Configuring MMS on my old HTC Touch phone was a pain. In fact  configuring MMS on any device is a pain and is probably one of the reasons the service is not as popular as SMS.

The carrier (Airtel) did not have a way of pushing the settings to the device and the manual configuration that they were suggesting did not match the UI elements that I was seeing on the phone !

I did finally manage to configure MMS on HTC and did write a detailed post on the same.

MMS configuration on the Blackberry on the other hand was a breeze. A service book was pushed by the carrier which has the MMS settings

I was also asked to send a test MMS to myself to activate the feature (wonder why I had to do this).

A soft reset was also recommended after which the MMS feature started working.

If you are having trouble enabling MMS on Blackberry:

1. Ensure that the MMS Service book is present
2. Ensure that the service is activated as well (Activation methods are carrier specific)
3. Ensure that you send a test MMS to yourself.

One thing that I noticed after setting up all my email accounts on Blackberry was the  hotmail email was landing real slow on the Blackberry device

It used to come almost after 10-15 minutes, much like my corporate email that I configured using Outlook Web Access (OWA).

On other accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo or yahoo, the mail delivery was almost instantaneous.

To fix this delay in hotmail do the following:

1. Login to your carries BIS page i.e. http://carrier.blackberry.com
2. Edit the hotmail account settings
3. You should see a “Change Protocol” option as shown in the image below
   
4. Click on it and accept the terms and conditions.
5. This change to “Mobile Services Protocol” should now start delivering mails to your Blackberry device as and when it lands on the hotmail server.
    

Screen capture utilities are required when you want to flaunt your Blackberry Home screen or when you want to accompany them along with a support query.

On support forums, query with an attached screenshot helps in quicker resolution of the issue.

Blackberry does not bundle any native application for screen capture and users have to rely on third party applications to take screenshots.Here again, we have wired and wireless(preferred) ways of capturing the screen.

If  you want to use wired way, you can try Blackberry JavaLoader or BBScreensho0ter. These are applications running on your desktop which capture the device screenshot !

Wireless way is preferred way of taking screen shots and for this, you need an application installed on the device.There are 2 popular applications out there

1. CaptureIT
2. ZonaSnap

ZonaSnap is a much better tool compared to CaptureIT and has options to send the image as an E-mail attachment or even publish it to Photobucket (wish Flickr was supported ! )

You can set a convenience key for the application which makes it easier to capture the screenshot !

Few years back, copying all contacts to the SIM was the only way of importing contacts onto a new phone. Most of the Smartphone operating systems today have better native support for address book management and synchronization.

On my old HTC Touch(running Windows Mobile), I could easily sync Outlook contacts with the device using ActiveSync. However ActiveSync worked only over a wired cable or via Bluetooth and there was no other wireless way of synchronizing contacts

Blackberry on the other hand has an amazing wireless contact sync feature. There is no separate “Sync” operation triggered by the user !! ; Any updates done on the Blackberry Address book are synced back to Gmail Contacts and same holds good for any updates done on Gmail Contacts.

Follow the below steps to get the perfect wireless contact sync on Blackberry

1. The first thing to do is to setup Gmail as the primary store for Address Book. If you are using Outlook or any other contact store, you need to export the contacts to  CSV and import them in Gmail
2. Gmail also has this nice de-duplicator feature which can be used to eliminate all the duplicate contacts in the address book.
3. While setting up the Gmail account on Blackberry, select the “Sync Contacts” option
   
4. It will take a few minutes, before you start seeing all the Gmail contacts on your Blackberry Address book.
5. However there is a bug because of which, sync might cause duplicate contacts only on the Blackberry Address book (not on Gmail). To avoid this go to Address Book -> Options -> General Options and set "Allow Duplicate Names" to "No"
   
6. All contact changes (add/update/delete)  done either on device or on Gmail are synced almost immediately.

Some of the frequently asked questions  on how to get the contact sync up and going:

What If I have the contacts only on the SIM?

1. Import the contacts from SIM to Blackberry Address book. If a contact had multiple phone numbers, this will create multiple contacts on BB Address book.
2. Setup Gmail sync (using the above 6 steps)
3. Use Gmail de-duplicator to fix all the duplicate contacts which got created during SIM import
4. Changes done on Gmail should automatically sync back to the device

What If I have already synced/imported the contacts via Blackberry Desktop Manager

1. One way of handling this is to import the contacts into Gmail first, use the Gmail de-duplicator feature and then setup the Gmail contact sync feature.
2. Alternatively, you can just go ahead and setup the Gmail sync; If there are duplicates, Gmail should help in merging the duplicate contacts.

Note: Wireless Synchronization can be turned ON or OFF even via the Blackberry Address book options.

As with any other frequently used desktop application, the first thing that I did when I got the Blackberry was to familiarize myself with the keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts are typically an alternate means for invoking one or more commands that would otherwise be accessible only through a menu, a pointing device, different levels of a user interface, or via a command console – Wikipedia

My old HTC Touch, being a touch based phone, had no concept of keyboard or a shortcut which was quite frustrating. The Blackberry OS comes with a multitude of shortcuts and in this article, I will cover only the shortcuts available on the Blackberry Home Screen.

In order to enable some of the shortcuts listed in the table below, one has to first disable “Dialing from Home Screen”

1. Go to Phone Screen -> Blackberry Key -> Options -> General Options
2. Set Dial From Home Screen to NO

Note:
These shortcuts are the ones defined in the OS; one can always install a third party application like QuickLaunch which helps in assigning shortcuts to all kinds of operations possible on a Blackberry device

The shortcuts for the Instant Messaging Applications will work provided they are installed.

