Experts Online

eBook on Time Management for Technology Users

Bruce Keener — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:54:04 -0600

Too busy to find time to browse through the self-help books in your local bookstore, to see if there is a good book on managing your time? Wish you could find a bunch of tips on how to use your Windows Mobile device to manage your time better?

Problem solved: you can download my free eBook entitled Time Management for Technology Users. It is currently available in three formats: MobiPocket Reader, iSilo, and the popular PDF format.

Can Somebody Develop This?

Bruce Keener — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:00:45 -0500

On my iMac, I use Gmail notification software to inform me when I have new Gmail. I have not been able to find anything similar to this for my Smarphone, and it seems like it would be a great Smartphone utility. As it stands, to see if I have new Gmail I have to manually check my Gmail account using IE on my Dash. Sure would be nice if there were a utility to periodically check this for me.

Have any of you come across a utility that can do this? If not, any developers out there that care to take this on? Of course I get a percentage cut for having the idea :)

Nothing Wrong With The Smartphone

Bruce Keener — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:17:17 -0500

Regular readers of my Keener Living Blog know that I am toying with the idea of getting another phone, in addition to my T-Mobile Dash: an iPhone or a BlackBerry.

Some of you have probably read my articles along those lines and have wondered if I am a "defector."

Well, a couple of points of clarification are in order:

I actually am very happy with my Dash. My writeup of my first impressions of it, and my upgrade of it to WM6, are both available in my articles here at Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine.

Fixing Alarm Problems in Windows Mobile Devices

Bruce Keener — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 10:03:00 -0500

I recently addressed the following topic on my Keener Living Blog and thought it would be good to share it with the broader audience here:

Appointment reminders not working at all on some Windows Mobile Pocket PCs
Appointment reminders not having an audible alarm on the T-Mobile Dash after a WM6 upgrade (the reminders vibrate but do not produce an audible alert)

The second problem has an easy fix, thanks to Karl of Ask The

Giving yourself a recalibration

Bruce Keener — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 10:30:09 -0500

It's been a while since I've talked about any time-management-related activities, so I decided to post on this topic today.

Whether you use a PDA or paper or both to help you manage your time, good time management always boils down to whether you are working on the right things.

First Impressions of Windows Mobile 6 on my T-Mobile Dash

Bruce Keener — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:26:30 -0500

Although this post first appeared in my personal blog some time back, I thought it would be a good idea to share it with the broader audience here. This summarizes my initial impressions of the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade on my T-Mobile Dash.

Major Improvements

There are several significant improvements in this new operating system, some that I am probably not yet aware of. But, the ones that impress me a lot are:

HTML email — I love being able to view HTML email on my Dash.
Calendar improvements — The calendar now shows timebars on the daily view so that you can graphically see where your time is going, and the new weekly view is fantastic: it is a graphical view of your appointments, and you can see the details of each by just using the D-pad to scroll from left to right throughout the week.
Task application — the built in Task application is now more than just the simple task viewer it once was: you can actually create new tasks with the app and edit existing ones.
Mobile Office — You can now view and edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents on the Dash and you can view PowerPoint presentations on it (no editing capability for the latter). Moreover, the viewing mode for Mobile Word has a great smooth scrolling feature: makes it darned easy to read a Word document on the Dash.

The built-in Internet Explorer also seems to be much nicer, although I am not sure how to quantify the improvements in it.

I won't inundate you with screenshots, since there are tons of WM6 screenshots on the web now. But here is one to show the timebars in the new Calendar application:

How I manage memory on my devices

Bruce Keener — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:49:05 -0500

In reponse to this month's "Ask The Experts" question of how I manage memory on my device, my answer is simple.

For my Dell x51v, I use the following two programs:

SKTools, a great all-around toolkit, which includes a memory cleanup section.
Magic Button, a free utility that lets me fully close programs and lets me easily switch between active ones.

I periodically use SKTools to clean the internet cache on my Dell and to clean out temporary files.

Customize your Smartphone Start Menu

Bruce Keener — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:48:45 -0500

One of the few things that initially annoyed me about the T-Mobile Dash was its Start Menu. The operating system put stuff at the top of the menu that I didn't care about, like:

Communications Manager
Email Setup Utility
Other things that you use once and then pay little attention to

And, new programs that I added to the Dash, such as Agenda One and Documents To Go and SKTools Lite, showed at or near the bottom.

Great, Free Smartphone Utility

Bruce Keener — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:27:34 -0500

I'm finding that many of my 90 or so Pocket PC software packages do not run on a Smartphone platform. So I am searching for replacements for the software I really use (out of the 90 packages, I regularly use no more than 10 or so).

One of the fine products that I have come across is SKTools Lite for WM5 Smartphones. This utility is very helpful in cleaning out your internet cache (which can take up a lot of valuable memory if not cleaned periodically).

Actually Edit Documents on Your Smartphone

Bruce Keener — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:15:37 -0500

I recently posted a review on my personal blog of Dataviz's Documents To Go for Windows Mobile Smartphone, and thought it would be good to share that review with readers of Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine:

I was delighted to learn that Dataviz has released a Smartphone version of the software. Prior to switching primarily to the Pocket PC platform, I used Documents To Go on my Palm handhelds for years. This software's capability for editing Microsoft Word, Excel, and even PowerPoint documents, was something I used a lot.

In fact, the DTG software was so good, in comparison to the Pocket PC's built-in Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, that I actually switched back to Palms for a while (more than once). When Microsoft came out with Windows Mobile 5, they made worthwhile improvements to Mobile Word and Mobile Excel. But, DTG still offered more editing capability, and has always been good at syncing the changes back to the desktop without any formatting getting lost along the way.

When I made a decision last week to get a Smartphone (the T-mobile Dash), I knew upfront that it would not have any built-in capability to edit documents. But, since I do not have as much need for such editing as I did at one time, I figured the benefits of a Smartphone outweighed this one downside. Turns out, though, that with Dataviz's release of DTG for Smartphones, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

In the following review, we look at DTG's abilities for editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and its ability to view PDF documents and documents within zip files.