altaVENTE « /bin/tim

December 20, 2007

IE 8 and the ACID2 Test

Filed under: Dev, Microsoft, Tech, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 4:15 pm

I watched with interest the channel9 video from the IE team that IE 8 has finally passed the ACID2 test, which is one measure of standards compliance. they have a small movie showing how the ACID2 test progressed with various builds over the past few months (it should draw a smiley face, similar to the Aceed logo of the 80’s). It finally draws the image correctly.

You can try it yourself with your own browser here http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html but don’t forget to check the reference image to see what it should look like (IE7 is not ACID2 compliant).

What is amazing is how far out of compliance some browsers are. If you are still using IE 6 I encourage and implore you to get upgraded to a better browser capability as provided by IE7, Firefox 2 or Opera 9. Its only when you compare the CSS rendering of FF2, O9 or IE7 with IE6 that you see how slow, wheezy and downright inaccurate it is with a modern AJAX site. As a company committed to providing our web services to appear like desktop apps using AJAX, IE 6 users always complain but it truly is their browser and not our sites which are at fault. If people won’t move on we can’t make the experience better. Its no good saying the display is rubbish and slow in IE6, its never going to get any better. So move on up, please!

ACID2

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October 13, 2007

Qtek 8500 Hot Pink for £99

Filed under: HTC, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:59 pm

This is a great deal, vicki just broke her original black 8500 so I bought her a replacement in hot pink for the amazingly low price of £99! This is great value for money especially if you need test devices. Unfortunately hot pink is not my colour so I won’t be using one. However, the 8500 is a great device and the only flaw is that it has no WM6 upgrade available, but if you can live with WM5 which shouldnt be a problem then its stellar value. You can also register it at the HTC support site so if WM6 is made available (highly unlikely) then you will be able to get it.

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October 12, 2007

IE6 Test VHD for VPC and ITGProxy …

Filed under: Dev, Microsoft, Tech, Windows XP, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:52 am

Microsoft helpfully provide developers with a free, although time limited, VHD for VirtualPC with XP SP2 and IE6 for compatibility testing. This is jolly useful for backward compatibility testing or if you are tracking down an issue which needs a vanilla IE6 which hasnt been modified by the dev environment or other add-ins.

There is one gotcha that you need to be aware of. When they built this VHD, Microsoft obviously tested this on their internal network and then packaged it up. As a result they left in their own company specific proxy settings for the proxy server run by their internal IT Group (ITG). So, if you try and connect to a web page from IE on your own machine outside of Microsoft, you will not connect to a page since the ITGProxy server is not contactable. Ping and other IP releated activities will work fine.

So to fix this issue you need to open IE, and from the TOOLS menu select INTERNET OPTIONS and click the CONNECTIONS tab. At the bottom of the dialog you will see a LAN SETTINGS button, click that and the dialog below will appear. Simply uncheck the ‘Use a proxy server…’ check box and click OK and then OK to dismiss the main dialog.

Simple, but unless you know what to look for you could spend ages trying to resolve this issue. You can download the IE6 VHD here http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/7/2/b72085ae-0f04-4c6f-9182-bf1ee90f5273/IE6_VPC.EXE

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October 11, 2007

Verbocity and Redaction

Filed under: Microsoft, Office, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:29 pm

I was just saving a document i had written in Word as an HTML file and I could not believe how big it became with verbose declarations, so I just tried a quick test. I created a new file and typed 3 lines of text comprising 54 characters, then I saved as web page ….

The resulting file is 24,947 bytes with as you would expect 24,947 characters in 552 lines of code!