If I have missed any other Home Screen shortcut key, do let me know by leaving a comment.

Most of the Blackberry devices sold by RIM are locked onto a specific carrier, which means that the phone wouldn’t work with any other carriers SIM

I bought a Bold 9700 which was locked into AT&T network. There are lots of people out there selling the unlock code starting from 10$ all the way to 35$

These guys even give out complementary codes on popular blackberry blogs and have seen them pretty active in the Blackberry forums

When I was searching for “Unlocked Blackberry Bold 9700″ in Goolge Product search,I ended up seeing all the unlock providers first in the list (For some reason, Google couldn’t distinguish between “Unlocked” and “Unlock” in my search query)

And most of these in the list were guys selling the code via eBay and the surprising part was the offer price: 1.85$ ~ 2.5$

I went by seller rating and bough the unlock code from eBay. To get the unlock code, as with any “unlocker”, you have to submit the phone IMEI , phone model and the carrier

I was surprised to see the code delivered to my email within 10 min.

Once you get the unlock code, the process of unlocking the phone is pretty straightforward (This again might differ from phone to phone)

For Bold 9700

1. Go to “Manage Connections” and select “Turn All Connections Off”
2. Go to Options -> Advanced Options -> SIM Card
3. You do end up seeing a empty screen here. Type MEPD (case insensitive) on this screen
4. You would see a list in which “Network” would be marked as “Active”
5. Type MEP2 on this screen to bring up the unlock code entry text box (note 2 here is Alt+E)
6. Type in the unlock code received from the “unlocker” and you should see “Network” status changing from “Active” to “Disabled”

Now the device is unlocked and work with any GSM carrier. I would recommend anyone to use eBay service rather than paying exorbitant amounts to the “unlockers” charging almost more than 10-30 times the price offered on eBay

Note: If you are a long standing customer of the carrier, you can even call the customer care and ask for the unlock code. You should mention that you are traveling out of the country and intend to use the phone with some other SIM. This way you can get the unlock code for FREE !

Blackberry Bold 9700 which was released in US around mid November is now finally available in India.

There was no launch party for the Bold release like the one that happened for Singapore launch !

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 will be available nationally from multi brand outlets serviced by Redington India as well as from operators including Airtel, Aircel, BSNL, Idea Cellular, Loop Mobile, MTNL, Reliance, Tata and Vodafone beginning today

Now for the disappointing part; Its priced at 31990 which is almost 700 USD

In US, the no-commitment price for the same device is 350USD.

Here is an video, which might tempt you to go for the phone irrespective of the price

In my earlier review of HTC Touch, I had hoped that the phone would last for couple of years; it did last for more than couple of years – 2.5 years to be exact and got replaced by a much superior, nicer, faster Blackberry Bold 9700

HTC Touch was a nice phone but not a useful device. The messaging capabilities were very limited partly because of the touch interface and partly because of the almost useless OS – Windows Mobile. The processor was too slow to run applications and it was a pain to watch the device load the applications.

I have been using the Blackberry for almost a week now and it has been an amazing experience till now !

• The messaging capabilities in Blackberry is something that can’t be even experienced on an iPhone. I could quickly configure all my E-Mail accounts via the Blackberry Internet service and now new E-Mails are pushed to the device as and when they land on the server
• The physical keyboard is a pleasure to use when compared to the touchscreen keyboard.
• Blackberry Messenger is an excellent tool to chat with your other Blackberry friends.
• Facebook App is developed by RIM and does integrate nicely into Blackberry. You can even link Facebook contacts into Blackberry contacts which in turn pulls information like phone number, photo etc from Facebook onto the device address book.
• There are quite a few useful applications which can be downloaded from Blackberry App World (like iPhone App Store) . There are few others which can be downloaded OTA.
• I love keyboard shortcuts and Blackberry has taken care to incorporate the same in most of the applications – Messaging, Browser, Home Screen etc.

The only problem I had was with respect to the boot time. Every time I uninstall an application, you have to reboot the device and this is something which does take a lot of time.

I don’t intend to write an exhaustive review of the device hardware and capabilities. In case you are interested to know more about this phone, do read the reviews done by Phone Arena and Crackberry.

The HTC Touch phone that I have been using from 18 months had turned into a nightmare from the past 2 months.

I do use the phone extensively to synch my Outlook contacts and calendar appointments. However from the past few weeks, I was seeing that the Time Zone on the phone used to default back to GMT+1 at random times.

I am on GMT+5.30 and for some unknown reason it used to default back to GMT+1. As expected, the appointments in the calendar were popping up at the wrong time; same goes for the morning alarms.

I did observe this reset happening after disconnecting the device from an active ActiveSync session. However I used to see this behavior at random times even without the assistance of ActiveSync.

When I connect the device to the PC, the time on the device is always synchronized with the time on PC, but the Time Zone was always untouched.

I did search thorough a lot of forums to find a fix for this problem. Some of the forum posts were pointing to the data set in the Regional Settings. I checked on it and every other possible option in Windows Mobile and nothing helped.

Just a few days back, I found a setting on the device which was causing this issue (Not sure how I overlooked it)

There is a Time Zones tab on the Phone settings (which is almost hidden)

I for some reason had enabled the option and hence the time zone was being set/overridden by the carrier; in my case the screw up was being done by Airtel.

