Tag: mobile_phones

Microsoft, RSS, Telecoms

Windows Mobile Edition 6 – no RSS support?

Endgadget are reporting that Microsoft has announced Windows Mobile Edition 6 – Microsoft’s operating system for mobile phones.

According to the article, the major new features of WME6 are

  • HTML support in email
  • Windows Live for Windows Mobile
  • File transfer capability in Windows Live Messenger
  • New versions of mobile Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with rich editing
  • Remote wipe capability for stolen and lost devices
  • Call history in contact cards
  • Tight Vista integration
  • “Calendar ribbon” for more easily viewing schedule by day or week
  • New versions of .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server built-in

Some nice features in there alright but how about support for RSS? It would be great to be able to have an RSS reader built-in to the phone. This would make it trivial allow people to subscribe to podcasts, for example from their phones and do away with the need to be carrying a phone and an iPod.

There’s a demo of WME6 on YouTube.

Technology, Telecoms, voip

Jajah launches half-baked mobile product

Jajah launched a new VOIP product for mobile phones overnight.

The story was broken by our own Pat Phelan and followed up by BusinessWeek and Mike Arrington.

There are a number of problems with the product (I suspect they launched to deadline rather than launching when they had fully tested). The most obvious one I have heard is that the download link doesn’t work for the mobile client application and indeed when I tried to download the version for my Nokia N70, it attempted to download the wrong file type (.sis instead of .zip).

Jajah download error.

I did make a call to another Jajah user using the web interface but the call dropped after around 20 seconds – presumably ‘cos I had burned up my 50c credit. 50c in 20 seconds of a call (or $1.50 per minute)? That doesn’t seem like much of a cost saving to me – quite the opposite. Especially considering calls to other Jajah users are supposed to be free.

I suceeded to download with the OTA option (over the air). The app installed successfully on the phone but now I don’t know what to do next. Nor can I find anywhere on the site to tell me how I configure which calls go out over Jajah and which go over GSM. Seemingly Jajah decides that for you – well, if my Jajah experience so far is anything to go by, I’d prefer to be making those decisions myself, thanks.

My advice, wait until they get it right (could be a while yet!).

Blogging

Ryder Cup blog

I’m delighted to see that all my nagging of my old friend John Prendergast has paid off and he has started a blog!

However, I wouldn’t have been more surprised if it was about crochet! I never knew John was a closet golf fan.

John’s is the Ryder Cup blog (the Ryder cup is the biennial golf competition between Europe and the US). The Ryder cup is being held in Ireland this year.

John has all the Ryder Cup info on his blog from the Park and Ride facilities to security arrangements (no mobile phones allowed – security my arse, they just don’t want any camera phones getting news out before Sky do!) to player profiles.

John also makes use of Microsoft’s Live Local mapping to put up maps of the area and he has and a great looking template too.

Good stuff John – as someone who knows nothing about golf, even I found this site interesting!