Its truly amazing how much code is inserted around my 54 characters of text complete with information about the registered user and orgainisation and author. Look at this block which is actually commented out in the doc but still there absorbing space;

<!–[if gte mso 9]><xml>

<o:DocumentProperties>

<o:Author>Tim Carmichael</o:Author>

<o:Template>Normal</o:Template>

<o:LastAuthor>Tim Carmichael</o:LastAuthor>

<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>

<o:TotalTime>8</o:TotalTime>

<o:Created>2007-10-11T20:47:00Z</o:Created>

<o:LastSaved>2007-10-11T20:55:00Z</o:LastSaved>

<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>

<o:Words>9</o:Words>

<o:Characters>57</o:Characters>

<o:Company>altaVENTE</o:Company>

<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>

<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>

<o:CharactersWithSpaces>65</o:CharactersWithSpaces>

<o:Version>12.00</o:Version>

</o:DocumentProperties>

</xml><![endif]–>

Obviously this info is useful from a document management perspective but useless at runtime and potentially embarassing if you didn’t want someone to know this info and they just used VIEW SOURCE in IE.

So be aware when you ’save as web’ from Word (or other Office 12 apps) about what is getting saved in your file…

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October 7, 2007

VSTO Variations …

Filed under: Microsoft, Office, Visual Studio, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 9:06 pm

Gosh Darn-it, just when something useful comes along you find it has a missing wheel. VSTO or more properly Visual Studio Tools for Office is a conceptually great idea to help make all the functionality of Office apps like Word or Excel usable as if they were native components in Visual Studio. So far, so good because the previous mechanism of using COM and COM shims was never very satisfactory or seamless.

Unfortunately, nothing comes without a downside and the first downside is that VSTO doesn’t support Office apps pre-version 11.0 (Office 2003). Ok, at first that seems workable since thats 4 years ago and surely people would have upgraded by now, until you discover that that has some big exceptions, proved by me identiying corporate customers still using Office 97 (on NT 4.0!).

The second gotcha is that VSTO is really very compatible between Office 11 and 12 (Office 2007), with 12 having shedloads more functionality and different interfaces, which becomes evident when you doscver that each version needs a different PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) which can’t be mixed.

This is a big downside for an ISV like me. So what can I do ? Well not much, apparently there are some bodges to get some common codebase but in reality we are left to write conditional code and essentially write two versions like this;

private void My_Addin(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
          {
                 if (this.Application.Version == “11.0″)
          {
                 // Office 2003-specific code.
           }
                else
          {
               // Office 2007-specific code.
           }
}

This is inconvenient and there’s no guarantee (in fact far from it) that I won’t need a third condition for Office 14.0 next year (there’s no Office 13.0 for superstitious reasons). So how does this make me feel? it makes me feel we should just stick with COM shims because then we can support older versions, but then we lose new functionality like the Ribbon (or do it lower level) or stick with VSTO and make Office 12 our preferred target. No surprise which one MS want us to do! Gosh Darn-it, life is never easy.

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August 22, 2007

My Home Screen

Filed under: HTC, Microsoft, Mobile, T-Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:06 pm

This is my edited simple home screen for the WM6 based T-Mobile Mail (Excalibur). One of the big changes to my taste is to change the font form 16 point bold to 18 point normal as I think this looks more elegant.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<home>
<author>Tim Carmichael</author>
<contacturl>http:/blog.timcarmichael.com</contacturl>
<title>Tims Simple Home Screen</title>
<version>1.0</version>
<!– filename   tim.home.xml - copy this to application data\Home directory on your device –>

<!–The HTC Excalibur has a Square 320 x 320 screen so target height and width are both 320 –>
<!– I use normal weight Segoe font (instead of bold) but increased in size from 16 to 18 point –>
<default target-width=”320″ target-height=”320″ font-face=”Segoe Condensed” font-size=”18″ font-weight=”normal” padding-left=”5″ padding-right=”5″ bgcolor=”transparent” fgcolor=”COLOR_HOMETEXT” padding-top=”3″ b-border-color=”COLOR_HOMERULE” b-border-width=”1″>
<format state=”unselected” fgcolor=”#FFFFFF” bgcolor=”transparent” font-weight=”normal”/>
<format state=”selected” fgcolor=”#FFFFFF” bgcolor=”COLOR_HOMEHIGHLIGHT” font-weight=”normal”/>
</default>