The Airtel tower was setting the Time Zone on my phone to GMT+1 Prague, Budapest while it was standing tall and operating from Bangalore. I am sure opening a complaint with Airtel won’t help and I have disabled this option for now.

If any of you Windows Mobile owners are facing a similar Time Zone issue, do check this option.

HTC Touch Diamond was unveiled in London 2 weeks back and even India is part of the global launch of the handset.

As with the case of HTC Touch, HTC Diamond will also be available via Bharti Airtel, which means that the device will be locked onto Airtel Network.

I am confident that the intelligent folks at XDA will come up with an unlock mechanism for HTC Diamond as they did for HTC Touch.

The specifications of HTC Diamond looks way better than HTC Touch. It has a much faster processor, more memory and a better camera. Its 3G enabled and also has GPS. The new 3D TouchFlo also looks good.

There is also a custom YouTube Application, however I am not sure if the video experience is same as in iPhone.

Official HTC Touch Diamond Video

The phone is being priced at 27500 INR (670$) which in my opinion is way too high. Hopefully the price will come down over the period of time in which case it will be a worthy alternative to HTC Touch.

My 8Mbps broadband plan is sucking out money from the past 2 months; somehow I am managing to exceed the 4GB download limit.

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka….. Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of their important offering e.g. Airtel Data card.

Check an example URL for Airtel Data card:

http://airtel.in/level2_t7.aspx?path=1/106

And its not just this URL; every URL in the site seems to have a awkward “level2″ and path parameter. Also the path parameter seems to get a new value with every domain change and makes linking to their site a pain !

Update: Airtel portal is back in action; not sure who hacked it or whether it was some upgrade issue. The countless number of “srilanka” in the URL in a way conveys that it was probably not a server upgrade issue !

Many of the visitors who land on my HTC related posts have contacted me to know more details on HTC Customer Service. I was initially surprised as to why these users couldn’t get this data via Google.

I did a search for HTC India on Google only to find crappy pages listed on the first page of search results.

There is not even a link to the global HTC site and this pretty much explained the reason for the number of people contacting me to know more on HTC customer service in India.

HTC does have a dedicated portal for customers in India. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up in Google search and the only way to find this to navigate via the HTC International home page

HTC India - http://www.htc.com/in/default.aspx

HTC provides support over Phone, Email and if it still doesn’t help you can walk into any of the customer care centers listed below:

Check in this link for up-to-date information

http://www.htc.com/in/support/customer_care.html

If any of the above phone number is not working, please check this link for updated information.

Cell Broadcast also know as Short Message Service – Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) is a service designed for delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area. Unlike SMS Point to Point which is manly a one to one service Cell Broadcast is a one to many service.

Some mobile operators use Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location based news, etc. The service might not be supported by all the operators; even some of the handsets don’t have the capability to receive Cell Broadcast messages.

One of the readers on my earlier post on HTC Touch wanted to know whether the Cell Broadcast service could be enabled on HTC. The service can be enabled easily on a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson phone and isn’t so easy to configure on HTC.

Steps to enable Cell Broadcast on HTC Touch

1. Navigate to the following screen on the device

   Start -> Settings -> Phone -> More

2. Check the “Enable” box under the Broadcast Channels

   

3. Click on the “Settings” to bring up the following screen

   

   -> Check “Receive channel list”
   -> Set Language to “All Languages”
   -> Create a new item with any name and channel number set to 050 or 50

4. You should immediately see the Cell Broadcast messages being displayed as message alerts.
5. Cell Broadcast messages as message alerts are annoying and if you want the same to appear on the home screen, install the BatteryStatus application. Once installed, the application has an option to display the Cell broadcast messages on the “Today” screen
   You can even optionally set the alignment for the broadcast messages.
   
6. Once the above setting is done, you should see the Broadcast messages on the home screen as shown below (The message is next to the battery status)

   

Note: The display of Broadcast messages is a battery sucker ! As you can see from the above image, the battery was fully charged before I enabled the broadcast feature. Within a day, the battery drained to 18% ! Every time a message is received, the display light is turned on and this is one major battery drainer.

Twitter is a web service which helps you to communicate and stay connected through quick exchange of messages. Its supposedly one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.

Until few days back, accessing Twitter service from iPhone was possible only via the safari web browser. Following are the 4 web based Twitter Clients for iPhone:

Twitter Mobile

Twitter Mobile is the official version of the mobile client. The User interface is basic (hence loads faster) and it lacks a lot of features available on normal web based client.

The following snapshot shows the only 4 options available on the mobile client.

Pocket Tweets

The user interface of PocketTweets is pretty good with buddy icons and the available timelines. However the good looking interface took a toll on the loading speed. It was amazingly slow even when I used the client over Wi-Fi

Hahlo

Hahlo has a much better user interface compared to PocketTweets and it also loaded up pretty fast. The home page is kind of not that user friendly and would have liked if it could directly showed the friends timeline.

iTweet

iTweet has all the features but not the right user interface. I found it too difficult to use; only a few tweets are displayed and the application menu itself took a lot of space on the screen.

Following are the 2 native twitter clients available for iPhone:

Mobile Twitter

MobileTwitter is a native twitter applications developed by Nicholas Pike and is available on the STE source. The native client loaded the tweets pretty fast and unlike the web clients you don’t have to enter the login credentials again and again.

The only issue with this client is the positioning of the options menu with respect to the iPhone keyboard which pops up while posting a tweet. Many a times I ended up clicking on an option rather than typing a character !

