New version of PointUI Home (1.02b)

The guys from PointUI have just released a new version of Home, their new "shell" for Windows Mobile à la iPhone. It has a lots of improvements, changes and bug fixes as you can see in the release notes.

It is great that they support Smartphones and PDAs without phones, a lot of customization options, the removal of the Windows Media Player shortcut in favour of a Favourite/Start Menu shortcut the use of less CPU and a lot of bugs having been fixed.

Best mobile phone of 2007

The guys from Xataka (a popular Spanish blog about gadgets) have published the results from their poll to guess which is the best mobile phone of the last year.



iPhone looks good and feels great but I cannot vote something not allowing MMS and SMS to multiple recipients, with no 3G support and no SDK to program non-web applications (by now).

Anyway, I have to agree is that if, without these and some other important not supported featuresl, what are the rest of the phone and mobile OS makers to do when they bring the next generation of iPhones? At the same time, we know the rest of the people are not being lazy (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, the Linux army). 2008 is a very promising year for the mobile gadget fan.

Fixing the mobile operator name in Windows Mobile (useful for Pointui Home)

One of the things that I would love to get fixed in Pointui Home is the fact that the operator name is too long and does not fit the space allocated for it in the screen. Besides, it is untrue (Vodafone E) while my operator is Yoigo.

I guess that this is because GSM networks provide certain information (mobile network code, mobile network country, operator name and network name, for example) to our phones, and some phones are not using the proper information.

For instance, Pointui Home displays the network name as stored in the registry in Windows Mobile, in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\State\Phone\Current Operator. Windows Mobile is missing the operator name (Yoigo). So we can change the string to Yoigo and show a more accurate information and a shorter string. Well, not that easy... As we switch our phone off and on, Windows Mobile will replace again the string value associated to that entry in the registry to the network value provided by the operator. You can override the value again, or you can create a program that periodically does this task (there are some available).

The fact is that Yoigo is operating on Vodafone Spain network and that leads some mobile phones to make users unsatisfied with the information displayed on their phones' display.

[ADDED SOME MINUTES LATER] I guess that it would be possible to permanently display the string that we want for our operator by adding a key to the registry entry
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\RIL\OperatorNames\ named like the mobile network code and with a value equals to the string that we want for our operator. I have to try it.

Pointui Home reloaded

I have not had the time yet in order to comment Pointui Home and its update tool has made it jump to version 1.01b. In fact, this afternoon it updated to version 1.01a and this evening it made it to this version.

You can see the changelog here. It is great not only that they show what they changed, but that they declare known issues taken into account for future releases.

I love that they think of users wanting to customize their tool, although it is achieved by having to write some entries in the registry. Fast prototyping is great!

Pointui Home

I have been trying the 0.92 beta version of Pointui Home, a new UI for Windows Mobile that I already commented (very briefly). It is time to go to bed now, but I want to say that I love it.

I'll comment it in detail soon, but I can advance that -although it is a beta, it has bugs and there is a lot to do- it is a great approach to iPhone-like UIs on Windows Mobile and I recommend everybody to try it. Remember that it is FREE.

Pointui Home

Being introduced as the ultimate iPhone-like user interface for Windows Mobile, Pointui Home promises a lot. Here you have two videos:





Minus two days and counting.

Oh, and it's FREE.

Tricks to stop tricksters

A phone falls into water and it stops working. That is something that people say that usually happens. And it looks like many people wait for them to dry and go to the shop and say that it mysteriously stopped working so the warranty makes them get a new phone.

I had read that some phone makers had created phones with materials that changed their colours if they get wet.

It looks like the iPhone has something like that, as said in MacBidouille. They say there is a small ball in the headphones jack that changes from white to blue when wet.



So it looks like tricksters will have to stop playing tricks like that with Apple's phone.

iPhone

First experience with an iPhone. It looks great, it is usable, it is light. It is cool. Anyway, Matt owns a Blackberry for BT connectivity and the rest of the stuff that iPhone does not support :-)

Trillian Astra and the mobile web

I am enjoying current Trillian Astra windows client a lot. There is some stuff yet for the developers to do and the web client is frozen until they make it work with the latest version of Trillian servers. I could not try the web client yet, because of that, but I expect a lot from it. I hope I can link all my RSS feeds there so this way, the "My Web" part of the Windows client gets activated and I can check them all. This way I'd remove some RSS Yahoo widgets from my desktop (I am using two of them in order to be notified of changes and then read the full version: Informer and Yahoo! My Headlines).

Of course, thinking of a web client made me wonder if I could ever enjoy Trillan Astra web client on a mobile phone. Well, they have quickly made my wishes come true (or, at least, they will). See this post in Cerulean Studios blog and check how wonderful it will look on the iPhone.

It might work in S60 browser too, as people are enjoying iPhone web apps in Nokia browser (although some refinements should be done to use all the screen of some S60 3rd edition, like N80).