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What Can I Do With My Smartphone? |
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Monday, 15 November 2004 |
With so many new Smartphones popping up all over the world and the distinct lack of marketing skills employed by carriers/manufacturers of Smartphones, I thought it was about time all you MS Smartphone lovers out there knew exactly what your phone is capable of. Now brace yourself coz thereÂ’s a lot to get throughÂ….
The Homescreen
The Smartphone homescreen is a wonderful place. With most phones these days you can display the time, date, a nice picture and thatÂ’s about as far as it goes. With MS Smartphone you can, as standard, display the time, date, number of text/sms/email (and mms on certain carriers), appointments, cell broadcast information (carrier dependent) and display a list of your most recently used programs. These elements of the homescreen are known as plugins. Plugins allow information from programs to be retrieved and displayed on the homescreen. You can define where the plugin displays this information, how much room it takes up on the homescreen and other aspects of the pluginÂ’s behaviour, such as whether it has its own background picture or whether itÂ’s only visible when it has information to display, which is all configurable via the homescreen .xml document. Now you may think thatÂ’s quite good in itself but the Smartphone has a vast community of techeads behind it and theyÂ’ve made some of their own. For instance, Orange supplies two great program shortcut plugins with the 2003/2003se devices they carry. These plugins are only available as part of the rom (built-in software) of these devices. The Smartphone community came up with their own versions for Smartphones bought from other carriers (RJShortcut). They also created plugins which allow: web content to be displayed on home screen (RJHTML Plugin), the built in Windows Media Player to be controlled from the homescreen (WMP Plugin), startup AND shutdown sounds to be played (SSS Plugin), certain information to be displayed in an lcd style and animated (LCD Plugin), various alarms to be set and times displayed (Alarm Plugin) and a lot of other stuff I cant remember. There are hundreds of homescreens that have been created with plugins such as these out there and making your own is now a lot easier than it used to be with RuttensoftÂ’s Homescreen Designer program. When compared to those of other phones, the Smartphone homescreenÂ’s possibilities are endless and IÂ’ve only just scratched the surface on this subject!
Now you may think that in itself is a pretty impressive feature of your phoneÂ…but thereÂ’s moreÂ…
Customisation
Sounds! Everyone loves the plinky plonky crapness of most new mobiles these days (!) Well we Smartphone users donÂ’t have to suffer this hardship. MS Smartphones allow you to play any sound you want for your ring/sms/email/mms/error/confirmation/information/ tone and allows the sounds to be in .wav/.wma/.midi formats. As with the homescreen, limits to customising the sounds which emit from your phone and controlling the way they behave (vibrate/loop etc.) are endless. So too are the pictures displayed on the various screens of your phone. The error/confirm/info/homescreen/start menu/windows media player screens can all be customised with your own picture/skin and most of the newer homescreens available for Smartphones include extra screens with them. The folders in the start menu can also be customised with different icons and different fonts can be used throughout the phone as well. Again I'm scratching the surface of this subject but itÂ’s a good start to getting you more informed about your Smartphone.
Organisation
Most phones let you set reminders to events and let you store a bit more than just a phone number to a contact but the MS Smartphone takes it to another level. Your Smartphone lets you store just about any bit of information you can think of about you r contact, give you a whole host of options when it comes to appointments/events/reminders/alarms, allows all this important information to backed up to your PC, to an online server or, with extra software, even backup your entire phone! Also, while your phone is connected to your PC, any changes you make to the information you have stored in Microsoft Outlook is automatically updated on the phone and vice versa. All that information is pretty much common knowledge to a smartphone user but incase your notÂ…now you know another of SmartphoneÂ’s great features.