Features:

• Your timeline (you + those you follow)
• Direct messages
• Replies
• Everyone
• Updating your Twitter status
• Reply directly to tweets from MobileTwitter
• Open Tweets in MobileSafari (handy for clicking on links..)
• Direct message authors of tweets
• TwitPic.com integration
• Manual refresh

Twinkle

Twinkle is very similar to MobileTwitter in terms of features and User interface. One interesting feature in Twinkle is the “Location” feature using which you can check on the tweets posted by people near to you. If you don’t find any tweets you can always change the distance

If you know of any other Twitter client for iPhone, please suggest the same via the comment form.

A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had “experienced” iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me, HTC Touch UI is nothing compared to iPhone; same goes for the user experience.

Using iPhone in India

We all know that iPhone is available only in a few select countries and its also bound/locked to a particular carrier in that country. And if you are not lucky to be in that country, the only way to use an iPhone is by “hacking” it.

I spent almost 3-4 hours by going through the various forums to find the safest way of hacking the iPhone.

As you read more and more into these forums, rather than being informed, you end up in a confused state. You really can’t decide as to what method to use to hack your 500$ iPhone.

I am in no way an iPhone hacking expert but this is what I understood by going through tons of articles and forum posts. (Disclaimer: The information might not be 100% accurate)

First thing is to understand some of the terminologies associated with hacking the iPhone.

If you are planning to use iPhone in India you need to do all of the above. For some legal users of iPhone hacking might only involve “Jailbreak” which allows them to install third party applications.

Tools to hack iPhone

After going through the various forums, I narrowed down onto two tools to hack the iPhone (on Windows)

1. ZiPhone 2.6b
2. iPlus 2.0b

There is one set of users who have had success with ZiPhone and there is one set which believes that iPlus is the safest way of hacking iPhone.

The way ZiPhone breaks iPhone is different from the way iPlus does; ZiPhone permanently downgrades the bootloader from version 4.6 to 3.9 whereas iPlus downgrades it to a fake blank 3.9 bootloader. With iPlus you have an option to go back to 4.6 bootloader which is probably required to shield against future firmware updates from Apple.

Many believe that iPlus2.0b is the safest way to hack iPhone; however note that there is one issue found with using Fake Blank Bootloader. More details on this post. The issue is more of a warning and might occur only if you try to downgrade to 1.0.0 or 1.1.1 firmware.

ZiPhone has a very nice user interface and it almost tempted me to use it rather than iPlus. (Note: ZiPhone is probably an ideal tool to break iPod Touch)

However the inability to restore back 4.6 bootloader prompted me to use iPlus2.0b with the international payload. Though iPlus2.0b is command line driven, it did its work of breaking, activating and unlocking the iPhone with zero trouble.

The iPhone is currently activated on Airtel network and it should also work with the following service providers:

• Spice
• Vodafone
• CellOne

For using iPlus2.0, I followed the instructions given on this post:

• How to activate, jailbreak and unlock 1.1.4 firmware with iPlus (3.9 / 4.6 bootloader)

Also note that I skipped the loading of 1.1.4 firmware; You can skip this after confirming that you have 1.1.4 version of the firmware on your iPhone. To confirm the firmware version, you need to type in this code: *3001#12345#*

Also if you are not comfortable with this command line interface, the same developers of iPlus have come up with iLiberty+.

This UI wrapper for iPlus was released a week back and I thought it might be risky to try out a new untested tool. However I do like the concept of iLiberty+ where they have tried to design it as an extensible tool; users can download and place the payloads of their choice and select the same from the “Advanced” tab.

Disclaimer: This post is just my experience of breaking iPhone using iPlus2.0, if you bricked your iPhone using iPlus2.0 or ZiPhone I am not liable

I have been a great fan of Newsgator products, particularly the desktop based feed reader FeedDemon ! I have been recommending the same to many of my friends.

After trying out lot of RSS readers including RSS Bandit and Google Reader, I finally found that none of them could match FeedDemon’s simple yet powerful user interface and I totally loved the synchronization feature built into the application.

Along with Flickr, FeedDemon became one of the apps that I paid for !

Now Newsgator has turned most of its RSS products including FeedDemon into FREE applications.

So go ahead and grab your free copy of Feeddemon ! There are host of other products including Newsgator Mobile being offered for free. Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon and many other products has more details on this free offering.

Do read my earlier post on FeedDemon and if I am not able to convince you to use FeedDemon, probably Amit would !

Thanks Nick

Pointui (pronounced point-you-i) is a software which brings in a total new user experience on Windows Mobile 5/6 powered devices. Techcrunch notes that this software is probably more for the users who are envious of iPhone; The UI navigation does look very much on the lines of iPhone, but again iPhone is not just about the easy navigation.

As we all know the basic user interface of Windows Mobile sucks big time and it hasn’t improved much in Windows Mobile 6. This post by Gizmodo discusses some of the flaws in the current version mobile OS and also confirms that Microsoft will probably work on these in the future version of Windows Mobile.

I have been using Pointui on my HTC Touch for the past 2 days and I should say I am not un-impressed by the free program. Yes, Pointui is free.

Pointui helps you to go around the OS using finger swipes and it takes some time for one to come in terms with this interface.

Home Screen

The home screen does have all the widgets that will help you quickly launch the most commonly used programs on the devices. It also has options to quickly access the phone settings, change volume levels and lock/unlock the phone.

You can also slide at the center of the home screen to access the time/calendar and your outlook task list.

