Rob's Rants

Since making calls via Google Voice requires nothing more than entering a series of digits on your dialpad, there is a whole class of programs available for Windows Mobile, which I skipped in my software review, but which can be adapted for this purpose. Calling Card or Credit Card dialers. Think about it – using a calling card requires essentially the same functions as using Google Voice: dial a phone number, enter a PIN or other ID number, navigate a menu, and finally, dial the number you want to call.

So, if none of the Google Voice software that I identified for Windows Mobile works for you, you can always try to adapt a calling card dialer like Sunnysoft Calling Card or another freeware program. I haven’t tried this yet since I’m still trying to work through the bugs in GVoice Dialer, but it might be worth a shot if Calling Card gives better integration with the built-in address book. There’s a good post from an early Google Voice (Grand Central) adopter at http://technologyinmind.com/?p=107 who uses the Calling Card strategy and likes it.

Here’s a quick list of the software I’m running since upgrading to ookba’s ROM. Links are provided where possible:

1. Opera Mini (included with 3volution ROM)
2. Skyfire (included with 3volution ROM)
3. Bing Search for Mobile
4. Facebook App (from Microsoft)
5. Garmin Mobile XT (modified to run from my own SD card, see this post)
6. Google Maps
7. GPS Test
8. GPSed
9. GV Dialer
10. Midomi
11. Nimbuzz
12. OggSync
13. Pandora (I got the CAB from xda-developers, but official page is here),
14. PocketTwit
15. Ilium Screen Capture
16. Skype
17. TCPMP (part of the 3volutioin ROM)

[Update 9/2/09: added CAB file at end of post.]

If you’re a long-term Windows Mobile user, it’s sometimes hard not to look at the iPhone or at Android phones and not get a little jealous at some of the cool apps built for those platforms. Sure, if you use your phone for work, we can laugh at the other people struggling to connect to an Exchange server or to open and edit Word or Excel docs. But once the workday is done or on the weekend, it’s hard not to envy your iPhone friends when they whip out the phone, take a picture of the SKU code on the new Wii game, and tell you that it’s cheaper 2 miles away at Target. Or, as happened to me, when we were sitting in a bar having a beer and a song came on and I couldn’t for the life of me remember who sang it. So my friend whips out his phone, and asks the bartender to hold it near the speaker behind the bar, and voilà — the name and artist is displayed. How cool is that?

Well, someone finally ported one of these apps to Windows Mobile. As I saw on the Wingster site (for T-Mobile Wing and TouchPro 2 phones) there is a Midomi cab running around out there, which I decided to try. If you don’t know Midomi, it’s a website that will identify songs by capturing a small segment through your system’s microphone. You can either play a song from the radio or TV or somewhere, or, and this can be the scary part, sing or hum a part of  a song. Because of this, Midomi has become something of a Karaoke site, with people recording their own songs. Most of which are horrible and painful enough that I wanted shove a dinner fork into my ears in the first few seconds just to make the pain stop. But we don’t really care about that — we care that Samsung apparently ported a Midomi app to Windows Mobile for release on some of their touchscreen devices and that the port works on Windows Mobile Standard, albeit with some issues.

The Problems

The main issue that I can see is that the app was designed for touchscreen devices which typically have much better resolution than the Dash 3G. So the screen is pretty distorted on our phone. And the ‘Menu’ command doesn’t work — it freezes the app. But otherwise, the app does what it’s supposed to do, and if you have the Task Manager mapped to a convenient key, exiting the app without the Menu isn’t so bad.

So, here’s what you have to deal with.

The main screen is severely distorted, but still usable.

Distorted Main Screen

And, it works surprisingly well. I tested it in a weird way and it actually worked — while watching the Road to Europe episode of Family Guy on my TiVo (linked below) I had it sample the Kiss song (starting at 4:33 into the linked video) by holding my phone near the speakers of my sound system. And even with some dialog happening it got the song correct:

Correct!

And the app even went on to suggest the correct links:

Correct Links

So, bottom line — as long as you can put up with quirky navigation and never using the Menu command, we can finally have a cool app like our iPhone friends.

Here’s a crappy YouTube post of the Kiss scene from Family Guy:

Update:

This evening, I tested the voice recognition with my 4 1/2 year-old. She sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. And the program figured it out with no problem and presented me with 7 or 8 different versions that I could download. Amazing!

Here’s the CAB I used: Midomi.cab

In the end, the limitations were just too much to overcome.