The Internet
All variations of MS Smartphone allow you to browse Wap but almost any phone can do that these days. SmartphoneÂ’s go one better though, allowing you to browse the world wide web in all its glory and download a variety of files. Now as standard you canÂ’t download much apart from homescreen skins, music and videos but using a third party file explorer called Smartexplorer will allow you to set Pocket Internet Explorer to download any file type you want. Although even as standard the humble Smartphone can stream music and video from the internet straight to the phoneÂ’s built-in version of Window Media Player 9 (10 on certain newer models). There are now even alternatives to the SmartphoneÂ’s built in web client allowing greater ease of use and flexibility when browsing the web.
Media
Most decent camera phones can record short films and play them back. The Smartphone again goes one better, allowing you to play pretty much any type of video/music file you can think of…and yes that includes Divx!!! As standard the built-in WMP can handle .mpg/.mp3/.wma etc. but when you add an awesome and totally free app like Betaplayer you can also watch divx encoded, full length films, .play ogg encoded music and much more! What does that mean? Well basically, you know that DVD you love to watch over and over again? Encode it to the fabulous Divx format and take it with you! The average size of a full length film at good quality is about 130mb, so you’ll need a nice big SD (miniSD for HTC Typhoon/Feeler C500/SDA) card to store it on. At this present moment in time a 256mb capacity miniSD is around £30, so it won’t exactly break the bank and its well worth the investment. Did you also know you could remote control your PC’s media player over Bluetooth (2003/2003se only) using Ruttensoft’s Media Player Remote? They also do a PowerPoint presentation remote as well!
Apps and Games
Those poor fools in Nokialand who still believe that Java games are the latest in mobile gaming had better think again, we Smartphone users are blessed with real games. From a quiet beginning in late 2002 the Smartphone community has grown incredibly and with it has the amount of games and programs available for it. We have such classics as Doom and Duke Nukem. We have full blow console emulation for the Sega Megadrive, SNES, NES and Gameboy allowing you to play all your old favourites but we also have a breed of new games with graphics and gameplay equal to that of the original Playstation! WellÂ…almost but take for instance the excellent Eclipse: First Wave, a game of that quality would never be seen on youÂ’re average Nok*a. As for apps we have an abundance of useful little programs that make life that little bit easier and better. File managers, registry editors, instant message programs, notepads, Office document viewers, backup utilities, phone customisation appsÂ…even a little torch app! Best of all, alot of the apps/games for Smartphone are free!
Miscellaneous
ItÂ’s at this time that I begin to scrape the barrel that is my memory. ThereÂ’s so much to tell about SmartphoneÂ’s but remembering it all is another matter so IÂ’ll just give a quick run down of some of the other cool stuff you can do. The latest craze at the moment is Satellite Navigation. Yes you read right, you can use your smartphone to find your way anywhere! A couple of the major companies have released Sat Nav software for MS Smartphone. All you need is a Bluetooth GPS unit (so 2003/2003se only), the Sat Nav Software, your trusty Smartphone and the world is your lobster!
The MS Smartphone is a Windows CE OS based device. All the settings and information connected with a given program are stored in a place called the registry. Now this type of place is hidden from the user because messing about with the wrong values could totally screw things up but if you know what you want and where it isÂ…then have no fear, because the MS Smartphone has two very good registry editors available for it: PHM Registry Editor and Smartione which are phone and PC based respectively. Editing the phoneÂ’s registry is great for making little tweaks like vibrating the phone when a menu pops up or removing the three second gap from your ringtone.
On a final note, although there is obviously some stuff I have missed out here, one thing I will remember to tell you is this…THERE IS NO IR REMOTE APP FOR SMARTPHONE! You see the Smartphone unfortunately does not support consumer ir and as such cannot function as a TV remote controller. So please, for the love of god, if you’re ever in MoDaCo and think…”I wonder if there’s…” stop right there, coz there aint and I’m pretty sure there never will be but feel free to search MoDaCo for more information…trust me there’s enough posts about it.
I think that about wraps it up. Any further queries click on the “Discuss This At MoDaCo” link below and ask away.
Laters,
Alex (nedge2k)
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