However it lacks the following:

1. There is no way to “theme” the home screen. The blue background really looked awkward on my HTC Touch I couldn’t find any way of changing this.

2. Windows Mobile 6 has a new feature via which lists the active running programs and you can selectively kill each process or stop all the applications (In windows mobile 5, the same was accomplished more painfully by going into the settings menu). The Pointui home screen removes access to this feature.

3. The battery icon doesn’t tell you if its being charged.

Some screenshots which might inspire you to try out Pointui

Settings Screen and Applications Screen

Unlocking using Pointui

More Help

When Pointui is launched for the first time, it also launches the automated help. The video of the same is embedded below.

You can always access this help via “Settings -> Help”.

Download Pointui for Windows Mobile

In one of my earlier post, I mentioned a couple of popular keyboard applications for smartphone/pocket PC running Windows Mobile operating system. One of the reader of that post, Idan pointed me to another cool virtual keyboard application from PocketCM.

The keyboard does look a lot like the iPhone keyboard and works a lot better compared to the default keyboard application. Check the official video below to see PocketCM keyboard at work.

I guess it will take some time for me to pick up that speed using the application. I did switch my HTC Touch phone to landscape mode and it was more comfortable typing with 2 hands.

Features worth noting:

• Visible feedback when the key is pressed
• You can move the fingers to change the key pressed, the key is triggered when you release the key (not when the key is pressed)
• Smart suggestion based on key position
• Adding of new words (very useful feature)
• Supports Themes – You can change the keyboard theme via the Input Settings page.

After upgrading to Windows Vista, setting up the communication between Vista and my HTC Touch was a PITA ! And I would like give the entire credit of this pain to Vista !

On Windows XP, Activesync did a very good job in syncing with the smartphone and I also managed to synchronize over Bluetooth. When I plugged in the handset (via USB) to the vista upgraded laptop, the windows mobile device center opened up and showed the connection status as "Connected".

The dialog box looked something like this:

Open "Windows Mobile Device Center" and you are treated with a dialog box with 2 check boxes (as shown above)

The "Waiting" status actually turned into "Connected" and the Storage card of the mobile phone (with the HTC Touch Photo) was also listed in Windows Explorer. Vista just gave me a feeling that everything was setup with no issues. However I couldn’t sync contacts/notes etc and I couldn’t even explore the device.

Initially I thought that the unlocking of the "SIM Locked" phone might have caused this problem and I even did a hard reset on my device. I started WMDC with lot of hope only to see the dreaded box again

It took a lot of time for me to realize that the connection was never setup properly. (I found this out from the Activesync status report on the handset)

I went through a lot of forum threads and none of them had a concrete solution for the above problem. In one of the threads I read about running Windows Update after connecting your handset.

On doing this, Vista update suggested that there was an "optional" update for Windows Mobile Device Center. After I ran this update, I was presented with a totally new looking Windows Mobile Device Center.

• Programs and Services allowed me to get updates of WMDC.
• Pictures,Music and Video option allowed me to import pictures and music from the handset
• File Management allowed me to explore the device
• Mobile Device Setting allowed me to setup a "Sync" partnership with the device.

So all that was required to fix the problem was to run Windows update ! But wait ! I ran windows update and the WMDC update never showed up !!! This is why I blamed vista in the first place for the pain it caused. The update showed up only when I connected the device which in a way was weird.

So if any of you guys are having trouble setting up WMDC, run the Windows update after connecting the device ! I even managed to "Sync" over bluetooth with no issues.

Let me know if any of you have still trouble setting up a sync partnership between your handset and WMDC running on Vista !

GMail, the most popular (and my favorite) Email service from Google has added IMAP support in addition to the existing POP3 support. One of the advantages of IMAP is that you can sync your mail from multiple clients. With POP3, even if you read a mail from one client, it isn’t reflected on the other client and you have to re-read the E-Mails.

IMAP helps in synching the client operations to the server and this feature is one of the major reasons for the popularity of Microsoft Exchange Server.

You can enable IMAP Access in GMail via the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP link.

Setup Instructions for most of the popular IMAP Clients can be found on https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726 (Even iPhone can sync with GMail)

I quickly setup accounts on Windows Live Mail and Outlook 2003 to see IMAP access in Action. On outlook once the account is setup, you have to explicitly subscribe to the IMAP folders.

Outlook took almost thrice the time to download the message headers when compared to Windows Live Mail. So on my home PC, I might be sticking with Windows Live Mail to read/sync GMail.

Other features:

• Starred messages in GMail show up as "Flags" in the Email Client and vice versa
• New folders created in the Client show up as Labels on the web client.
• When you move a message to a folder in the client, the labels are automatically applied.

Also you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth required to download all your GMail mails ! Only the headers are downloaded by default and the mail content is downloaded on demand.

IMAP access will definitely help me save some time at my work place (My employer might say otherwise ). If GPRS cost comes down in India, I can as well setup the account on my HTC Touch (By the way its already synching with GMail over Bluetooth )

When I bought the HTC Touch Smartphone I was never told by the reseller that it was locked onto Airtel Network in India. Only after seeing some of the comments left on my earlier post, I realized that it was a SIM locked phone.

Recently when I traveled to Beijing, I felt the pain of having a SIM Locked phone. I had all my contacts and other details on this phone and yet it wasn’t useful when I needed it the most.

When I inserted the China Mobile SIM onto the phone, I was prompted to enter the "Unlock Code". A search for the unlocking procedure on Google pointed me to a lot of paid sites which were ready to send the unlock code on a payment of 20$.

