Gordon’s Place

I got a new phone recently, an Orange SPV c500 ( aka Audiovox SMT5600 / HTC Typhoon / Scoble Phone ), which runs MS Windows Mobile as it’s OS. This is a new OS to me and it’s taken me a bit of time to get to grips with it, mainly because of a lack of decent documentation. When I got my previous , Symbian, phone I leaned heavily on Russ Beattie’s What’s On My 6600 but there doesn’t seem to be a Windows Mobile equivalant out there. So here are some of the things that I’ve discovered which you might find useful if you find yourself in a similar situation.

Punctuation in T9

This is a simple one, but it took me weeks to work out. I even checked the manual before I stumbled onto the solution, although it must be in there some where. Anyway, if you want to use punctuation when you’re in T9 mode, you can either hit the 1 button, wait for the little drop down of alternatives to appear and pick the punctuation character from the limited list of options ( very laborious ). Or, you can hold down the # key to bring up a menu containing all of the punctuation characters. As I said, very simple.

Speedials for applications

This is something that I haven’t come across in a phone before, and it’s pretty handy. You can assign speedials to either contacts or applications. To assign a speed dial to one of your applications, navigate to the start menu item, press the Menu button and take the first option – Add Speed Dial. You can have two character speed dials which lets you use convenient mnemonics for your application. For example, I can kick in the file manager by dialling “FM” ( 36 ), Internet Explorer is obviously “IE” ( 43 ) etc.

Receiving files via bluetooth

To configure your phone to receive files via bluetooth you need to set the option to “receive incoming beams”. This is nowhere near any of the bluetooth configuration options, but is in the Beam section of the Settings option – Start, 4, 7

Sending files via bluetooth

I’m completely stumped on this one. I couldn’t find an option anywhere to send the picture / video I’ve just captured to my PC / PDA etc. Eventually, I downloaded a replacement to the standard file manager for the sole reason that it allows you to pick one or more files and send them to another bluetooth device. It’s called Smart Explorer and you can download an evaluation version from www.binarys.com

Task Switching

One of the cool things about my old Symbian phone was the menu button. If you held that down it would pop-up a list of the currently running tasks for you to switch between / kill tasks. The SPV has a pretty good equivalant task manager application which I mapped to a single digit speed dial. But this is still a couple of key presses – the Home key to take me out of the current application followed by holding down 8/T. It’s not as elegant as a dedicated key. So I ended up buying XBar 2.0 from www.smartphone.net. This remaps the joystick so that when you click and hold it pops-up a little icons list of the current tasks, you can then use the joystick to navigate between them.

Reading RSS Feeds

www.bloglines.com. It looks great on Pocket IE and if you use FeedDemon then it will very cleverly not download the articles which you’ve already read on your mobile.

Reading Books

If I’m reading a novel ( as opposed to a technology or business book ) then I like to load it onto my phone. I usually buy a paperback in the bookshop and then nip on to the IRC channels to see if it’s also available in DRM free, ASCII text. I feel morally OK about this since I’ve paid for the book already and it’s pretty handy to always have a copy of my current reading in my pocket. To read ASCII files, I use the mobipocket reader, which is a free download.

Get Things Done

If you have any more than a dozen open tasks at any one time, then you’re going to find the task applet on the Smartphone worse than useless. It’s a simple list, with options to complete or delete individual tasks. That’s it. So, if you want any kind of categorised view, you’re going to have to download an alternative. I’ve tried both Oxios ToDo List and Developer One Power Tasks. Although the Oxios application looks a lot prettier, Power Tasks provides a much more useful method of browsing your tasks by category.