This is encouraging – Opera Mini is Profitable

Apr 7, 2006 | blog

Opera, the other alternative browser (and a darn good one) discusses how mobile operators are making money using the Opera Mini browser.  Mini was designed specifically for mobile phones, their small screen, and their keypad.  Their press release yesterday gives a lot of detail on who is using it and how its being used.

Russell Beattie has a nice post on this topic as well.  By the way Russ, nice new layout – kind of minimalistic, I like it!

MSNBC.com Mobile – For Windows Mobile

Apr 6, 2006 | blog

Interesting – MSNBC is offering a new mobile service specifically for Windows Mobile devices. It kind of surprised me that all the currently available Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone versions are listed on the site. Did I mention – its free?

To sign up, you simply select your device, enter your phone number (which is only used to send you a URL via SMS) and then download the client software (~700k). The service offeres up to the minute news, picture news, news videos, and clips of the Today show. Seems kind of neat.

Check it out here: MSNBC.com Mobile

Via: Pocket PC Thoughts

GMail on Pocket PC

Apr 4, 2006 | blog

Has anyone had a good GMail experience on Pocket PC?  I’ve got it set up and working with the default mail client in Windows Mobile 5.  Send and receive work fine, but the weird thing is that as soon as you open a message in WM5 Mail – the message disappears from the list of email.

This is not how it works with other “standard” POP3 mail accounts, why does GMail behave differently?  One thing I have not done yet is to search out for a GMail PPC client.  Has anyone use one?  How do you work with GMail on your PPC?

On the .mobi TLD

Apr 4, 2006 | blog

I’ve been putting off posting on the .mobi top level domain.  I’m not sure yet… I do agree with Russell Beattie on his points of why its a “good thing”.  Having a standard is very useful, as Russ points out, to be able to know that you can go to yoursite.mobi and have a mobile page formated correctly for your device.

It’ll be nice if it all works - sites need to adopt this for it to really become useful, and of course, every site needs to purchase another domain.  This is the part that I really have an issue with.  Why not simply have your site automatically reconfigure the output based on the resolution or browser string?  Guess that makes too much sense.

Disappointed in FlexMail 2006

Mar 30, 2006 | blog

FlexMail 2006 is an email application for Pocket PC devices.  WebIS had released previous versions under the name Mail, and I purchased a copy of Mail 2.0 awhile back.  Since the new version was released earlier this month, I thought I’d try out the new version and see how it has grown.

Now WebIS has done some substantial work on this product for compatibility with Windows Mobile 5, to support for SSL on  both inbound & outbound POP/SMTP mail accounts.  Support for IMAP is here as well, though I have no IMAP accounts to try it with.  Other new features are support for VGA and square screen devices, integration of SMS messaging on phone devices, and various other small though important inprovements.

My main thing I was looking forward to was manageability of my mail.  Since I have 5 separate and distinct email accounts that I use and monitor, I have a need to keep the accounts separate.  I was not able to do this in FlexMail.  The built-in Messaging application in WM5 has the ability to have separate folder structures for each mail account – FlexMail does not.  This simple difference negates all the features of FlexMail for me.

The built-in mail client for WM5 is surprisingly flexible for multiple accounts and this is what I need rather than the ability to view HTML email (though that is nice).  Until FlexMail adds this kind of functionality, its getting removed from my MDA until the next version.

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