<!– This was designed for a T-Mobile Dash version of the Excalibur so I use the T-Mobile background, change to your own choice –>
<background bgimage-rotated=”TMobile.jpg” valign=”top” />

<!– Standard colour scheme settings which I haven’t changed –>
<scheme>
  <color name=”COLOR_WINDOW” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_WINDOWTEXT” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_STATIC” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_STATICTEXT” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_HIGHLIGHT” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HIGHLIGHTTEXT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_TEXTSELECT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_MENU” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_MENUTEXT” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_GRAYTEXT” value=”#CCCCCC” />
  <color name=”COLOR_GRADLEFT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_GRADRIGHT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_INTGRADLEFT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_INTGRADRIGHT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT” value=”#0a4476″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_TRAYGRADRIGHT” value=”#155D9C” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HIGHGRADLEFT” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HIGHGRADRIGHT” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_TRAYTEXT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_WINDOWFRAME” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_BTNFACE” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_BTNTEXT” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_SCROLLBAR” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HOMETEXT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HOMEHIGHLIGHT” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HOMEHIGHLIGHTTEXT” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_HOMERULE” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_ALERTWINDOW” value=”#FFFFFF” />
  <color name=”COLOR_ALERTTITLE” value=”#444444″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_ALERTRULE” value=”#000000″ />
  <color name=”COLOR_TITLEFLATCENTER” value=”#3485ce” />
  <color name=”COLOR_SOFTKEYFLATCENTER” value=”#3485ce” />
</scheme>

<!– This is the icon bar at the top with signal strength and battery status, remove if you add another custom battery/signal strength plugins –>
<plugin clsid=”{837FC251-FE69-43ad-84E0-EBCEDEBA0884}” name=”iconbar” height=”25″>
<iconbar y=”5″ fgcolor=”#ffffff”/>
<background gradient=”title” bgcolor=”#114676″ b-border-color=”COLOR_HOMERULE” />
</plugin>

<!– This is the most recently used (MRU) list of applications displayed as icons under the iconbar–>
<plugin clsid=”{79EFB752-CB70-446d-B317-499723482B3D}” name=”startmru” height=”35″>
<background>
</background>
<mru icon-size=”16″ max-buttons=”6″ x=”2″ y=”6″ valign=”center” button-transparent-color=”COLOR_HOMERULE” highlight=”COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT”/>
<appname halign=”right” x=”0″ y=”8″ w=”320″ font-size=”18″ />
</plugin>

<!– This is the plugin carrier which says which operator I’m connected to –>
<plugin clsid=”{E09043DF-510E-4841-B652-388316977A7A}” name=”carrier” height=”24″>
  <allowselection/>
         <background>
         <format state=”selected” bgimage=”" />
</background>
<!– I set x=0 below so that the ‘carrier’ name is displayed left justified –>
  <label bgcolor=”transparent” halign=”left” h=”20″ font-weight=”normal” y=”0″ x=”0″ w=”81″ font-size=”18″>
  <text><carrier/></text>
</label>
  <label bgcolor=”transparent” halign=”left” font-weight=”normal” y=”0″ x=”0″ textwidth=”115″ font-size=”18″>
  <text><wifi/></text>
  </label>
<clock>
  <time font-weight=”normal” font-size=”18″ valign=”top” halign=”right” y=”0″ x=”0″ w=”320″/>
  <!– I set mode below to long so I see the date in long format eg 24 August 2007 –>
  <date font-weight=”normal” font-size=”18″ valign=”top” halign=”center” mode=”long” y=”0″ x=”58″ w=”320″ />
</clock>
</plugin>

