Here is a holiday treat. If you find yourself frequently re-creating partnerships, or synching multiple devices your desktop, you probably find duplicate entries in Contacts. Fellow Mobile Devices MVP Michael Gordon put me on to this free Outlook Contacts Scrubber that provides a way for removing duplicate records from Outlook Contacts by merging data on a field-level basis.
This process that this program uses is important because duplicate contact records are often caused small changes to the records. If you change one field on a Pocket PC and a differnet field on your desktop, that will generate duplicates. This program will recognize those differences and allow you to merge the two changes into one record.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:27 PM |
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Outlook 2002 Add-in: Pocket Contact Synchronizer 1.2 Microsoft has posted this pseudo work around for public folder synchronization. I say pseudo because what this does is copy contacts in an Exchange public folder to the default Outlook folder, and hence then syncs down to a Pocket PC. It does not provide direct public folder sync.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:03 PM |
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PCWorld.com - Toshiba Comes Calling With a New PDA "One of the next new products from the mobile communication unit of Toshiba will be a personal digital assistant that can also be used as a telephone, a company executive says." No word on what operating system this device will use.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:49 AM |
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John Rappold sent me an e-mail, alerting me about the articles he has written about the Anycom Bluetooth products. He has one article about the Anycom Bluetooth CompactFlash card and another about the Anycom printer module. A key piece of information is that the printer module will not work with Socket's Bluetooth card, which I have. Anycome will be releasing an update to address this in February.
posted by Frank McPherson 7:56 PM |
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Alan Reiter has some in-depth analysis of the Boingo announcement, and WiFI vs. Cellular. I think Boingo has two critical success factors: 1) Get as many hot spots as possible to provide a lot of access. 2) Develop as many clients as possible to be available for everyone.
posted by Frank McPherson 7:39 PM |
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Xerox Wins Case Against Palm, 3Com It will be interesting to see what Palm does. And, I wonder how this affects Pocket PC?
posted by Frank McPherson 6:32 PM |
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I stopped by Compusa this afternoon and got to see the Casio E200, though it was locked down so I couldn't hold it in my hand. From what little I could see of it, I really don't like the front buttons. They're black and very difficult to read. I think Casio should have made those buttons silver. The 64 MB of RAM and then dual storage cards make the E200 appealing, but so far the reviews that I have read are pretty negative.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:27 PM |
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I received word today from DataAnywhere that they have shipped the Snap-N-Type mini-keyboard for the iPAQ. I am interested in seeing how well this works, and whether it works with sleeves. The keyboards are now shipping, so you can order yours from DataAnywhere.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:22 PM |
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pocketPCpassion Bulletin Board - SD not so fast on the H3800 Dale Coffing did some write speed tests to CompactFlash, Secure Digital and MMC. Writes to CompactFlash were the fastest, but what was surprising is that it was faster to write to MMC than Secure Digital.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:08 PM |
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Public Space Wi-Fi's Transforming EventGlenn Fleishman has posted more details about Boingo Wireless. The bad news is that this service requires a Windows client, so until a Pocket PC client becomes available, we're out of luck. The Windows client provides all sorts of cool features to make connecting to WLANs easier. It supports network profiles, provides full VPN to secure all transactions, provides single logon across all of Boingo's participating WLANS, and provides SMTP authentication so that you don't have to keep switching outbound email servers. The pricing seems reasonable: a pay-as-you-go model of $7.95 per connection, with up to 24 hours at a single venue, 10 connections per month at $24.95 with $4.95 for additional connections, and $74.95 for unlimited usage.
posted by Frank McPherson 8:57 AM |
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Palm loss: $54 million (12/19/2001) "Tom Sepenzis, analyst at CIBC World Markets, said Palm's overall news was good, but next year will still be challenging. Specifically, Palm has failed to come out with innovative products. He predicted that Palm's upcoming i705 wireless-data offering would not stand up to Handspring's Treo phone."
