Blog entries about Touch screen devices

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.

This is your chance: the impressive Skyfire browser is freely available until August 30. Also, this week there’s lots of device news, including the official announcement of the Palm Treo Pro, the September arrival of the first Android device (from T-Mobile), and Reviews of the HTC Touch Pro.

"Sunnysoft upgrades its Windows Mobile contacts manager Sunnysoft Contacts to version 1.5! Some new features include...

Rumors are about that Verizon and Sprint will be offering the HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro. Plus, there’s a great video on YouTube of the amazing Touch Pro interface. This week we’ll also note a few reviews of the new HP iPAQ 910 and leaked information about the Treo 850.

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.

We’ve recently redesigned our web site, and I’m impressed. It must be among the best Windows Mobile/Smartphone sites on the Internet. This week we’ll also note a video review of the Samsung and other device news, as well as a new version of Google Maps for Windows Mobile.

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.

"July 30, 2008 – VITO Technology is proud to present Task2Gather - a brand-new free service for online task management. Task2Gather is one place for all your tasks and projects: family, social, business, and private. Task2Gather lets you put your tasks online and invite family members, colleagues, or clients to participate and achieve common goals."

I've reviewed a number of new software input methods this year for Windows Mobile touchscreen devices. They have all generally used the standard qwerty layout that would be found on a hardware keyboard. Fitaly throws you for a loop because it uses a non-querty layout, and incidently the name is derived from the arrangement of letters on the keyboard (just like querty).  The fitaly layout was designed in the nineties for pencomputers, when Jean Ichbiah thought that writing with a stylus required a different type of keyboard.

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.

"It's been awhile since we released our last new title, but for a very good reason. Our latest title, Jaybot's Catchy Cadence is an amazing game, and it's now ready to play!"

Reviews of the Treo 800w, iPAQ 910, and Samsung Omnia are popping up, so I want to note these and give a bit more info about these and other new devices. Also, this week we’ll touch on the new mobile version of Live Mesh, Microsoft’s new approach to cloud computing.

Treo 800w and iPAQ 910

I’ve been giving so much coverage to the exciting new touch devices that I sort of forget that there are other form factors that continue to be popular, including those like the BlackBerry with a front-facing keyboard.

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).

"The efficiency of the Fitaly on-screen keyboard lies in its layout and its enhanced features. Most people think 10 fingers are necessary to do extensive texting. Fitaly allows 10-finger speed with a single pointer. As one user puts it: “Simply nothing better. I’ve tried many different input programs and fitaly stands out well above the rest."

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).