<!– Calls Plugin –>
<plugin clsid=”{0BA8ABB8-1F1D-417f-88C6-DA8530E2E7A6}” name=”missedcalls” height=”22″ width=”320″>
<background>
</background>
<!– visible=false means this text is only visible if there is an actual missed call –>
<format state=”nocall” visible=”false”/>
  <label font-weight=”normal” fgcolor=”#FFFFFF” font-size=”18″ x=”0″ halign=”left” y=”0″ >
   <text>Missed Calls : <calls/></text>
  </label>
</plugin>

<!– Messaging plugin –>
<plugin clsid=”{2F930BF0-6FE9-4a53-9E17-88E9247BAB48}” name=”SMScount” height=”22″>
<background>
</background>
  <label halign=”left” h=”23″ x=”0″ y=”0″ w=”290″ font-size=”18″ padding-right=”0″ >
   <text>SMS : <unreadSMS />      Email : <unreadEmail /></text>
  </label>
</plugin>

<!– Calendar plugin –>
<plugin clsid=”{865A354A-4A96-4687-B001-C155DC0DBE76}” name=”Calendar” height=”41″>
<background>
</background>
  <label halign=”left” h=”22″ x=”0″ y=”17″ w=”285″ font-size=”18″ padding-right=”0″ >
   <text><time/> <location/></text>
  </label>
  <label halign=”left” h=”22″ x=”0″ y=”0″ w=”285″ font-size=”18″ padding-right=”0″ >
   <text><subject/></text>
  </label>
</plugin>

<!– Show All Day events –>
<plugin clsid=”{2FFD93B3-0FF0-4228-A6D6-D2DF177D7D92}” name=”alldayevent” height=”24″>
<background>
</background>
<format state=”noevent” visible=”false”/>
  <label halign=”left” h=”20″ x=”0″ y=”1″ w=”280″ font-size=”18″ padding-right=”0″ >
   <text>All Day Event: <subject/></text>
  </label>
</plugin>
</home>

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August 15, 2007

Hard (cold) resetting a T-Mobile Dash Mail or HTC Excalibur S620

Filed under: HTC, Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 7:19 pm

Just in case I ever forget, the hard reset key combination for Excalibur is holding down both soft keys whilst powering on the device. I think they should make this a standard procedure for all smartphones rather than the range of weird and wacky combinations you have to do on each different model.

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August 10, 2007

T-Mobile Mails on Ebay

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 7:02 pm

Just recently purchased a couple of used T-Mobile Mails on ebay since T-Mobile wont sell me the handsets offline. Both are already unlocked and both have had the US WM6 update for Dash already installed before I got them. Both appear fine and not blocked from T-Mobile network (phew) now I just need to reconfigure them over the next few days. I’ll post the steps I perform to get them to my spec.

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July 31, 2007

Can software be obese ?

Filed under: Microsoft, Office, Vista, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:28 pm

The answer has to be yes. Anyone who knows me will be aware of my obsession with making my apps smaller and more optimized, its a legacy of memory constrained systems I grew up with computers like the 1K ZX80 and Apple ][ and CP/M systems with 64K RAM. I can’t stand software bloat, and it shows in altaVENTE apps with our players and viewers are generally about ~300KB in size even though they do amazing things.

So, imagine my disbelief today when I was told that adding a Vista compatible set of icons would double the average size of our players! That is software bloat gone mad!

Of course the reason for this is the support for all sizes of gorgeous Vista icons right up to 256 x 256. I love these icons but because we need to place them as resources in our apps they just bloat them completely. I wouldn’t mind if we could ship the icons as a separate file if the user wanted them, and keep them out of the EXE, but we can’t, as Explorer relies on being able to enumerate the icon from the EXE…

So, the solution ? Well, my plan is to go to an 8-bit grayscale icon, which can still look gorgeous, but is svelte as well. Less is more if you know what I mean. We’ll do some prototype and post them for feedback soon.

