David Carrington

To set up bluetooth ActiveSync with Windows Mobile 6 you’ve got to go through a number of steps which aren’t always particularly obvious:

1. Enable bluetooth on your PC and Windows Mobile device
2. Create an incoming bluetooth COM port on your PC
3. Go to ActiveSync connection settings on your PC to enable COM port access
4. Create a bluetooth connection partnership (or refresh an existing one) to see the ActiveSync service on your device
5. Open up ActiveSync on your device, go to Menu, and choose “Connect via Bluetooth”

All that because I wanted to transfer a single file from my phone to my PC.

In fact, all I needed to do was use the “Beam file” functionality in File Explorer. I’m pretty sure this was limited in the past to use Infrared only. It now supports Bluetooth and it was possible for me to transfer the file.

It’s still not a perfect solution though. After choosing the “Beam file” option, I then have to wait 5 minutes while it looks through every nearby bluetooth device and tells me it’s name. A big shame it can’t instantly recognise that I’ve got my bluetooth dongle nearby and already paired up.

There’s one area where the WIDCOMM bluetooth driver is far superior to Microsoft’s - it has bluetooth FTP support.

Jason Langridge talking about “unlimited” data traffic made me think how similar this is to what I get each month from Orange:

• Unlimited texts? 3000.
• Unlimited evening and weekend browsing? 1000Mb.

Incidentally, last night I realised that when I connect to Orange World over GPRS it thinks my phone is PAYG, even though I switched to a nice contract about a month ago. I hope this doesn’t affect my first bill.

Eric Meyer pointed out that someone was looking to analyse the ALA Web Design 2007 Survey results for UK-only. I quite like this idea, and being impatient to see some results - I had a look myself. Here’s some figures to get us started:

32831 people filled out the survey.
3666 of those were from the UK.
1164 of those were Developers.
277 of those were between 21-24 (this is where I fit in).

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Nick pointed me towards Jason Langridge’s post on TouchPal - an on-screen keyboard designed to speed up typing on Windows Mobile devices that don’t have a hardware keyboard. Nick knows that I’m in the same situation and that one of the major factors in me going for the HTC Touch was that it didn’t have a keyboard.

So I downloaded it and gave it a go. At first, I was under the false impression that I had to drag every letter left or right to get the correct key. Later, by mistake, I found that it was far more intelligent / predictive. This was unintuitive for me personally as I use drag-left to delete and drag-right to add a space.

The CooTek TouchPal Keyboard is fast, and helps greatly when you are typing long paragraphs of text. What it lacks though is equally fast access to symbols. I type up to 50 text messages every day of the week, and I’m also a fan of smileys/emoticons to convey that a statement was meant in a joking way.

On the built in touch screen keyboard with small keys, I can access a large number of symbols quickly and easily. With TouchPal, I have to switch tabs up to 3 time, simply to write one smiley. “^_^” is an anime-style smiley that I’ll sometimes use in texts and is very annoying to type with this software.

I can see myself becoming very fast at typing long sections of text with this keyboard, but considerably slower if I was attempting to write a symbol-filled text message.

In essence, what I need is a more customisable version of this software that allows me to do the following:

• Fill one of the keyboard tabs with symbols (or sets of symbols) of my choice
• Let me modify the symbols below each letter on the main alphabet screen
• Somehow make the screen less distracting - too much happens at once when you press a key
• I want a Ctrl key! Without this I have no Undo, no Select All, etc.

I may keep the software installed and even try writing text messages with it. If it’s fast enough to be noticeable, I might even change my texting style to match. No more symbols!

Update: Another part that bugs me considerably is that if I finish a sentence with an exclamation mark and the word I just typed is not the one predictive texts chooses first, I have to: 1) choose the word, 2) remove the automatically created space, 3) put my punctuation in. That’s very disruptive for me.

Update: I’ve emailed the developers my opinions and uninstalled TouchPal to make more space.

On Tuesday night I was glancing at an OS map of Maidenhead to check out a route that the 19th Maidenhead Scouts would be navigating. 4km long, with about 14 stops, and 1.5 hours to do it - it was focusing heavily on precise navigation rather than walking speed. Just to “be prepared”, I loaded up the route into both GPS devices I own.

Up comes Wednesday evening. Parking a short distance from the start point, 14 of us gathered at the start point and began the crucial first step in our two groups: making sure everyone knows where they are on the map. MP3 players removed and torches switched on, we head off on our journey into the night.

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