Skyfire’s a new gecko-based browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, and if you’ve got a Windows Mobile based phone, you’ll want to request access to the beta ASAP (the beta program requires a US phone number, unfortunately). It’s not quite ready for prime time, but it is definitely something to track as it moves toward 1.0.

Here are some screen shots of Skyfire in action:

Splash Screen as Skyfire Beta Loads

Optaros.com in full screen view. Note that the flash carousel of images works just as on desktop browser

Zoomed in to enter username and pass in login page

Viewing Flash Video from YouTube

You can get more detailed discussion (and more screenshots on what looks to be a larger screen device) in the recent Ars Technica review, which ultimately concludes:

Although SkyFire has a long way to go before we can determine if Oberhofer really has it right, the concept deserves attention. SkyFire is relatively strong considering the short amount of time that it has been under development, but it can’t really compete with Opera Mobile 9.5 on Windows Mobile devices yet. SkyFire has a decisive advantage for users who want to watch Flash video, but for practically everything else, it’s still more of a proof-of-concept than a fully-functional web browser. We will be sure to give it a second look when it exits beta.

I haven’t yet found Skyfire replacing the phone’s built in Pocket IE for day to day browsing, but I think it easily could once it hits 1.0.

Thanks for the notice from the MobileViews Blog:

I thought this Daylight Savings issue was fixed in last year’s patch. Guess not. Here are the links for the CAB file download as well as the desktop (setup.msi) installer version.

Update for Windows Mobile for PC (KB949168) (SETUP.MSI)

Update for Windows Mobile for PC (KB949168) (WMDST2008-1.CAB)

FYI: I just installed the CAB file installer version on my Dash. It restarted my smartphone without even giving a warning that it was about to do so.

So now I have to go figure out which update I’m supposed to use, and apply it, or else my phone will be off by an hour for much of SXSW next week.

How soon will either an Adroid phone be released or the Nokia N810 line include cell connectivity, so I can use it as a phone – I’d buy one of those easily.

One is its occasional glimpses into the future (see here and here). Another is its refusal to expose my location to Google Maps.

One I haven’t ever figured out is the fact that whenever I travel in Europe (usually Switzerland and Germany) I get tons of SMS messages. They seem to be “Cell Broadcast” messages, meaning they aren’t sent directly to me but to everyone – but my phone seems to pick those CB messages out of the stream only while in Europe.

Here’s a screen shot from my last day in Europe on my most recent trip – in 24 hrs I got 230+ sms messages:

Opening up one of the messages, here’s what they look like (it is typical of the others):

What’s going on here?

Looks to me like I’m getting notified every time I go from one tower to another?

Most importantly, can someone show me how to turn these off? I’ve never found a setting which seems to apply – maybe I need to edit the registry?

All I know is that I don’t think I’ll ever buy a Windows Mobile device again.

3G iPhone in 2008? Maybe.

OpenMoko Neo1973? Maybe.

Something running Android that I can hack at? Bring it on.

First, it never works with the Google Maps “My Location” feature. Here’s all I get:

On top of that, I’m still getting the occasional moment where my cellphone decides it is the future.

This morning my phone briefly thought it was 2009:

Seems to be related to a cell tower somewhere in the vicinity of Chelsea / Everett – just North of the Tobin bridge.

Am I the only one seeing this?

Anyone else see this happening on their Windows Mobile device?

One theory is that I’m hitting a rogue cell tower somewhere in my commute which tells the device it is a later date. But I’ve got “auto update” of date/time disabled, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had this happen even while travelling in other cities and states, so it isn’t specific to one cell tower.

It causes all the event notifications to fire, since they are now overdue, and causes all kinds of other general weirdness, like emails coming from the future.

If only Windows Mobile were open source . . . Guess my next phone will be an OpenMoko.

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.

In Windows Mobile Terms, it’s like a self-induced frontal lobotomy. My phone no longer knows what applications are installed on it, doesn’t remember how to sync to our exchange server, etc.

After spending two hours last night battling the ActiveSync demons in order to connect my BlackJack to my laptop (in order to install the registry editor and certificate for our exchange server on it), uninstalling and resintalling bluetooth (twice!) in the process, and hacking registry settings to enable ActiveSync to work with our exchange server, I’m done.

Would an iPhone just work, or am I falling into the Apple hype?

Of course, what I really need is an OpenMoko. How long before I can run one of these on Cingular? Can I already?

Presumably this works with lots of other Windows Mobile based devices as well, but I’ve only tried it on my Cingular BlackJack (aka Samsung i607).

You have to copy some files to the Windows directory on the device (the HTC Streaming Media player and some codecs, I assume) and install two .cab files to associate the file types with launching the streaming player.

Just follow the directions found here: YouTube Streaming Mobile: A “How To” WM5/M6/SP

I found that at Step #1, I couldn’t copy all the files from the zip into the Windows directory on my device – had to leave out the .HTM and the Shortcut – but it doesn’t seem to have mattered.

One difficulty was finding a volume control – the app seems to assume you have a touchscreen, which I have not – but the up and down on the main control wheel / compass thingie work just fine for volume.

Another quirk – full screen mode requires rotating the phone 90 degrees. Guess they were thinking of landscape.

