Blog entries about Non-touch screen smartphones

I've updated the following tutorials / bibles:

The Multiplatform Lyrics Bible (info on the just-added lyrics-displaying capabilities of Conduits Pocket Player 3.7)

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.

"Papyrus 2 brings many exciting new features, including: Search View for PIM item searching; Advanced filters management; Automatic attendees notifications, Popup selection effect for optimized display and much more! Papyrus 2 back-end engine was re-designing from the beginning and delivers the fastest experience for the pro user!"

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.

The built-in Windows Media Player has always suffered from a major flaw: it didn’t support resuming the song from the last position after restarting the player. XDA-Devs forum member Wolfman-XP (the same guy that has also developed AVRCP support for GSPlayer) has fixed this: he has released a plug-in that remembers the last position where you press(ed) the Pause button.

Following is an update to my previous article on the CPU usage of the audio player applications. Please consult the old article on how the data should be interpreted.

GSPlayer is a well-known, excellent, free (!!!!), constantly updated audio player application I’ve very frequently elaborated on (search my blog for my related articles).

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).

As has been explained in the Remote Desktop Control Bible, in the pre-WM6.1 days, Windows Mobile was clearly worse than WindowsCE .NET running on clamshell devices in that the Remote Desktop Mobile client couldn’t make any file transfer in the former, while it could do in the latter (for years).

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.

Hardware

There’s a really interesting article comparing the built-in camera of the four most widely discussed new Windows Mobile phones: HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch Pro, Samsung Omnia, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1. There is also a dedicated PPCT thread HERE, with some of my comments.

Games

"July 7, 2008 - VITO Technology releases Winterface - a major breakthrough in the world of Windows Mobile. Winterface is the Next Generation Shell for Windows Mobile comprising the options of a launcher, a task manager, and a multitude of Today plug-ins. Winterface gives the user unprecedented freedom to easily lay out the interface exactly the way they like it."

There are several vertical scroller space shooter games but very few of them are free. Distant Galaxies, available for both Windows Mobile platforms (touchscreen- and touchscreen-less) is one of them. It’s available HERE for download and is recommended, albeit it has some problems.

Sparus Software is going to release a free(!), slightly (but not that much) dumbed-down version of their pretty useful EveryWAN Mobility Manager software currently offered for enterprise customers.

The new EveryWAN Remote Support, Personal Edition will be completely free. The biggest difference between it and the already-existing enterprise version is that EveryWAN only supports connections via ActiveSync. This means no (remote) TCP/IP connections are allowed.

I’ve promised in my ThemeGenCE review & tutorial that I would quickly compare & evaluate the current theme editors so that you know which one to pick.