Pocket Now provides this link for screenshots of a new email client for Pocket PCs being developed by WebIS, who are the same folks (person) that develop Pocket Informant. From the shots it appears the biggest thing is true support for HTML mail. I guess that is good, but what I want is support for true SMTP authentication, and the ability to change ports. It is really good to see development of serious alternatives to the Microsoft offerrings. If we get enough of these alternatives, we might wish more for having all of Pocket PC stored in Flash ROM so that we can trully customize our own system.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:59 PM |
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PocketPCTools.com reports that Toshiba Germany has announced the E330, which is basically an E310 with an Xscale processor. The most important thing about this device will be the price. The E310's low price has been very instrumental to any success that Pocket PC 2002 can claim.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:52 PM |
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Microsoft VPN flaw may open intranets to attack PPTP is the built-in VPN support on Pocket PC 2002.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:02 AM |
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The Southeast Michigan Pocket PC Users group will be holding a meeting on either October 12 or 19 in Novi, Michigan. During the meeting there will be a presentation by T-Mobile on their Pocket PC Phone Edition and data plans.
If you would like to join or attend this meeting you will find information at our Yahoo eGroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SMUGPPC/
posted by Frank McPherson 10:45 AM |
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I don't understand a word written here but the screen shots are enough to show that Textmaker will be a real wordprocessor for Pocket PCs.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:51 PM |
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Welcome to O2 xda It would be nice if T-Mobile developed a Pocket PC-specific site like O2 did. O2 appears to be much more aggressive in providing updates and in selling accessories.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:26 PM |
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PCWorld.com - Microsoft Readies Bluetooth Keyboard, Mouse I didn't realize that Microsoft's Bluetooth keyboard and mice will require batteries. That could be a big negative for these products.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:22 PM |
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PCWorld.com - Toshiba Shrinks Bluetooth SD Card It will also consume less power, which may really be the big news here. Too bad the T-Mobile Pocket PC phone doesn't have an SDIO slot. I wonder if that deficiency can be address through software?
posted by Frank McPherson 12:21 PM |
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Tekguru - Belkin Bluetooth USB Adapter I found the link to this review on Pocket PC Thoughts. I've seen the Belkin Bluetooth USB adpater for as little as $49 in CompUSA. I use their PC Card adapter, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the cards functionality and their client software.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:07 AM |
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Express Network, Faster Wireless Internet Access I found this out over at MyThera.com. Verizon now has a megabyte data plan for their Express Network service that is pretty competitive.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:13 PM |
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I'm lining up a presentation by T-Mobile for the Southeast Michigan Pocket PC Users Group. The meeting will be in October in Novi, Michigan. I hope to have a date nailed down by the end of the week. If you live in the Southeast Michigan area and you would like to attend this meeting, send me a message.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:52 PM |
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Each time I try, I conclude that the T-Mobile Pocket PC is just not suited for reading eBooks. The navigation button frequently sticks causing multiple pages to flip by, and the lack of a jog wheel is a real hinderence.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:48 PM |
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One of the more useful features for wireless computing may be to obtain price comparisons while shopping. This Yahoo! Mobile page has a list of mobile price comparison sites. I haven't checked them out to determine how good they are, but I wanted to pass the information along.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:13 PM |
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Yahoo! Mobile also sends SMS alerts. You will have to configure Yahoo Mobile to work with your device, and I provided my SMS email address rather than going through the phone number & carrier route. When using any of these alert services I recommend using the email addresses (which generally will be [your phone number]@tmomail.net) rather than using any carrier specific thing since it the Voicestream option is bound to be broke due to their switch to T-Mobile.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:45 PM |
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Lycos Anywhere appears to be a service similar to MSN's.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:36 PM |
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T-Mobile's SMS alerts are pretty good, and I recommend that you peruse and set up alerts through their web site. One of the cooler features is Alerts on Demand. Granted, its not as automatic is having pre-set alerts, but then you don't always know when you are going to need the information. For instance, one of the handy features is the ability to get flight information.
Here is what you need to do to use Alerts on Demand. First, I created a SIM card entry with a name and the number 444 using T-Mobile's SMS application, or you could Inbox and create a contact. I put it on my SIM card since I was using this service with my Ericsson T39m phone. What I use is _Alerts, which insures that it will be at the very top of the list. Send the SMS messages to 444, and include in the message the following text:
FL "flight number" to get flight information; eg FL 485 will return flight information for flight 485
WT "city,state" to get weather by city; eg WT Detroit,MI
WT "zip code" to get weather by zip code; eg WT 48322
ST "ticker symbol" to get stock quotes; eg ST IBM
NW N to get news
After a short period of time (depending on how busy the SMS gateway is), you will receive a reply SMS with the information that you are asking for. If you want, you could create My Text short cuts for any of these items. There are more alerts on demand, but I think these are the most useful. I recommend that you check out the T-Mobile web site to get all the information about their SMS service.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:53 AM |
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MSN will send you 100 free SMS alerts per month via Mobile MSN. There are a wider variety of alerts available than T-Mobile's, including free-form reminders that you may want sent to you at a set time and date. For example, MSN's Carpoint service will send traffic alerts for freeways in metropolitan areas. Keep in mind that SMS is a push technology, so you will get the messages as soon as they are sent so long as your Pocket PC Phone is turned on and within the network. The network will hold messages if you are not in coverage, and send them to you when are in the network. Lately I found that MSN's stock price alert has been way off, so I shut it off. I believe you can pay to have more than the 100 alerts sent each month. One of the cool ways that I used this service with my Ericsson phone was have it send me score updates during the Stanley Cup when I had to attend an event and couldn't watch the game. Of course, you can go through the 100 free alerts pretty quickly doing something like that, so you want to turn the alerts on or off, which you can do pretty easily through the web site.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:48 AM |
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One of the cool things you get with T-Mobile's GPRS service is SMS, which provides a way for you to send and receive short messages from your Pocket PC without using any of your GPRS data or GSM voice minutes. I've been exploring all of the things you can do with SMS, and today I checked out ICQ's support for SMS. Right now I don't have access to my ICQ client program, so I am using their web interface. While the web site claims that it supports Voicestream in the USA, when I plugg in my phone number of sending messages, ICQ says I can't send messages to the cellular network. The web site also says that you can send an SMS to an ICQ user, but doesn't give any specific instructions for doing so.