posted by Frank McPherson 12:28 AM |
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EarthLink founder takes to the air - Tech News - CNET.com "EarthLink chairman and founder Sky Dayton will unveil his newest company on Thursday, a wireless Internet service provider named 'Boingo.'" My guess is that this is the big news that Glenn has been writing about. Mobilestar will be a partner, so my guess is that this will tie together Mobilestar with many of the smaller WiFI wireless ISP. The bottom line here for Pocket PC users is that this could mean that you could connect your Pocket PC to the Internet using a WiFI card at a lot more public places.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:26 AM |
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Whatever you do, do not connect two Pocket PC devices (or a Pocket PC and a Handheld PC) to a desktop computer at the same time. If you do, it can lead to some very unexpected results. I just spent 90 minutes fixing a problem that a friend had in synchronizing his Pocket PC. He did a hard reset of his Pocket PC, and every time he tried to create a partnership the process would bomb part way through and throw up an unrecoverable error. Deleting all partnership information from the registry and the hard drive did not fix the problem. The only thing that did fix the problem was an uninstall of ActiveSync, complete removal of ActiveSync files (three were left stuck in \Windows\System), and a check of the registry to make sure everything was gone. We then reinstalled ActiveSync and we were able to successfully create a partnership and synchronize.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:22 PM |
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Check Back Tonight for Major Story Glenn promises to post the info after 9 PM Pacific. I wonder this is an announcement that Voicestream is aquiring Mobilestar?
posted by Frank McPherson 1:59 PM |
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This discussion thread over at Brighthand has some battery life tests for the Toshiba e570. The reports are that the e570's battery life is better than the e500/Audivox Maestro. From this information it sounds as though you may want to avoid the Maestro because the batter life is bad.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:46 PM |
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PCWorld.com - Palm Moves Forward With Wireless Plans Palms decision to go with Texas Instrument's version of the ARM processor gives analysts a better sense of where Palm is heading.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:46 PM |
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CommonTime - Cadenza Good news for Pocket PC 2002 users who want to sync with Lotus Notes. CommonTime has released the Cadenza Pocket PC 2002 beta that supports synchronization with Inbox.
posted by Frank McPherson 3:56 PM |
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Desktop Outliner 1.0 Now this is interesting. DSR Tech has released a desktop companion application to Pocket Outliner.
posted by Frank McPherson 3:43 PM |
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In an article that I read in today's Wall Street Journal, I learned that Palm is one of the companies that will be testifying for the remaining nine states that are pressing on for more penalties against Microsoft. So it seems that Palm's whining will now move into a court room. It will be interesting to hear how Palm will spin Microsoft's supposed advantage in handheld computing.
posted by Frank McPherson 3:37 PM |
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Developer News -- RSA Unveils WEP Security Breakthrough "Fast Packet Keying avoids this problem entirely by generating a unique RC4 key for each and every data packet sent over the WLAN. The two companies stated that this solution to the WEP problem is designed to be distributed as a software or firmware patch by WLAN vendors, so that the repair can be implemented rapidly."
posted by Frank McPherson 3:27 PM |
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PCWorld.com - Delayed Yopy PDA Shipping Soon "South Korea's G.Mate has confirmed it plans to begin shipping the Yopy, a Linux-based personal digital assistant, in late December."
posted by Frank McPherson 3:23 PM |
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infoSync : Snails on the loose It seems that every day I learn about a new cool game for the Pocket PC. Pocket PC 2002's graphics and sound make it a great gaming platform, and it appears to be attracting the attention of some of the best game developers.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:28 AM |
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Odigo Messenger Force is a winner. One of the problems with Instant Messaging is that there is no interoperability between messaging services. You have to install and use a different client for each service, unless you use one of the unified messaging clients like Jabber. This may not be much of a problem on desktop computers, but you probably don't want to install four different messaging programs on a Pocket PC, which is limited in storage space. I've played with JabberCE, but I wasn't able to get it to work with any services other than Yahoo Messenger. And it requires you to manually enter all of your instant messaging contacts manually. Ruksun has ported the Odigo unified messenger, which has been available for some time for desktops, to the Pocket PC, and I found out about it this morning while reading PDA Buzz. I downloaded it, and it works with AIM and Yahoo Messenger. Better still, it downloads contact info from MSN, AIM, and Yahoo. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to download ICQ contacts.
Of course, there are going to be people who not like the idea of buying a messaging client for $25, when you can get messaging clients for Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ for free. I agree that $25 seems to be a little high, but it does allow you to consolidate four different messaging programs for the Pocket PC down to one. I think that if messaging from your Pocket PC is important to you, and you have contacts across multiple services, Odigo is a worthwhile program.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:33 AM |
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