Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine blogs

I can’t say I’ve been lazy in the last few days. Thanks to the excellent feedback the XDA-Develeloper folks provided, I realized I need to check out XDA-Develeloper coder A_C’s latest, pretty nice and, if you’re a big fan of iPhone-alike interfaces, pretty much recommended, free (!) utilities.

Non-iPhone platforms (including both the operating system – see HTC’s latest Diamond* have been trying to copy the way iPhone works and is used. For example, Symbian also has a similar tool HERE.

*: As far as the, well, built-in storage- and GUI responsiveness-wise, to put it mildly, not really convincing HTC Touch Diamond (which is all the rage today in the Windows Mobile world) is concerned, before I publish a full story on it, read the comments, including mine, HERE. They’re really worth checking out to see what the tech geeks think of the Diamond’s inherent problems – as opposed to what many sites state in their HTC Diamond announcement reports. You’ll see why the “4GB of built-in memory is more than enough for everything you can think of and you certainly don’t need storage cards to extend it” approach of HTC is pretty much flawed. The Diamond should either come with 16GB flash memory at least (as is the case with later iPhone models and the Nokia N96) and/or with an additional microSD slot – even if under the battery.

Slide2Play

Let’s start with S2P (Slide2Play), a stylus-free MP3/WMA player application. It simply lets you browse and play your music files. It supports album art but, as of the current version, not much else - for example, not even playlists are supported. The interface is, as with the other apps of the same author, very easy to use with fingers. Of course, because of the lower sensitivity of traditional touchscreens versus the capacitive, glass screen of the iPhone, don’t except anything as easily controllable as on the iPhone, particularly not on devices with screens known for their being overly insensitive; most importantly, the HP iPAQ 210.

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I tend to think of Proporta.com as the case place because they seem to be able to cover just about any digital device out there. The new line of Universal Phone Cases comes in three sizes:

Internal dimensions

Small Case: 90mm x 25mm x 50mm
Medium Case: 110mm x 60mm x 25mm
Large Case: 120mm x 70mm x 30mm

These black leather, handsome cases will protect your device with a stitched-in aluminum insert in the flap cover with a strong magnetic clasp. The sides and bottom are composed of expandable elastic to accommodate slightly larger sizes.

The cost is $27.95 and shipping is free for the rest of the month.

I wish that the cover had a couple of pockets for expansion cards. I wish that the strong and secure belt clip on the back were removable so I could stow it in my gadget bag better. Other than these minor nags, it is a good investment in the security of your device.

The final version of Opera Mini 4.1, one of the best Web browsers available, has just been released; see THIS for more info. I’ll post a detailed multiplatform review in some days, after having used it for some time on all my three mobile operating systems.

Finnish computer mag Tietokone has just published a summary of their desktop browser speed test published in their (offline) papermag. Currently, I only have access to the online summary (while I'm a paying subscriber to their mag, it hasn't arrived yet). I'll let you know when there's anything else of interest in the article as soon as I receive the offline version - it's promised to be pblished tomorrow (which means subscribers living in abroad receive it shoon thereafter).

They state the current desktop Opera 9.5 b2 is considerably faster than both Internet Explorer 8 b2 and Mozilla Firefox 2. It's only Apple's Safari and Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 5 that turned out to be faster. It has also turned out to be faster with both normal- and Flash-based contents.

I've always preferred using Opera to IE on my 15" UXGA (1600*1200) Thinkpad because, even as of IE8b2, Opera 9.5 has far better zoom-in capabilities (which is essential on an UXGA or WUXGA 15" notebook), particularly when zooming into forum pages; not to mention its standards compliance (see my latest reports HERE).

I've just posted a new section to the YouTube Bible. See section UPDATE (05/12/2008) at the bottom.

Because of the huge prices of traditional (non-Internet-based) video phoning services, several Symbian users have been praising TiVi, a VoIP app / service with video phoning and, at least on Symbian, front camera support capabilities. As it also has a Windows Mobile version, I gave it a very thorough, three-platform (desktop Windows, Symbian and Windows Mobile) ride to find out what it's really capable of.

1.1 Registration, Web page

Fortunately, using the service for TiVi - TiVi connections is absolutely free (as opposed to what some people state in some Symbian forums) and works over fully (on both sides) firewalled connections. To being able to reach your buddies, you'll need to register a nickname on the central server. This is pretty easy and can be done HERE.

You'll also need to download the client software; it's available for the desktop HERE and for mobile platforms HERE. Install it; after starting it, press the left softkeys on both mobile platforms and go to Config. There, fill in your login name / password. After this, you'll become available for the others; using your nick instead of a "traditional" number will work when calling you. Note that it also has a built-in Contacts list and also has access to the system-level contacts, offering (of course, non-free - as opposed to in-network calls) dial-out capabilities for them.

Note that the page and the service themselves are pretty far away from being professional. Latvian is used on some both the Web pages (even when using English) and, which is even worse, in the answering machine. This, of course, isn't that problematic, particularly if you speak some Slavonic language because, then, you'll understand at least the last two words of the answering machine message and can deduce what takes place. And, it's only in the first occasion that this can cause any kind of confusion.

1.2 Screenshots

(a Symbian shot showing the output of the HTC Universal - that is, the Nokia itself, me trying very hard to make a screenshot on it. In the upper left corner, you can also see Nokia's own camera image (of the Universal, with 180 degrees rotated screen, in front of it). Note that the Symbian version, in addition to stopping / restarting video, also supports switching between the front/back cameras if you press 0. By default, the front camera is used, of course.)

(a Windows Mobile HTC Universal screenshot showing the image received from the Nokia N95 and its own picture in the upper left corner. As you can see, the client doesn't even display a button shortcut to switch between the front and the back cameras)

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