However I did stumble upon a thread in XDA Developers forum which helped me to easily unlock my HTC Touch ! (free of cost)

Instructions for Unlocking HTC Touch

1. Use ActiveSync to copy the following files onto your phone

• Cert_SPCS.cab
• EnableRapi.cab

2. Install the above 2 applications on your phone by clicking on the CAB

3. Unzip Touch_Unlock.zip on your PC  and run Unlock_Touch.exe (See that the ActiveSync connection between the PC and the mobile is still up)

4. A file unlock_code.txt will be generated which will have the 8 digit unlock code (Ignore any other digits if generated.)

Download: Cert_SPCS.cab/EnableRapi.Cab/Touch_Unlock.zip

More information can be found on the following official thread on XDA Forum.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=328221

The procedure was quite simple and thanks a ton to Rishi, the guy who submitted the procedure on the XDA forum

Unlocking HTC Touch Dual

Many visitors have landed on this post searching for a unlock solution for HTC Touch Dual.

Going by the comments on this thread, it seems like the Unlock solution for Touch mentioned above does not work for HTC Touch Dual.

I spent some time on XDA forums and finally found this thread which lists the procedure to CID unlock the HTC Touch Dual

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=355730

CID Unlock is also referred to as the vendor lock and is done by the  manufacturer to prevent installation of ROM not released by them.

After unlocking using the procedure, you can flash any ROM of your choice.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=355397

Note: Use the above procedure at your own risk. I will not be responsible for any damage caused by the files attached in the procedure.

If you know about any other procedure/tools to unlock HTC Touch/Dual, please feel free to suggest the same in the comments section.

SPB Mobile shell is an extension for the boring default user interface of a Windows Mobile powered Pocket PC phone. Key feature include:

• Phone style menu
• Weather forecasts 
• Photo speed dial
• World time
• Launcher
• Big dynamic tabs on Today
• Color based themes
• Smart contact search

The SPM Menu based navigation loads faster and you can quickly launch application of your choice.

Even the Now Screen is pretty detailed and gives a quick overview of

• Messages – Email/SMS
• Missed calls
• Volume level
• Weather
• Date and time
• Appointments/Meetings.

More screenshots of the shell can be found here !

Most of these features are already available on the Today screen of HTC Touch and hence SPB Mobile Shell might not be a good replacement option.

However this shell might a worthy replacement for the default UI provided by other pocket PC vendors.

The default calculator that comes bundled with Windows Mobile 6 isn’t made for touch phones. Also the application hasn’t received an upgrade from a long time. Even my 5 year old Casio Pocket PC is running the same calculator application !

gCalc

gCalc is a simple calculator application which works great on a touch based phone and  is also good for one-hand use. The operator dial pad saves you the trouble of searching operators while doing the calculations.

The user interface looks so much better compared to the dull interface of the default application. And if you are still not impressed by the UI, gCalc developer has made the application skinnable

gCalc with ClownFish Skin

The theme change has to be done using the About option ! You can find more details on gCalc here.

The camera on my old Sony Ericsson T630 was totally hopeless. Also the amount of memory was so low that after every few photos, I had to move it out to make some space for new ones.

However the same is not true with my new HTC Touch. The 2MP camera doesn’t take the best of the pictures but its a very handy feature to have in a mobile device. The 1GB memory does take care of storing the photos for a long time.

(God! I am talking about HTC so much these days; For those who are bored with these HTC posts, please bear with me )

Here is a look at the HTC Camera Interface:

You can set the resolution for the photos and set white balance depending on the lighting conditions. The max 2M resolution setting has a image output with resolution of 1600*1200 which isn’t too bad and the photos were definitely worth uploading to my Flickr Account

One of the mobile tools recommended by Flickr is Shozu. Also I had seen Scoble using this service extensively to upload the photos taken on his Nokia N95 !

Installation

1. Sign-up/Register on Shozu
2. Select your mobile device (List of Compatible phones)
3. Once you complete the registration, a SMS will be sent with a link pointing to the Shozu application which is compatible with your mobile device.

Shozu on Windows Mobile 6

Shozu isn’t the easiest of applications to use; However it does accomplish the task of uploading and tagging your photos. Here are few screenshots of Shozu User Interface.

As you can note from the above screenshots, Flickr isn’t the only destination for your camera photos. You can upload to a host of locations including Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, Webshots, FTP site etc.

And its not just photos, you can even upload videos and backup your contacts with Shozu!! With Shozu application installed on your mobile device, you don’t have to copy the photos to a intermediate location like your PC.

Checkout some of the photos taken on HTC and uploaded via Shozu here !

Do you use your camera phone to take pictures ? How do you copy/archive/upload these pictures ?

Try Shozu

ActiveSync, a synchronization program developed by Microsoft allows a mobile device to be synchronized with a Desktop PC. Other than syncing your contacts, calendar, tasks and notes you can also sync the Emails on the Exchange server.

ActiveSync also allows you to

1. Copy files between PC and the Mobile Device
2. Install/Uninstall Mobile Applications

ActiveSync can also be used to connect to a network or Internet. The connected device can use the computer’s network connection as if it were its own. You can use this feature to perform tasks such as downloading non-Outlook e-mail messages or to browse the Internet.

The above feature was the primary reason I wanted to setup a ActiveSync partnership via Bluetooth on my HTC Touch Smartphone. The device did have Wi-Fi capabilities;however the minute I turned it on, it used to suck the handset battery big time !