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July 23, 2007

Replaceable variables

Filed under: altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:29 pm

Following on a customer question today, all altaVENTE apps including compilers for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Media and PDF support replaceable variables. So, when you want to compile a document for a hundred users and still mainatin individuality you can use these to personalise each one. These are the ones we support, they are case sensitive:

%presentationtitle% - The title of a PowerPoint presentaion

%authorname% - The licenced username (the author)
%authorcompany% - The licenced company
%authoremail% - The licenced user’s email address
%companyemail% - The licenced company’s email address
%companyurl% - The licenced company’s web site
%companytel% - The licenced company’s telephone number

%presvalidfromtime% - The valid from time for the document
%presvalidfromdate% - The valid from date for the document
%presexpirestime% - The expiry time of the document
%presexpiresdate% - The expiry date of the document

%recipientname% - The target user you have licenced/registered the document to
%recipientcompany% - The target users company
%recipientemail% - The target users email address
%licensetitle% - The title used for the licence (EULA/NDA etc)

So in youe EULA/NDA you could write this to replace the variable info from a batch list:

CONFIDENTIAL this document is intended for %recipientname% of %recipientcompany% by %authorname% of %authorcompany% and wil expire on %presexpiresdate%

Please try it out! it works very well and in Rhapzode, protExcel, Qosmosis, Movi and Trapeze.

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July 11, 2007

aargh … the madness of T-Mobile!

Filed under: Mobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:22 am

Every mobile operator has at least one fundamental flaw which makes you wonder who, back in deep staff, came up with that decision or policy. Well I’ve now identified T-Mobile’s flaw, for me anyway and it seems thousands of other people.

The flaw is exposed in a very simple way, T-Mobiles insurance scheme is run by a third party, and like any other third party arrangement its twice as much as it needs or should do. With T-Mobile that’s a whopping £9 month which is a super whopping £192 per 18 month contract including first excess charge. You can buy a new more replacement handset for that (or get one off ebay).

But wait! I hear you cry, what happens if you lose or damage your phone 2 or 3 times during contract, surely the insurance becomes worthwhile? Well that’s a matter of opinion, because every claim incurs excess charges of £90. Plus … the third party insurer only commit to giving you a refurbushed unit or near equivalent, not a new unit.

Best policy is to never lose your phone, a policy I’m happy to say I have stuck with since my first NEC P3 back in 1991. So most people don’t buy the insurance because its so expensive. So why am I upset about this? Well I wanted to buy a spare MDA Mail to replace an MDA 3 which I was testing WM6 upgrade on, so I phoned up T-Mobile upgrades and asked them how much?

They told me I could not upgrade or downgrade the MDA 3 but could buy an ’offline’ MDA Mail for £135 but they could not sell to me direct, so they gave me the part number and sent me to CarPhone Warehouse who supply T-Mobile offline phones. CarPhone warehouse wearily told me T-Mobile didn’t supply the MDA Mail to them so they couldn’t help. T-Mobile customer services then sent me on a fruitless waste of time journey to my local T-Mobile store who informed me they are not allowed to sell offline phones. A policy that they thought was crazy, as they have to send uninsured customers to local Carphone warehouse to buy replacement handsets and lose money by not completing the sale. This apparently leads to huge customer dis-satisfaction, and of course the opportunity for CarPhone Warehouse to steal T-Mobile customers by cross grading their contract. You can’t even buy it as a spare part as they have no way to bill you.

So back I went to T-Mobile who have now ultimately said the easiest way to get a replacement phone is to buy the cheapest contract with the MDA Mail free on which is a Flext 25 12 months which is £300 and dump the SIM or give it to someone…. this is madness for them and their customers!

So the bottom line for anyone losing or damaging their phone and wanting a T-Mobile model is to get another cheap contract and give the SIM and a cheap phone to your gran.

Also, for anyone buying from T-Mobile business, when they say Free 24 hour handset replacement, they only mean warranty replacement, not loss or damage, which they conveniently omit to mention.

Come on T-Mobile, let your stores sell offline phones!

