PhoneAlarm v1.30 Available

Compatible with all PPC 2002, WM 2003, WM 2003 SE
& WM 5.0 Phone devices.

30 day free trial version available.

Features

• Provides repeating alarms and escalating sound on new SMS/Email, missed calls & voice messages
• 7 Custom Phone profiles with manual / time-based automatic switching.
• Alarm notification on weak phone signal or battery
• Customise sound, volume and repeat for each alarm type in each profile
• Mute device and phone volume, also 1-click mute button
• Skinable user interface (How to create skins)
• Bluetooth, WLAN & Flight mode control via profiles (also for Widcomm/Broadcomm stack)
• Auto-profile change on (Work) and (Car)
• Detailed GPRS volume tracking
• Billing calculation – keep track of your phone costs
• Location-based information (change profile dependent on current location!)
• Call and SMS forwarding support in each profile
• 1-hand dialer for last 10 numbers (only for WM 5.0 & WM 2003 SE)
• Icons provide direct access to Inbox, missed call history etc.
• Option to cycle radio (off/on) to change user on dual SIM
• Rotate screen on profile change
• English, German, French, Italian, Danish, Czech, Russian and Chinese user interface
• Supports VGA display
• Simple installation

Available here!

Phatware’s PhatPad V3 Review

Execlenet review of an enhanced version of your Pocket Notes.

WHAT’S HOT
In PhatPad 3, there are three new features of special interest:

• Includes new File and Page managers for Pocket PC
• Voice notes can be added to PhatPad files
• Text and handwriting search capability
• Includes new Pocket PC Today screen add-on
• Supports Windows Mobile 5.0

PROGRAM FEATURES
    As I mentioned, pocketnow.com previously published reviews of PhatPad 2  and PhatPad 2.1.  If you are not familiar with the basic functions of this program, I suggest you read these reviews.  Essentially, v3.0 includes all the features of version 2.1 and functions the same way.  Instead of repeating the previous reviews, I will concentrate on the new features of PhatPad 3 and also speak a little bit about the desktop application which was not covered in our previous reviews.  If you are not familiar with the basic functions of this program, I suggest you read these reviews.

    One of the most significant changes to the look and feel of v3.0 is the new two dimensional preview screen in the PhatPad file manager.  Why is this new screen especially useful?  One neat feature of PhatPad is that this program will automatically name your files for you.  Usually, the files are named using the date and time the file was created, although you can change this easily in the options screen.  If you allow file naming in this manner, you will end up with a long list of files with names that are not especially distinctive.  Of course, you can manually name files but this is an extra step.  In v3.0, you do not have to take that extra step because the two dimensional preview screen lets you see a thumbnail preview of each file.  To open a file simply tap it with your stylus.  If you want to bring up other options, you can tap and hold on a thumbnail just like in the list view file manager.

Read on! 

Latest iPod Nano Skin for Mortplayer

The author BaldEagle along with Mikesjo just released the version 4, which includes Album art, Podcast Logo, Alarm, scrollable playlist, etc.
Available here!

Review: Boxwave’s X51v VGA Presentation Cable

Compared to Dell’s offering, the Boxwave VGA Presentation Cable is miles and miles longer (Figure 1). This not only gives you the ability to connect to any compatible VGA device, but also do so at a comfortable distance. The cable itself is a little smaller than Boxwave’s DirectSync product, but not by much. The cable splits as it comes out of the end of the PocketPC adapter, once again, giving you the flexibility to have your charging device away from the VGA device.
Read more here…

Source: PocketNow.com

Introducing, MobileLinkSite.com!

Introducing, MobileLinkSite.com!

Mobile Link Site is alot like other mobile portals in that it is a collection of links to mobile ready or optimized websites. What makes it different from most of them is that it is user interactive. What I mean is that you can sign up as a registered member and have your input. You can add links to be reviewed and added or report links that are dead or not mobile. Many portals out there now become outdated so fast.

This is my other favorite:

Free Guitar Lessons Video Podcast

iPlay Guitar Lessons

iPlayMusic have created a series of guitar lesson videos available for the iPod. There are 35 in total, and cover subjects ranging from chords and chord transitions, to specific musical styles.

Feed 

Free: Novii Remote Infrared codes, 1.1

by NoviiMedia, Inc.

About 500 infrared codebases for remote controlling popular home equipment: home theater, TV, Cable/Sat, DVD/CD, Audio, etc.

The collection consists of two folders.  One folder contains 438 codebases collected by Novii, other contains 56 codebases learned by our valued customers. We are thankful to everyone who shared their codebases with others on our novii forum.

All these codebases are in the NoviiRemote Classic 2.x format, so if you are using NoviiRemote Deluxe for PPC you need to import these codebases to NoviiRemote Deluxe format.

