Recently in SmartPhone Category

My current phone contract expires soon so I'm looking closely at my options. I'm happy with the way Cingular's service works in general, so I'll likely stick with them, which narrows my field of choices a little. I'm incredibly happy with my experience in using the 2125 and won't be switching away from Windows Mobile anytime soon. Of the available options from Cingular, I'm leaning toward the Samsung BlackJack, which is another Smartphone. With Cingular launching the Treo 750 today, I'm also taking a close look at that phone. Of lesser concern to me is the size of the phone, although if it doesn't fit in my pants pocket, I'll be annoyed. Palm loaned me a 750 to test out, so one of the things I did was compare it to my existing 2125; compare it to a BlackJack; and compare it to the Treo 650 available to Verizon customers. Here's a photo montage of those comparisons.

Treo 750 side-by-side with BlackJack

Treo 750 side-by-side with Cingular 2125

Treo 750 side-by-side with Treo 650

I'm not a big SMS guy, primarily because my brain doesn't think well in T9 mode. Palm made SMS on the Treo 750 more like an instant messaging client, by making SMS conversations threaded. I love it. I can send a message, respond, get a response and follow the conversation even if the messages are several hours apart. Having a full keyboard gets me to use SMS, having it work more like email or instant messaging with conversation tracking makes it easy to follow what's being said. You get a SMS thread for each conversation you're having. The one trick I noticed in this is when someone you message sends a new message instead of replying. The new message starts a new thread even though the message was really part of the previous conversation. I'm chalking that up to a limitation of SMS at this point, but hopeful Palm can figure out a way around this in the long run.

Below you can see an example of a threaded conversation.

My big complaint about Google Calendar was lack of support for easily syncing calendar data with my smartphone. I use Outlook for my personal information management because it's still the only thing that puts all my data in one place the way I want it. Google Calendar's iCal export made manual syncing with Outlook possible, but I want to get all my calendar data from my computer to my phone automatically. There have been several third party solutions that attempt to address this with varying levels of success. Just recently, Google released Google Calendar Sync, completely addressing the automatic sync between Outlook and Google Calendar. Google still hasn't addressed automatic sync of Contacts with Gmail and Outlook. For that you need CompanionLink.

The screen resolution on my Audiovox SMT5600 is 220x176 if you tilt the screen sideways for a normal 4:3 view. For some reason, the preferences on the device are set to display video at 160x120, which doesn't make full use of the already tiny screen real estate. I transfer most of my video content to my phone using Windows Media Player. The software detects the phones preferences and automatically sizes everything it transfers at 160x120, leaving a black border around the available screen space. Diane Dumas of Pocket PC Magazine recently tipped me off to a solution.

The fix for this involves hacking the Registry on your Smartphone. Once I got past the idea that editing the Registry on my phone is a little freaky and could potentially cause me to need to wipe the phone, I dove right in. I have tons of experience hacking the Windows Registry, but digging around in my phone was quite foreign. After a quick search of available options, I settled on Mobile Registry Editor from G. Ingelmo Blog. This is a free app that uses ActiveSync to interface the Registry on your phone from a Windows desktop. There's another on-device Registry editor, but I opted not to take chances with T9ing my way to a broken phone.

All the video preferences are stored in the:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\ASFCodecs\Video

Three MP4 settings based on Microsoft MPEG-4 codecs (MP42, MP43, MP4S) and six WMV settings (WMV1, WMV2, WMV3, WMVA, WMVP, WVP2) all default to 160x120 in the respective PreferredWidth and PreferredHeight settings.

By changing each of these settings to 220x176, instead of playing back video with black bars around the outside, wasting valuable screen real estate, the conversion process will now yield true fullscreen video on your Smartphone. This fixes the conversion problem for both WMP10 and Windows Media Center Edition.

If you've already synchronized content with your Smartphone in the past, you need to clear any settings caching already established with the desktop version of Windows Media Player 10. One way to do this is by clicking the Clear Cache button on the Privacy tab of Tools > Options

The other way to clear cached information is to delete the WMPInfo.xml file from your Smartphone. This is located in the top level directory of the phone when viewed using Windows Explorer on your desktop. Removing this file makes Windows Media Player 10 think it's connecting to a new device.

After making the Registry changes and clearing cached information, the next time you sync video to your phone using Windows Media Player 10, the default size should be 220x176.

Take your video full screen by pressing the * key on your Windows Mobile 2003 SE SmartPhone.