Fortunately Bluetooth wasn’t that damaging on the battery and hence is an ideal way to sync with your PC and also happens to be the best way to connect to Internet as well !!

Here is a step by step guide to setup ActiveSync via Bluetooth

(Note that the snapshots and features correspond to ActiveSync 4.5 and a Windows Mobile 6 powered Device)

1. Setup a Bluetooth partnership between the device and PC
   I am not going to write in detail about this step. The above process essentially involves turning on the Bluetooth on both your PC and Handset, making them discoverable and adding the Bluetooth device to the “Devices” list. Optionally you can also setup a secure partnership by associating a passkey.
2. Add Incoming Bluetooth COM port on your PC
   The Bluetooth Settings on your PC has a tab to configure the Bluetooth COM ports. Add one Incoming port (device initiates the connection) as shown below
   
3. Set the Bluetooth COM port in the ActiveSync connection settings dialog.
   
4. On your Handset go to Start -> Settings -> Connections -> Bluetooth
5. Your PC should be listed in the Devices Tab (If step 1 was successfully done)
6. Click on the PC device in the list to open the “Partnership Settings” screen. After clicking on the “Refresh” button, you should see a “ActiveSync” service listed as shown below
   
7. Open ActiveSync on your Mobile Device : Start -> Programs -> ActiveSync
8. Click on Menu -> Connect via Bluetooth ! If the ActiveSync partnership has been configure properly as described above, you should see activity on ActiveSync running both on PC and the mobile device. If your PC is connected to the Internet, the same will also be used by your Bluetooth connected mobile device.

If you had any trouble getting the ActiveSync to work via Bluetooth, feel free to raise the issue in the comments section

This video is a follow up on my previous post covering the popular keyboard applications for Windows mobile powered devices.

If you found the earlier post too lengthy, you would definitely appreciate this video

Youtube seems to have again crushed the video and it does look odd compared to the original video.

If you do find it difficult to follow the above video you can

• Download the original WMV File
• Watch the video in Full Screen Mode

RSS Readers: If your Reader isn’t showing the video, please do take the pain of opening this post in your favorite web browser

One important feature expected from a Touch screen based Windows mobile Smartphone is the ability to quickly input text.

Be it composing a SMS/MMS or taking a note or composing a word document, a powerful keyboard application is a must on a Smartphone/Pocket PC.

I quickly got adjusted to the Touch based navigation on my newly purchased HTC Touch Smartphone, however when it came to composing a SMS using my fingers, I failed miserably !

I had to either take support from the Stylus (which I didn’t want to) or I had to search for a better powerful keyboard alternative for my phone.HTC did market the Touch phone as the first touch based Smartphone, but they forgot to provide a better text input user interface !

By default the Windows Mobile OS came with the following methods of text input.

Keyboard

Unless you have very small fingers, the only way to work with the above keyboard is by relying on the stylus supplied with the device.

Letter Recognizer/Block Recognizer

On this interface, even your small fingers wouldn’t be of help. The only way to use this interface is again via the stylus attached with the device.

Transcriber

The Transcriber application is Microsoft’s award winning application that uses Transcriber technology to bring you unprecedented recognition accuracy and ease of use.

Transcriber employs advanced fuzzy logic and neural net techniques that allow it to recognize your handwriting with unparalleled accuracy and speed. Think your handwriting is too messy for Transcriber to make sense of it

Download Transcriber

Once you get used to the Transcriber, this method might be the most effective among the above 4 methods. However like in Letter/Block Recognizer, you are forced to use the stylus in Transcriber mode too

Alternative Touch Based Keyboards

Here are 2 alternative keyboards which saves you from using the Stylus.

HTC T9 Phonepad

HTC supposedly started licensing T9 text input capabilities and included a software input method for their devices that let you easily type out text using common T9 techniques.

This was a great feature for phones that only had touch screens since you could use your thumb to type out messages in much the same way you would do so on a standard numeric keypad using T9. However it was abandoned by HTC for some odd reasons. I was finally able to grab hold of the CAB file for the phone pad in XDA developers forum

After using it for a more than a week, I should say that this is probably the most efficient and fastest way of inputting text on a touch based device.

I couldn’t locate the forum thread which had the cab, so here is the link to the T9 Phonepad application.

Download T9 PhonePad (1.46 MB)

Full Screen Keyboard

Unlike T9 Phonepad, Spb’s Full Screen Keyboard is not a free application. However at 10$ its worthy every penny ! Unlike other input methods it covers the entire screen area and has keys large enough to be typed with finger-tips rather than with a stylus.

Additionally the dictionary-based correction algorithms allow users to reduce the number of misprints significantly.

Other notable applications

There are 2 more applications worth mentioning even though they are not touch based applications. They rely on the stylus but have some unique features which help you to input the text at a pretty fast rate.

TenGO

Resco KeyBoard

If you know about any additional keyboard applications useful for Touch based device, please do leave your suggestions in the comments section.

After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page.

When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content !

A search for WordPress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in for WordPress. The package consists of a WordPress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a WordPress theme which takes care of rendering your site on the mobile browser.

You can easily read all the posts with no need for horizontal scrolling. The page fits your device display perfectly.

Here are some snapshots of my blog opened in IE mobile browser.

Even the images fit nicely into the display width. You almost have the same experience as reading on your normal web browser.

And if somebody is still interested in seeing the original page (loaded with ads and sidebar), you can always exit the mobile edition and view the standard browser edition.

