Mobile

I installed Palringo on my Windows Mobile phone last week and have been very happy with it. Not only does it support mutiple IM services (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ and Jabber aka Google Talk) but it allows multiple logins to the same service.

Teleflip.com allows you to send and receive email on your mobile phone as text messages. There’s a decent run-down of the service on this page.

This may be old news to you but it’s new to me. You can use AOL Instant Messenger to send a text message to your friend’s mobile phone. If your friend’s mobile number is 408-555-1212, just send to AIM buddy +14085551212. Your friend can even reply to the message and you’ll get it back as an instant message. Found this over at lifehacker from this post back in 2005!

More about this later but Callwave and YouMail offer free alternative voicemail services for mobile phone users. Both include a we-based interface to retrieve your voicemail as well as text and email notification of new messages. Callwave can also provide a text-based summary of your voicemail with their Vtxt service. It’s supposed to be different than just speech-to-text in that it squeezes out unnecessary and redundant information. How well does it work? I dunno yet.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

Nuff said.

Things have changed in the 6 months since I’ve posted about GPS receivers — prices have come WAY down and location information is being reported more frequently. Semson’s has lots of Bluetooth receivers available including the i-Blue 737 Bluetooth GPS (5 Hz – Updated Version) (32 channel, Auto On/Off, WAAS) for about $100. What’s a 5Hz version? It reads and transmits location information 5 times per second instead of the usual once per second. Lots of software doesn’t read it that fast and if you’ve set the unit to send at 5Hz, it’ll drain the battery faster but if you want/need greater accuracy, there ya go.

Since Microsoft Windows Live Search for Mobile and Google Mobile Maps have come out and can talk with GPS units, GPS receivers make more and more sense as a cheap add-on for a Smartphone. So, which one to get? Well, like I said above, you can get a 5Hz version for about $100. You can also get the Qstarz BT-Q818, a 32-hour, 32 channel MTK chipset model with auto-on/off, for about $70 (check this GpsPasSion forum posting for a review and recommendation). And then there’s the i-Blue 737 with the MTK chipset for $70, too (see this GpsPasSion forum posting for a review and discussion).

You can always go to Wikipedia — their UMTS article describes it pretty well and there’s even a set of links on the right side of the page that will take you to other standards. Aside from that, here’s an article from a completely different site that, while it talks about Cingular in particular, is still a fairly good intro to UMTS and HSDPA along with their speeds.

If you fill out this page (the official page) you’ll be guided through the steps necessary to setup your device for web service, SMS/MMS and tethering (using your phone as a modem). Howard Forums has this page that describes the various proxies, APNs and port restrictions but the official page will also get you the information.

This is an intriguing concept. If you’ve got Outlook 2007 and the right wireless service provider (Verizon and Sprint/Nextel out here in California right now — you can look up whether your providers handles this from this link), you can have Outlook send you text messages (SMS) with reminders of events, tasks and even important email.

Note that I said “Outlook”, not your Exchange server. It appears that you need to leave Outlook up all the time to make this work. Oh, did I forget to say that you need a Windows Live id, too? From what I’ve read (SMS Link main page here and FAQ here), the trigger even occurs and Outlook connects to a service that Microsoft provides to send the SMS. You can also supposedly send arbitrary text messages from Outlook as well. Since my provider’s not signed up yet, I can’t test this out but if you can, please let me know how it works for you.

Personal Coverage Check is one fine site for determining your T-Mobile coverage. The first time you go in, just check the box that says you’re not a dealer/retailer … unless, of course, you are 🙂