After using my Dash 3G for a few weeks I began to wonder about “push” e-mail for my Google Apps accounts. This lead to looking for e-mail clients which would handle IMAP IDLE, and that lead to only two possibilities: Emansio and FlexMail 4.1. (No, I can’t use Google’s push client because I already have work e-mail syncing via Outlook Web Access/Exchange, and WinMo 6.1 can only handle a single Exchange connection via ActiveSync.) I initially tried the Emansio plug-in for Windows Mobile/Pocket Outlook, because I think the Windows Mobile 6.1 Pocket Outlook implementation is pretty good. But the Emansio plug-in was a disaster, throwing error after error and crashing repeatedly. So I moved over to FlexMail 4.1 for a trial.

The Promise

In addition to IMAP IDLE connectivity, FlexMail promises many of the features of a full-fledged mail client. A couple which jumped out at me were:

• Robust search.
• Full folder views by default.
• Reply from any account.
• Conversation view of SMS and e-mail messages.

There are lots of other features — this is a complex program — but I really just wanted a good mail client with IDLE support. Search was a nice-to-have, but not a must. The rest seemed cool, but not if it got in the way of being a decent e-mail client.

The Reality

I installed FlexMail which went mostly as planned. Several reviews commented about how easily the installation captures your existing settings, but that didn’t happen for me. Only my Exchange account auto-configured. My IMAP accounts required a manual intervention. Soon after getting going, some problems appeared, which, taken individually weren’t bad, but together added up to more than I could take.

Integration Issues

After getting through the configuration I noticed a couple of things. First and foremost, FlexMail didn’t integrate with my Sliding Panel home screen. This was a pain, because the new sliding panel structure is one of the fixes (admittedly kludgey) that Microsoft has put in place to make WinMo 6.1 work better until 6.5 is released. And for FlexMail not to work with it and it’s slick notifications is a problem for me. In addition, FlexMail doesn’t integrate with the stock sound notifications either. This proved to be a bigger pain for me because the FlexMail sound settings don’t allow for easy choice of decent sounds, only a few relatively useless noises. But because my main work e-mail remained under the control of ActiveSync (only displayed through FlexMail) while my IMAP mail was fully controlled by FlexMail, I ended up with two completely separate notification sounds for my two accounts. This was unacceptable.

Additionally, I’m not the only one who has noticed the lack of sliding panel integration. There is a good-sized thread about it on the FlexMail support board, and, while I have a great deal of sympathy for developers trying to build on this long-in-the-tooth platform, the author’s answer to people questioning the lack of sliding panel integration left me very disappointed. In fact it really left a bad enough taste in my mouth that, once I realized there were issues, it tipped the scale enough for me to dump the app. And I can usually overlook a lot of technical issues — hell I had a T-Mobile Wing for a year!

Display Issues

As soon as I started using FlexMail I noticed that some e-mails just wouldn’t open correctly. Particularly the ones heavy with graphics. For some reason the pictures just wouldn’t open. One of the features of FlexMail is supposed to be a robust HTML client, so I was disappointed at this.

Additionally, FlexMail had a continual problem with e-mails from my local newspaper (daily headlines, breaking news, etc.). For some reason that I never figured out, they would always sort to the end of my inbox and diaplay a date with a year of 1855! I’ve been getting these e-mails and no other client ever had a problem. And the ones thet FlexMail displayed incorrectly opened correctly in Pocket Outlook, regular Outlook, Google webmail, and Thunderbird. I even looked at the headers and they looked correct to me. Weird.

Threaded SMS Display

FlexMail has a threaded (conversation) display feature. Trouble is, so does the version of Pocket Outlook that ships with the Dash. And frankly, I like the Pocket Outlook version better.

Input Problems

I also noticed that FlexMail overrode the Dash’s XT9 input settings (as if XT9 wasn’t already a bear to get configured correctly). In fact, it created its own problems that were different than the issues I normally have with XT9 and just got used to! Most annoying was the fact that whenever I began typing a message FlexMail would act like the Caps Lock was stuck on. So I had to get into the habit of hitting the SHIFT key for the second letter of a word! That was ultimately the straw that broke my back.

Conclusion

All of this added up to a rather unsatisfying experience. There was a lot to like about this software, but in the end the negatives were just too much to ignore. I uninstalled FlexMail about a week after I installed it. And for what it’s worth, XT9 went back to normal the instant it was gone.