Is your site mobile browser friendly ? If not install and activate Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition Plug-in. Probably I should start tagging my buddies to install and activate this plug-in

Download WordPress Mobile Edition

Plaxo is an online address book service founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen, and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ringand. I have been a loyal user of this service from some time now.

I happened to meet a person named Ghanshyam Dass in Shanghai airport (during transit), who later turned out to be the Nasdaq Director for Asia Pacific !! We exchanged cards and the next day I received a Address Update request from him.

This was when I was introduced to Plaxo (By the way this was way back in 2004) !! I immediately signed up for the service and even downloaded the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook (which was the E-Mail client used by my employer)

For those who have not used Plaxo, this is how it works:

• Plaxo has an online service which helps you to store your contacts on web.
• Plaxo also synchronizes the contacts stored on the web onto a host of mail clients like Microsoft Outlook,Thunderbird and Mac OS X Address Book. Note that the synchronization is 2 way in the sense that the contacts added/updated in the Client applications are also updated onto the web.
• You can send update requests to all/selected contacts and the updated information is synchronized across the Web and Client applications.
• If the contact is also a Plaxo user, any update of his contact information is automatically synchronized.
• The synchronization is not just limited to contacts; you can even synchronize your calendar events and Outlook Notes.

For me, Plaxo eliminated the necessity to backup my contact data. It also helped me to keep the address details of my contacts up to date !

Plaxo recently did a major service upgrade and the new version makes the service more simpler to use. The online Plaxo service has been completely revamped (“Ajaxified”). I am not impressed with the way the Contacts and Notes are displayed. The classic (previous) version displayed the data in a more user friendly way.

The all new Plaxo 3.0 now supports synchronization with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, AOL, Thunderbird and your mobile phone.

Plaxo also has a new toolbar for Outlook and it automatically sync’s with the online service (There is no need to manually click on the “Sync Now” button)

The service is still a Beta and I did have trouble synchronizing my calendar data with Google.

Plaxo 3.0 also introduces a new service called Pulse. I still haven’t completely explored this service; meanwhile check this link for more details on Pulse

How many of you are using Plaxo ? How many of you find the service useful ?

Consilient has brought its free mobile E-Mail application called Push to  India.

Using this application you can retrieve E-Mail’s from your Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail AOL or any POP3/IMAP E-Mail account.You can also send and receive photos and read your work email using Consilient Push.

The Push service also has attachment support (ZIP, MS Word, PDF & Excel) and uses 128-bit encryption.

The help section of the Consilient web site has pointers to the User Guide and FAQ

Unfortunately I don’t have data connection on my Airtel mobile and hence wasn’t able to download the “push” application and use it.

If you have a mobile with access to data network, go ahead and try the free mobile E-Mail application.

Note: Do have a look at the supported phones as well before trying out the application.

I have been hearing and reading about iPhone from many months now and I guess it was one of the intensely followed product in Apple’s history.

iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs on MacWorld today.

Apple’s Website is also updated and you can find all the details on iPhone here:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

(Note: The site is very slow as of now )

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device.

iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers

Specification

• 11.6 mm thick
• 3.5 inch touchscreen
• 2MP camera
• 4GB or 8GB storage
• Bluetooth, WiFi
• GSM Quad Band
• Runs OS X !
• Supports Widgets, Google Maps, Safari and itunes
• Battery – Upto 5 hours
• Weight – 135 grams.

Price (Cingular – 2 Yr contract)

• 4GB – 499$
• 8GB – 599$

Availability

• US – June 2007
• Europe – 4Q 2007
• Asia – 2008

Also Checkout Engadget’s iPhone picture Gallery

I was checking out the Top 10 Coolest Designer Gadgets at TechEBlog. The one which caught by eye was the Sony Ericsson Black Diamond mobile phone.

Check this.. Looks cool..:)

The phone is designed by Singaporean Industrial designer Jaren Goh. The coolest feature is the borderless screen

The latest model which I would like to own is the M600. Its a touch screen phone unveiled in CEBit 2006. But unfortunately this model is supposed to be priced at around 400-500$ I believe !!

Tags: Sony Ericsson, Black Diamond, M600, Jaren Goh

There is a post at digg which is worth checking out. An online privacy service portal Cotse.net found that one of the main keyword in google search that bought users to their portal was “privacy service“. In recent days they found that none of the search results for the keyword “privacy service” was pointing to cotse, except the ad for which cotse paid !

In recent days I have also felt that the google search service is not returning results relevant to the input keyword. Till few weeks back “Search” and “Google” were synonyms for me. However for some keywords, the results in Google were not satisfactory and I found better/faster results in windows live search.

In fact windows live search was the first to index my site. It took Google almost 2 weeks to index my site. (i.e. after submitting the site to Google sitemaps)

So I too believe that there is something broken with the google search. They might be experimenting with a new algorithm. I hope they come back to “form” as soon as possible !

Tags: Google Search, Cotse, Live Search

Recently I happened to see a flash of the new Sony Ericsson mobile phones displayed in CeBIT2006. I also happenedto see a program in CNBC where the CeBIT was covered. The host of the show checked the nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson booths. His final verdict was “Sony Ericsson Rocks !”. He thought that the best phone in the show was the Sony Ericsson W950

I have stuck to the view that Sony Ericsson makes the best mobile phones and my Nokia buddies have always begged to differ. Agreed Nokia does bring out with a new phone “every day”. But the features build and most important the cost to feature provided by Sony Ericsson is amazing

Check out some of the other phones (which I liked)

technorati tags: Sony, Ericsson, CeBIT2006, W950, M600