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July 10, 2007

Its just a phone! Unboxing the Motorola MotoFone F3

Filed under: Mobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 1:56 pm

Every self respecting geek should have one of these to compensate for over exposure to smart devices. I think the beauty of the MotoFone F3 is in its utter simplicity, its just a phone, no camera, no wifi, no Internet, no GPRS, no MMS, no HSDPA, just good old fashioned voice and text. Its not even got internal memory so no built-in phone book or SMS store, all that has to come from your SIM.

Its only tilt towards hi-tech is the E-Ink ‘electronic paper’ display but tempered with only two lines of six characters in uppercase only (except when they have a descender) and only -,?@ as non alphanumeric characters.

However all these limitations belie an underlying beauty through simplicity. Its thin, but not the thinnest at 9.1mm and feels good to use and carry. Designed for emerging markets, its cheap at £23 + VAT and can be bought at Expansys http://www.expansys.com/d.aspx?i=139429 unlocked.

Don’t expect any more from it than a simple phone and you won’t be disappointed. Its a great phone to use when you are going somewhere that might be hazardous for a smart device and where a longer battery life helps. There’s a dedicated page on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Motofone_F3 complete with secret cheat codes.

its a tube not a box silly!

The ‘inner tube’

Feels good

Quite thin compared to the HP iPAQ 500

Compared to other similar style phones (SLVR, F3, SPL and iPAQ 500) its the thinnest!

Compared to bigger devices

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July 9, 2007

HTC Easy Network Setup

Filed under: Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:33 pm

I just found a simple but incredibly useful tool on the HTC site which automatically sets up your operator settings on your device. You run it from Windows with your device attached and it asks you your country and operator, then sends the settings direct to your device over ActiveSync. This is so useful if you have a non-standard device like a Dopod, and takes all the work out of remembering and setting the correct configuration. I was browsing through to see if anything new was available and this was listed for the S710, but I just used it on my Excalibur (Dash) and it worked fine and quick too. This reminds me of a previous generation tool we built at DAT for HTC a few years ago as an in-ROM tool, but its much more flexible as a Windows/ActiveSync app so it can be easily updated. I’m looking at how we altaVENTE could integrate this into our Mercury device security platform as a lauchable app, as its jolly useful.

It supports these countries/operators

UK operators (O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Virgin and 3)
France (SFR, Orange, Bouygues…)
Germany (O2, T-mobile, E-plus, Vodafone…)
Italy (Vodafone, Wind, TIM, 3)
Spain (Movistar, Orange, Vodafone)
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland

You can find it here http://www.europe.htc.com/support/software/htcs710.html

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July 8, 2007

HP iPAQ 500 Mini Review

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:28 pm

Well, I have spent nearly 2 days with the iPAQ 500 now and I am far more impressed than I thought I would be, but there are some annoyances too. Despite my earlier reservations about the size I have found it easy to use, hold and carry. In fact Vicki has been threatening to steal it to replace her beloved Qtek 8500, so it appears to work for girls too. In the end it only took 45 minutes to charge, and I only know that because I heard a strange buzzing which turned out to be the iPAQ finishing charging. I love the fact that it set everything up for T-Mobile straight away using the wizard and I didn’t have to do anything extra. Although the screen is low res its quite pleasing and more than adequate. Battery life seems good, better on balance than anything else I have (which is most everything WM). It uses a standard mini-USB for charging (great!) and even better, has a separate headphone mini jack.

However, there’s a few things I don’t like; There is no separate on/off switch, you have to use the End Call button which has the knock on effect that the Home key becomes Quicklist and most frustratingly (and stupidly in my view) the Call button becomes the keyboard lock. Why HP didn’t keep End Call as lock, and use Call as power on is beyond me (and rationality). What this means in practice is that you can accidentally make a call whilst locking the keyboard….doh!