Speaking of SMS to instant messaging. T-Mobile says that we can use SMS to communicate with AIM, but I have never been able to figure it out. pt is on the case though, so I am anxious to learn how he is doing it. You can use the AIM client for Pocket PCs, but GPRS doesn't always stay connected, so you can't really stay online.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:31 AM |
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pt has gotten his grubby hands on Datanywhere's universal accessory adapter iPAQ 3600 to T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone and has taken some pics using the phone with a Stowaway keyboard. I wonder how stable the connection is since the pictures show the Pocket PC being pretty high above the keyboard.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:31 AM |
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Arne has written a great article about how GPRS works, and how you determine data transfer rates.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:28 AM |
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ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide Chris De Herrera has put together a very comprehensive troubleshooting guide for ActiveSync. This is one worth bookmarking.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:05 PM |
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As I have written here several times before, I use nPop to manage my email on my Pocket PC. The main reason why is that nPOP supports full SMTP authentication so that I can specify a userid and password for the SMTP server that is different from my POP userid and password. With flat-monthly plans available for regular dial-up and CDPD services, you don't have to worry too much about connect time or the amount of data that you transfer. This is not the case with GPRS connections like T-Mobile's that charge for the amount of data that one uses, and thus you have to think about how much data that you use.
Unfortunately, this problem is exacerbated by the amount of spam that we get these days. To counteract that issue I use a service called spamcop, which is an email filtering service. Basically before I actually download email it is forwarded from my mail server to spamcop, where it goes through their extensive spam filters before it is sent to another mailbox on my server, and hence downloaded to my Pocket PC. Spamcop does a decent, though not perfect job of capturing spam, and unfortunately, as I have used the service longer I have noticed it catching less and less of the spam I get. (Though just yesterday I had to turn off the forwarding while spamcop moved to different servers, and I was amazed by the constant flow of spam into my email box during the day.)
I have to admit that I have not done extensive research in to all the spam filtering services that are available. I know that there are some good PC-based utilities for PCs, but of course they don't work with Pocket PCs, and you don't want to be downloading even the headers if you can get away with it. Hence, I recommend considering spamcop if you are at all serious about accessing your email via wireless connections. If you use other filtering services I would love to hear about them.
The next step in my email setup is nPOP, and here you want a strategy that downloads as little data as possible, but still lets you know what you have. I have configured nPOP to only download headers. To do that in nPOP tap File, Options, which opens the Recv tab. Change the Number Of Lines Received to 0, and clear the Message Body IS Received When Checking and Show Header check boxes. In this case, Show Header means that the entire email header is downloaded and that provides more information than simply the message sender name, email address, and subject. It doesn't matter what options you select in the Mail List Save group because those options control what happens with email after it is downloaded. Tap OK to save the configuration.
Now when you check for email with nPOP all you will get are the headers, which use much less data. I then tap and hold on the messages that I want to download and tap Mark For Receive. Likewise, you can mark headers to be deleted, and then when you do an update nPOP will download the messages you want, and delete the messages off the server that you don't want. I can imagine that this configuration that I use with nPOP saves me 100K or more of data each day.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:56 PM |
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Yesterday I went to the Detroit Lions vs. Green Bay Packers football game. We had a great time, punctuated by a victory for my favorite NFL team, the Green Bay Packers. The game was the regular season home opener at the Lion's new stadium, Ford Field. We had choice seats in the club section, provided as a gift to my friend who invited me to attend the game with him. Of course, I took my T-Mobile Pocket PC to the game with me since after all it is my mobile phone. I can report that T-Mobile's coverage at Ford Field is excellent, and I had no problems connecting to GPRS. I checked email, and updated my personal weblog. The Packers have a new running back that I did not know much about, so during the game I checked the Packer's web site. There is an AvantGo companion to the Packer's site that lists their roster, but did not provide the vital stats on the player that I was looking for. (is he a rookie, and if so, from where?) Fortunately, I was using a Pocket PC, so I could also access the full Packer web site, where I found the information that I needed.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:37 PM |
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There seems to be a timing issue with the GPRS network. The complete post below made it to Blogger, but Pocket Blog doesn't think it made it.
posted by Frank McPherson 5:55 PM |
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