Troubleshooting:

* The infrared port of some handhelds is slightly underpowered, so to be sure, try to control your devices from a very short distance (3-4 feet).

* Also verify that you are pointing the infrared port on your handheld at the home entertainment equipment. Note that the infrared port on some handhelds is located on the side of the device.

* Finally please be sure that you are pointing directly at the infrared receiver of your devices, not at the screen.
Download here

Google On Your Mobile Device

Everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, has been getting better and better each year in working with mobile devices. I thought I’d recap some of the features and maybe introduce a few new ones. First up is a web optimizer from Google, pointed out to us by Philippe Bueche.

Figure 1: The Google Optimizer at http://www.google.com/gwt/n

You don’t search using this service. Rather, you input your favorite URL and Google fetches it, cutting down the site for your screen and optimizing the connection for low bandwidth connections like GPRS or 1xRTT. I don’t have anything to test the throughput with but it did seem faster. I guess it would also lighten the monthly bill for those not on all-you-can-eat plans. You can see the result below.

Figure 2: My personal site, www.eHansberry.com as seen through the Google Optimizer.

Note at the bottom you have the ability to turn off images, or you could tell it to remove the images before the search begins in figure 1. If you want to see how well this works, try a site that looks horrible on a Pocket PC, like CNN’s front page. Note this also works on the desktop, so if you are modem bound, this can make your browsing life easier.

Next up is GMail for your device. Several months ago, Google modified the GMail web page to work with non-IE browsers by stepping down to less feature rich but more compatible HTML code. It works OK for a Windows Mobile device, but you still get some side-to-side scrolling an probably more data than is necessary. Of course, you can bypass IE altogether and use the POP3 option on your Windows Mobile device, provided it supports POP3 over SSL. Now there is a third alternative. It is a web page specifically made for mobile devices, which you can find at http://m.gmail.com

Figure 3: The new GMail for Mobile Devices page

As you can see, it is seriously stripped down, but it allows you to get at your labels, compose emails, etc. I suspect this will work on a number of cell phones that have decent browsers on them.

One of Google’s more useful services is its online price/store finder, Froogle. Now, you can Froogle your way to savings on your mobile device. Simply visit http://wml.froogle.com and you’ll see this page.

Figure 4:Google’s Froogle on your mobile device

Simply type in your search query and up pops figure 5.

Figure 5:Froogle search results.

The problem here though is none of those links are clickable. I guess Google is assuming you are price shopping at a store to see if there are better deals online, not actually wanting to make the purchase on your mobile device. It certainly is a better option than using the Google SMS option on your phone. Oh yeah, that reminds me, send an SMS message with the word “help” to GOOGL, or 46645 and you’ll see what I mean if you dig into the pricing options.

OK, enough with extra stuff. Let’s see what Google does for you if you are trying to do what Google does best, which is search the web. First up is classic Google, which you can get by simply visiting http://www.google.com

Figure 6:The classic Google search

Notice that it added the “/pda” at the end. If you have a registry hack in place to cause your browser to masquerade as a desktop browser, you won’t get that. For that matter, none of the tips in this article may work properly if you have such a hack in place. The “/pda” page simply gives you a tighter page with less data on it. Searching gives you the following output.

Figure 7Output of the search

You’ll note that the output is much lighter than what you’d see on your desktop. You still get a brief summary of the page, but the cached version isn’t available, nor is the “similar page” feature. Some of you may remember the “/palm” extension. Go ahead, try it. It reroutes to the “/pda” page you see in figure 6. The old Palm page looked similar to the PDA page, except it was black and white. I guess once Palm devices finally got more than 4 bit color screens, Google decided to show us the web in color.

Closely related to this page is the “/xhmtl” page, or http://www.google.com/xhtml

Figure 8:The Google XHTML page

You’ll note that the page has a few more options than does the search shown in figure 6, namely “Local” and “Mobile”, the latter of which is classified as beta. Here, I did the same search as I did in figure 7 and look at the output.

Figure 9:Output of Google’s XHTML page using the “Mobile Web” option

The output of figure 9 is different than that of figure 7. Figure 7 matches your desktop output. Figure 9 though is only showing you what it available on what Google calls the “mobile web.” As far as I can tell, this is used synonymously with WAP, which means when you click on a link, you get pure text with very basic HTML. I also suspect that it would not give you web pages formatted for Pocket Internet Explorer, though I didn’t test it extensively. Note that this a very constricted way to search. A search for my name yielded zero hits, so I, apparently, am not spoken of in the “mobile web.” If, in figure 8, you select “Web” instead of “Mobile Web” you’ll get the same output as you see in figure 7.