The other minor irritant is that the right soft key is not Contacts by default, its called Shortcuts, and true to the name, it takes you to a ladder menu of 9 shortcuts (which you can change) of which contacts is option 0. This means performing 2 keypresses to get contacts. Once you get used to it its ok, and in some weird way, strangely logical and useful, but its different, and takes getting used to. Lastly I don’t like the irritating startup music which I haven’t found anyway to disable. I mean it just wouldn’t work for Jack Bauer whilst hiding from baddies, he be found straight away!

Other than that I really liked it, not as much as my Cavalier or Excalibur, but well worth it when you consider you can buy it from Expansys for £161+VAT. http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=146093

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July 7, 2007

unboxing the HP iPAQ 500 SmartPhone

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:30 am

Just got this new WM6 smartphone from HP. I’d kinda forgotten HP as a WindowsMobile vendor and this certainly brings them back to the front of my mind. Its cheap too, about £150 + VAT. Comes in a small neat package, different to the HTC packaging model, this is outer box and egg crate, not sleeve and preformed card. I’m going to use this for some compatibility testing on our new Mercury WindowsMobile security product.

Small neat package

Not many bits inside, but its all there, neat and tidy

And the phone itself feels good in my hand. initially, when I read that it was 16.3mm thick I was considering whether I would need to get a backpack to carry it round in, but I was pleasantly surprised at how neat and compaq it feels in my hand. I’ve left it on charge now like a good boy because there are dire warning about charging for at least 4 hours prior to use. I suspect that’s over the top but I fell like being good.

I’ll update this when I have had a chance to use it more. At least the battery cover fits well!

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July 6, 2007

New Movi update

Filed under: altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 1:03 pm

We just completed an update to Movi with a new Aero Basic look for the player. Here it is playing the trailer for the 20th Century Fox movie Die Hard 4.0 , unfortunately we can’t show the film image due to copyright, but believe me its there.

Same proven Movi capabilities of protecting content with EULA, authentication, licensing and valid from/expiry dates. Check it out at soon at http://www.altavente.com

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MS Gold Partner Update July 2007

Filed under: Microsoft, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 12:26 pm

Just got the July 2007 monthly update for Gold Partners from Microsoft. Here’s the contents as they arrived and the DVD’s as a stack. We get all we need downloading from the partner website so I’m not sure why they continue to ship physical media. The product downloads from the website are always up to date as well.

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July 5, 2007

HTC Support Site

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 12:26 pm

So I’ve registered all my devices at the HTC e-Club http://member.htc.com/member/login.aspx?fm=eu&ln=en , but there’s no Wm6 updates there yet. I think HTC need to put more effort in getting this up to date. There have been WM6 builds available for the Excalibur (S620) for over a year now in various beta forms and in release form for a couple of months from T-Mobile (US but not UK). So where is the update ? They did promise it for June back at MEDC.

Interestingly the site also accepts my QTek and Dopod devices which are made by HTC, but not HTC devices branded by operators like Orange, T-Mobile and O2. I can understand why, but they should really work with the operators to provide links to relevant updates.

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July 4, 2007

WindowsMobile, IE and auto detect settings

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 9:29 am

I change my phones frequently and always have to reset my operator settings each time. Its onerous and I usually forget something.Today I was testing a new WM6 smartphone device and was really having problems with it. I could get push email from my Exchange server but couldn’t browse the web … starnge. The GPRS was coming up. I’d turned the HSDPA option off, rechecked the APN and still nothing. …until one of my colleagues reminded me that IE has a setting that was probably affecting me ‘Automatically Detect Settings’. Sure enough it was not checked and worse the selected network was MMS! Anyway, as soon as I updated this sure enough IE started working. That’s one to add to my checklist!

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June 28, 2007

Unboxing my Dopod C730

Filed under: Microsoft, Mobile, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:16 pm

Well it arrived at 6:30 this evening just as I returned home. So I decided to record the unboxing process for posterity. I’ve wanted a Dopod C730 (HTC Cavalier) since I first saw the reviews. I can’t say its handsome, but it is professional looking.

Here’s the box it comes in, pretty standard package size.