Blog entries about Symbian and Palm OS

Listening to or watching podcasts is great fun. If you think they are boring, meaningless or can’t entertain you during, say, a long fight, you’re wrong. For example, watching all the clips of X-Play, played back on my VGA HP iPAQ 214 (thanks to Smartphone & PPCMag / iPhone Life’s Hal Goldstein for the gift!) could entertain me for long-long hours.

Compared to the capabilities of desktop multimedia players (see for example the excellent WMP vs Winamp vs iTunes vs MediaMonkey for more info on their capabilities), the mobile ones certainly lack when it comes to fetching, searching for, editing, storing and, in several cases, even accessing / displaying different kinds (album art and/or other images; textual genre / composer / title etc. info; lyrics etc.) of information in audio files.

Along with tags and cover arts, lyrics are also highly sought-for and widely used metadata, particularly with non-English folks who would like to know the lyrics of the songs they listen to.

In my last Bible of Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry webcamera applications directly usable in desktop messengers like Live Messenger, I haven’t elaborated on the apps that are a bit different: they let for using your camera-equipped handset as a camera for your messaging application running on your desktop PC (connected to your handset).

Many of you may already have heard of Another World (also known as Out of this World in the US and Outer World in Japan; Wiki page HERE; Abandonia page HERE), which was one of the best vector-graphic action-adventure games back in 1991-1992.

Compatibility

Not all notebooks or desktop computers have a built-in web camera. With desktop PC’s, this isn’t that big an issue: as you don’t carry them around, you can just buy an inexpensive, clip-on USB camera and you’re set. Not so with notebooks, UMPC’s or Tablet PC’s – with them, purchasing (and carrying!) a cabled solution might be overly suboptimal. Then, just using your camera-equipped smartphone may turn out to be the best solution; preferably over a wireless connection like Bluetooth.

Nicky Boom was a nice platformer game released for the Commodore Amiga and MS DOS back in 1992 (Wiki page HERE).

In my latest Misc News collection, I’ve already recommended Towers Trap, a brand new game on two mobile (Windows Mobile and Symbian S60) and desktop Windows platforms. GameZoneProject’s official page is HERE. No matter what platform you have, I really-REALLY recommend giving the trial a try and play through the (initial) tutorial. (Again, you’ll have text rendering problems on VGA Windows Mobile devices).

Now that I’ve become a proud owner of a super-mobile HP TC1100 Tablet PC, using mobile devices (smart phones) as external modems have became essential for me. Up until now, I’ve done most of my Web browsing, YouTube watching outdoors with some of my mobile devices.

Yes, it was quite a long ago that I've published my last Misc news. The reason for this is my having been really busy:

I’m using my newly-acquired HP TC1100 (a REAL wonder, if you ask me; I’ll post more on it later) tablet PC as a communications device (also) for MSN calls while at lunch at work to call home (for free) via my unlimited HSDPA plan. So far, the lack of the built-in camera has been a big problem. Now, with the massive (75%) debate of Just Another Mobile Monday, you can get it for almost free.

It’s working just great between my N95 and TC1100 over Bluetooth with all video call-capable apps like MSN.