The left soft-key is zoom out, clicking on the OK button in the center of the navigation pad zooms in.

You can have satellite view or map view, though hybrid doesn’t seem to be an option (may be dependent on level of zoom?).

Menu offers:

1. Find Location
2. Find Neaby Business…
3. Directions…
4. Change View (map/satellite)
5. Show Traffic
6. Track Location (GPS)
7. Clear map
8. Options
9. Help
10. Exit

Nice to have this and the Windows Live Search on the same phone – I’ll compare their results next time I’m looking for directions.

One immediate annoyance was the way Cingular/Samsung have configured the JBlend Java Virtual Machine on the phone. That had to go, or the phone was going back to the store.

First, the background.

On a vanilla BlackJack from Cingular, when you install java mobile applications like Opera Mini, Google Maps, or Gmail, they have to ask for user permission every single time they need to make a network request.

The options you’re given when the application asks are:

• Allow and ask me next time
• Don’t allow this time
• Don’t allow for this session

The missing option, of course, is: Allow for this session. (Or even, allow and don’t ever ask me again for this app – which I’d be happy with).

Second, the solution.

Thanks to IBM, this thread on Google Groups, this thread at HowardForums and this post at MS Mobiles, there is a way around.

In essence, this involves installing IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Microenvironment, an alternative JVM capable of running J2ME applications conforming to the MIDP 2.0 spec.

The easiest way is to use one of the J9.cab files, from the Howard Forums thread or here.

In addition, you need to copy the tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf fonts from a Windows machine into the \Windows\Fonts directory on your BlackJack. I found that Opera Mini didn’t work otherwise.

Using one of the .cab files rather than IBM’s default mechanism for installing includes adjustments to font paths, as described in the Google Groups thread, and has the added benefit of making the association between .jad and .jar files and J9, so from now on you can install Java apps just as you would with the default JBlend JVM. Finally, it installs an icon for the J9 as an application in the menu, rather than having to dig down into File Explorer to get to the new JVM.

Got an invitation code this weekend, just as I was getting up to speed on using my new Samsung Blackjack phone. Ah, the joy of synchronicity.

What Hey!Watch does is allow you to transcode video – translating it from one format to another.

In and of itself, that’s nothing to write home (or blog) about. But, they’ve added a number of features that I think are remarkable.

First and foremost, in addition to uploading video from your hard drive, you can point Hey!Watch at a url, or an RSS Feed with enclosures.

What this means is that you can “pull” videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, and many other sources – including video podcasts, or other feeds which are regularly updated. Point Hey!Watch at an RSS feed that has video enclosures, and it automagically discovers the videos, including updating when new ones are posted.

Second, it offers and incredible number of ingest and output formats – so it can take the Flash-based videos from YouTube and create WMV or MPG videos.

Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your encoded (really, transcoded) videos – so any video you’ve added to the system, via upload, via pointing to a url, via an RSS feed, gets added to your transcoded videos and published to that RSS feed. You can also hit a web page with thumbnails of all your transferred or transcoded videos, if you prefer – and download / delete them.

This is the right way to do transcoding in a Web 2.0 world.

The only thing not completely clear to me (my fault for not reading closely the terms when signing up) is what the revenue model is. I know I have a “watcher” level account for some period of time but I don’t have a clear picture of what all the different levels include, which are free (and which will continue to be free) and what the costs are.

So I’m trying to decide whether I’m finally ready to bring my phone into the 21st century. I have, and generally carry with me on trips, a cell phone (Nokia 6200), an iPod (4GB Nano, 1st generation), and a digital camera (Powershot SD200).

These three devices could be replaced with one – the new Samsung Blackjack, available from Cingular (my wireless carrier).

In the process, I’d get slightly less space for music (I could get a 2GB microSD card for the Blackjack, as opposed to 4GB in the iPod), fewer pixels in my camera shots (the BlackJack is a 1.3 Megapixel camera, the SD is a 3.2 Megapixel camera with zoom – but I’m not really taking advantage of that generally anyway).

But I’d also get mobile access to internet, email, and calendar (synched with desktop PIM), 3G-speed data access (UTMS), and bluetooth, which none of the old devices have.

In the process, of course, I’d also add more cost per month ($40?) for the data plan.

So, I guess in the end it comes down to whether or not it is worth it to be able to get email/calendar/internet while on the road – otherwise, I could just get a phone with music capabilities and a camera, without a data plan or internet access.

Given that I travel a fair amount these days, I’m definitely giving it serious thought – no more buying Wifi access in the airport, for example, though I don’t spend $40/mnth on that now.

I could also use the phone as a modem for my laptop, in areas where 3G networks are available.

Two jobs ago, I used to carry a CrackBerry, and definitely got used to it. But is that a good thing, or a capitulation to the always-on society?

Would my 2 hours a day on the train (when not traveling but commuting to work in Boston) be so much more productive?

Would my traveling (with many hours of waiting in airports) be more enjoyable?

Or do I need to that time for crossword puzzles and other non-work relaxation?

Also, can I deal with Windows Mobile 5.0? I haven’t seen a smartphone yet from a commercial carrier that’s running Linux, and so long as the Windows Media based player on this phone doesn’t *add* DRM to my files (Zune style) I don’t think I will mind.