I recently bought the Think Outside Stowaway bluetooth keyboard for my Audiovox SMT 5600 smartphone. This tiny yet full-size keyboard is a fantastic option for when you want to leave the heavy laptop at the office or when internet access is not available.
Setup wasn’t easy but eventually worked. Basically the driver that comes on the CD doesn’t work on the SMT 5600 but I later found a handy driver locator on the Think Outside website. Once I had the correct driver the keyboard setup was a breeze. The keyboard automatically recoginizes the phone every time I unfold it. Typing is a breeze on the large keys. I even discovered that you can emulate pressing the left and right phone soft keys by pressing Left-Function + Left Space and Right-Function + Right Space respectively.
I love this product. Beautiful design. Perfect function.
Microsoft has released ActiveSync 4.0 and they fixed the problems associated with trying to sync a smartphone running Windows Mobile via bluetooth.
To sync via bluetooth:
1. Download the new version of ActiveSync (There is no need to first uninstall your old version. It recognizes the old version and upgrades it.)
2. Setup the bluetooth connection with ActiveSync (taken from new Active Sync help docs)
3. Make sure ActiveSync is running on your PC and from your phone select “Connect via Bluetooth”.
Voila!
The masses of bogus SEO companies that are springing up are frightening. They are very convincing and most all have the same tactic of guaranteeing rankings in Google. The problem is that most only target useless keywords. Then when they rank on page 1 for these useless keywords they shove the unhappy client away by pointing to their success.
I recently ran across this site by accident which boldly claims “GUARANTEE You’ll Make It On Google!”.
They show many fuzzy screenshots pointing to their success for their clients in Google such as this one from the bottom of the page:
I was suspicious so I downloaded the image and zoomed in. Turns out that the hot item they ranked #1 for in Google was a press release titled “Vegan Shopping New Springtime Additions” for their poor client AlternativeOutfitters.com.
I’ve been playing with the beta version of the new Opera browser for Windows Mobile on my smartphone. While some features are nice, I was disappointed to find that it didn’t allieve some of the headaches that Internet Explorer is plagued with on Windows Mobile.
Pros:
The Opera browser is fast. In fact it makes IE look ridiculous. Of course you are limited by the slow speed of data transfer but the page renders way faster. Also, once it is rendered you can scroll from top to bottom of a long page about 10 times faster than with IE. I also like the way Opera highlights links as you scroll. Its much more obvious than IE and I feel that I have greater control in selecting links to follow.
Cons:
Unfortunately Opera did not add a “remember my password” feature for previously visited sites. In fact, they don’t even offer the option to remember the password on sites that are simply protected by .htpasswd which IE does. Also, I found that Bookmarks simply didn’t work. I saved several bookmarks but the next time I opened Opera they were gone. The back button didn’t seem to work consistently and there is no way to edit the URL of the page you are currently on. For instance, if you are currently on http://www.yahoo.com and want to go to http://movies.yahoo.com it would be nice to be able to simply click ‘Go’ -> ‘URL’ and have your current URL prefilled for quick editing as IE does.
Unfortunately my advice is, don’t waste your time installing Opera.