Now, let’s take a look at the other search options on the XHTML page. First, is images. Google has a great image search engine on the desktop, but that kind of bandwidth would be horrible on a mobile device, even over EVDO or WiFi. Pocket IE simply isn’t built to show 20-30 images at once. That’s ok, because this “Image” feature limits the output to two or three images per page.

Figure 10:The Image Search feature from the XHTML page.

In figure 10, I simply typed in “Pocket PC genius” and not only did it know to cross reference that with my name, it pulled up my picture! OK, what about the “local” search option? Turns out, that works pretty well too. One of my favorite places to eat is a pizzeria called The Mellow Mushroom.” They have an awesome white pizza there. Mmmmmmm… pizza…… er.. ahem. Sorry. Spaced out there for a second. So, I typed in Mellow Mushroom, selected local and pressed search. You get another page that asks you to narrow it down so it knows where local is. Just type in your city and state and country (it does seem to work in Europe) and press search again. You get the following screen.

Figure 11:Initial search result for Local search.

Now, simply find the locale of your choice and tap the name.

Figure 12:Google Maps on your Pocket PC

Now you get something that looks like Google Maps. It isn’t quite as dynamic as Google Maps on your PC, but it gets the job done. You can zoom in and out, shift directions and finally, get driving directions from your current location.

Last, but not least, is another search mechanism. This one actually goes back several years. Simply visit http://www.google.com/ie. The “/ie” extension isn’t really for mobile devices, It is for the sidebar in Internet Explorer on your desktop. As you can see, the page isn’t particularly lightweight with that big advertisement for the Google toolbar.

Figure 13:Google’s IE sidebar search page

What is useful to you is the output. Take a look. This is the same search I executed in figure 6 above.

Figure 14:Output of Google’s IE sidebar search

This only gives you the page titles. You have to trust Google has done a good job of searching, as it usually does. There is far less bandwidth consumed on these pages than on figures 7 and 9, which could be helpful if you need to tap the “next page” link a few times to look for a particular page.

Finally is Google’s home page optimized for mobile devices. We showed you this earlier this week but I might as well include it in this article.

Figure 15:Google’s Personalized Home Page for mobile devices.

The Google Personalized Home Page is best set up on your PC by going to Google’s main page and logging in. Once configured, on your device just go to one of Google’s search pages, like figure 6 or 8, and tap the “Personalized Home” link and log in.

So, that is a quick wrap-up of Google’s mobile device offerings today, and it is very possible I missed some. Google is doing so many things right now it is hard to keep track. Given everything above, it almost makes it worthwhile to add a “Google” folder in your Pocket IE favorites. Note too that there are tons of features built into Google’s search engine that go way beyond the simple query. For example searching for 5+5 will give you 10. You can find all sorts of tricks at Google’s Feature page, and they should all work on the mobile device just fine.

Source: Ed Hansbery/PPCT

SmartVideo and DMVN Offer Free Music Videos for Mobile Devices

“SmartVideo Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: SMVD.OB), announced mobile viewers can now watch the latest music videos on all Internet enabled devices, such as cellphones, PDAs, and laptops connected via cellular, Wi-Fi, and DSL networks. SmartVideo in partnership with the Digital Music Video Network (DMVN), today launched its groundbreaking, advertising-supported channels featuring videos by the music industry’s top artists. A unique feature of this service is SmartVideo’s use of an advanced Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that protects the copyright and security of the music.”

SmartVideo and the Digital Music Video Network (DMVN) have partnered up to deliver a free ad-supported 24/7 music video service for mobile devices. The initial launch features Top 40 hits, but there are plans to introduce additional channels in the near future. To get started, you will need to sign up for a trial SmartVideo account, but once the trial expires, DMVN content is still yours to access.

Skype for Pocket PC 2.0 Released

Skype for Pocket PC 2.0 is here, and while it might not be as feature-rich as its desktop counterpart, there are still plenty of bug fixes and enhancements for you to enjoy.

The list of changes in Skype for Pocket PC 2.0.0.39 and Skype for Pocket PC 2.0.0.41 (if your Pocket PC has a CPU of 312MHz or below) can be found below.

• change: Skype for PPC graphics updated to 2.0 style
• change: Contactlist sorting
• bugfix: Incoming chat and call privacy options
• bugfix: Impossible to cancel login when in ‘connecting’ mode
• bugfix: Missed call notification not displayed for SkypeIn call
• bugfix: Skype crashes after 2nd calling to PC and PPC user
• bugfix: Chinese languages interchanged
• bugfix: Skype stays in connecting mode
• bugfix: ‘Call’ and ‘Chat’ buttons are enabled when user is not logged in
• bugfix: Received ContactList is not authorized
• bugfix: Second authorization request will block accepting first request
• bugfix: Registering a new user, doesn’t sign in
• bugfix: Login page shown before EULA