Being employed at a company with a distinct focus on mobile computing, I’ve recently had the opportunity to play around with the i-mate JAMin and the Qtek 8310 smartphone, one of the few phones out in North America on the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform. Very few complaints so far, other than a somewhat inaccurate joystick and a persisting issue where the use of a headset results in sounding far away to whoever’s on the other end of a phone call.
TenGO: Speeding up PocketPC text input
Operationally, I’ve had some concerns that are largely the result of my own impatience and poor handwriting. On the user input side of the story, I haven’t a chance in hell of getting my writing recognized by any device that uses a touchscreen/stylus interface. That leaves me the less than speedy option of a tiny on-screen keyboard.
A free program called TenGO, however, has taken this option and heavily optimized it. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet remain laid out in QWERTY form on-screen, but the innovation of T9 text prediction is pulled into play to reduce those twenty-six corresponding separate keys into just six. Check out the on-site video for a pretty amazing demo.
Opera Mini 2.0: Speedier than IE
Despite what FireFox users will tell you, Internet Explorer remains the faster – but more security issue ridden – browser of the pair. The Opera browser has for a long time presented a dark horse option whose primary goal has been to be the fastest graphical browser available. Opera Mini 2.0, for its part, leaves Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 5.0 in the dust; I know what I’ll be using from my mobile browsing from now on.
Google Maps: Finally on Windows Mobile 5.0
Google Maps likely needs absolutely no introduction, but I have found its fast download time (on Rogers’ EDGE data network) and touchscreen-oriented interface to be superior to the BlackBerry app I’ve become familiar with.
SeatGuru is an interesting site which has a breakdown of the insides of every airliner that the major carriers use – noting the best seats on the plane, which ones to avoid, which seats have power ports and even where in the plane it is that food and refreshments are served first.
Air Canada and Westjet both have exhaustive entries on SeatGuru. Useful little website.
National Post columnist Andrew Coyne breaks it down:
With the just-completed hockey playoffs coinciding this year with the World Cup of soccer, as well as the overlapping basketball and baseball seasons — also Canadian football, the U.S. Open of golf and, later this week, Wimbledon — we are afforded a rare, eclipse-like opportunity to compare the major spectator sports at close range. Compare, and declare: There is one game that stands out as objectively, scientifically, mathematically superior to the rest. I am of course talking about “the best game you can name,” le sport des glorieux, the gentlemanly sport of hockey. Let’s break it down by category.
All along on MediaBlog, I’ve prized our podcasting tools highly in support of a trend I can see becoming very popular and vibrant as time rolls on. Not really having much time to produce original podcasts myself, I’ve been treating my own podcast as an area to post audio/video that’s hard to find elsewhere.
The snag I keep running into: How to convert the various formats that videos come in into something that’s iTunes- and iPod-compatible? For those not in the know, Apple’s technical spec for podcasts has a pretty narrow definition of what audio and video formats are permissible – obviously, just their own. So often there’s a need to convert video in particular to the .mov, .mp4, or .m4v formats.
Happily, there’s a freeware utility out there that allows you to do this with nearly every video format. I’ve used the Jodix Free iPod Video Converter program to convert two videos with great success thus far. Best of all: It’s freeware.