plus it feels like a phone, but with the display of a PDA, has wireless internet access and more importantly, the calls are good quality.
Having configured direct push, I now have my email, calendar and contacts synchronised with my Exchange server and Outlook, and for no extra tariff like you get with Blackberry. So I can send emails, make calendar appointments and add contacs while I am out and about, and when I get back to my laptop, everything will already be synchronsied without further action.
The one app I am still trying to find is a command prompt for Windows Mobile, so any suggestions, please leave a comment.
The Touch menu is pretty handy too. A quick flick of the finger on the screen brigs up a menu that yo can scroll around to get access to the majority of features that you are likely to need regularly - favourite calls, connections, contacts, photos etc.
The camera and video looks pretty good, although I do need to play with this more. Having said that, not sure that any phone could beat the new Nokia range in terms of video and photo quality - Carl Zeiss lenses with 5M pixel quality.
T-Mobile have a great service for internet hungry mobile users, called Web ‘n Walk. I expect to see serious users from teh IT community swaping over to T-Mobile as a result of this. I also heard that T-Mobile have started selling packages in the US with free roaming in Europe. There isn’t another provider offering this as far as I am aware. Europe and America are divided by rediculously expensive roaming charges.
I’m sure I’ll be trying to blag another phone in the next few weeks, I just can’t get enough of them. In the mean time, I am very happy with the HTC Touch.
My new Mobile 6 device
Thursday, October 11th, 2007Installing MSDE on SBS for Blackberry Enterprise Server
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007I’ve got a few customers using Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) now and they are all running this on Small Business Server 2003.
Research in Motion would probably not recommend this configuration, but actually SBS seems to cope quite well. Although I have not tested this out with more than 6 users.
Installing BES onto SBS is not entirely straight forward, mainly down to the way MSDE is installed on SBS. The BES installation cannot find the MSDE database, but it also doesn’t give you the option to automatically install another database instance.
So, in order to get the BES installation working on SBS, you should create a new instance of MSDE before ruining the installation. You can do this as follows:
1. Locate the MSDE files on the SBS 2003 CD 3 or download from Microsoft.
2. Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd -> clickOK).
3. On the Command Prompt, change to the directory where the MSDE files are located e.g. cd D:\SBS\MONITOR\MSDE
4. Enter the following command to create the new instance:
setup INSTANCENAME=”BESMgmt” SAPWD=”AStrongSAPwd” /L*v C:\MSDELog.log
5. Start the service: Start -> Run -> Services.msc -> Click OK. Scroll down to the instance you just created MSSQL$BESMGMT, select and click start service.
6. Check the log file to make sure everything installed correctly at C:\MSDELog.log
Then when you run the BES installation, simply enter BESMgmt as the database name. The installation will then run like a dream.
Make sure you follow the Quick Start Guide for the rest of the installation available here: BES Express 4.1 Getting Started Guide
Orange SPV C600 Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Review Part 1
Saturday, December 17th, 2005| I have been given this phone for review, and quite honestly I don’t want to give it back. Its When you think Windows, you think nice wallpaper, icons and |
Accessories in the Box
There’s
nothing outstanding about the accessories in the box for the C600.
Pretty standard stuff really and nothing special. Handsfree kit (wired
variety), USB cable, mains charger and CD for installing the software
on your PC.
There are a whole host of accessories that can be used with this device, because it has Bluetooth connectivity.
Windows Mobile 5
Initially
Windows Mobile 5 was a bit clunky and hard to get used to. It has its
own quirks like any OS. But after a couple of days, as usual, you find
your way around. It’s a nice system, but seems a bit buggy and doesn’t
always respond the way you expect it to. Roll on SP1! That said, I
still think Windows Mobile 5 is the best system on a phone.
Synchronisation
Active
Sync 4 is used to synchronise the majority of office documents between
the phone and pc/laptop. This is great when you have 1 phone and a pc,
but if you try and synchronise between a Smartphone, pda, home pc,
laptop and office pc, you got a lot of synchronising going on! So plan
your mobile communication policy.
Windows Mobile 5 and Messaging
When
Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003, they unleashed a
whole host of features designed specially for Windows Mobile 5 Users.
This allows easy connection to mail and security features like being
able to remotely delete data if you loose your phone.
Negative Points
The
most annoying thing about this phone is the centre joystick used to
control scrolling around the menu functions. This has a
multi-directional and click action which is about as useful as a
handbrake on a canoe. I hear this is an ill advised hang-up from the
C550. What this means is that when you scroll through the menu options
and then try to select an option, you jump up and down the menu options
randomly and can’t actually select anything that you want. This is
really annoying and I can’t believe they’ve stuck with this system.
Apart from that, please let me keep this phone.
Orange SPV C600 and SPV M5000 phones arrived
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005Orange have very kindly delivered us a couple of phones to try out. We are trying out the SPV C600 pictured above and left.
They have also sent an SPV M5000, pictured below. These phones have the new Windows Mobile 5 operating system, so we will be putting both the phones and the OS through their paces over the next couple of weeks.
Watch this space as usual for the low down in the coming days.
Orange tell customers no upgrade to Windows Mobile 5
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005Orange UK will not be offering existing owners of SPV devides an upgrade to the new Windows Mobile 5.
“..devices previously purchased e.g C500 cannot be s/w upgraded to Windows Mobile
Version 5.”
Unfortunately, this means that anyone with an SPV phone or PDA running Windows Mobile 2003 will be unable to upgrade to WM5. Microsoft are only distributing licenses direct to hardware vendors, so it’s not possible to do it yourself. You can only think that there should be an upgrade path for customers wishing to upgrade to Windows Mobile 5?
On a brighter note, this does mean that the SPV SPV C600 and SPV M5000 have now been released in the UK. And they do have Windows Mobile 5. Watch this space for a review of these devices as we put them through their paces and give you the low down on Windows Mobile 5.
For a list of vendors and devices swearing to upgrade to Windows Mobile 5, click here. This list will be updated over time. If your device can upgrade to Windows Mobile 5 and is not on the list, please leave a comment or email me at chris@yellowpark.net. Come on SPV, where are you?