September 2006 - Pocket.Info - Mobile 2.0

--------------------------------------------- http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=160 Windows Live Mobile Updated Published by Editor September 13th, 2006 in Site Reviews , Microsoft Hot on the heels of Yahoo's recent mobile home page redesign comes a major upgrade to Microsoft's mobile deck. There is a new mobile.live.com URL (the old mobile.msn.com address also points to the new content). If you want to preview the site in your PC browser use mobile.live.com/wml/ as the above URL's will take you to a page about Live Mobile. The new front page has a brighter, less cluttered look with updated icons. This is not just a cosmetic update. There's a revised News section, changes to Live Mail, Spaces and Live Search , a new Driving Directions page and two alternate start pages labeled Live.com Beta and MSN.com Beta . Here's a rundown of the changes. News , which is now labeled MSNBC News contains the full content of some of the articles on MSNBC.com - a vast improvement over the two line summaries that used to pass for news at MSN Mobile. The news page is limited to only the four top stories, unfortunately (2nd image). I discovered that there is an alternate version of Live Mobile at mobile.live.com/pocketpc/menu.aspx which is more or less identical to the standard version except that under MSNBC News there is a sub-menu listing multiple news sections - International, Local, Business, Weather and Entertainment (3rd Image). Under these sections are dozens of additional articles. I played around with Firefox's User Agent Switcher extension and it looks like devices running Windows Mobile or Palm OS get redirected to the PocketPC version. The funny thing is that although the PocketPC site has more news stories than the regular site the actual pages are still small enough to load without error even on low end phones. Incidentally, if you like MSNBC's online news, visit MSNBC.com with your mobile - there doesn't seem to be a dedicated mobile URL but the browser detection works pretty well. The mobile version of MSNBC is one of the most attractive and well designed of all the mobile news sites and carries virtually the entire content of the MSNBC PC site . Live Mail is out of beta and seems to have completely replaced Hotmail on the mobile platform. It now supports bulk move and delete operations . There are check-boxes in front of each message in the Inbox and other folders. Check a bunch of messages and with a single click you can Delete or Move all the checked items. This...

Well, you can now through Motorola’s “Instantmoto”, a vending machine stocked with mobile handsets and phone accessories and deployed at airports and malls. The Instantmoto vending machines are up and running, including one in the Macy...

What is Platform Verification Task? Smart Device development involves writing applications that target a particular device platform. Toolbox filtering, the unsupported control designer and IntelliSense provide design time aid to the developer to add only PMEs (properties/methods/events) supported by the current platform to his application. But in certain scenarios the developer might have written an application for a particular platform and then ported it to another platform. In this scenario it is necessary to identify the PMEs not supported by the new platform at build time. These errors cannot be caught by simply compiling the project against NETCF assemblies (For example, if your project contains a "Button" control, then, building it against the NETCF system assemblies will always succeed, since "System.Windows.Forms.Button" is a supported NETCF control. But "System.Windows.Forms.Button" is not supported by all device platforms (For example, Smartphone does not support it)). Platform Verification Task (PVT) is a post-build validation step to catch the unsupported PMEs before they can result in a runtime exception. Just another MSBuild target: So what is this post build step and how does fit into Visual Studio build system? As you might be aware VS2005 uses the MSBuild engine from the IDE to perform all compile time actions. The project file contains the information about the set of target files (which contain the list of MSBuild targets) that need to be imported and executed by the MSBuild engine. The set of targets specific to Smart Device projects are defined in Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets file (installed in the System .NET Framework directory) and are imported inside each Smart device project’s project file. Platform Verification task is one of the MSBuild targets added to Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets file which is executed after the project has been built. If project build is successful, then PVT is executed with the following parameters: 1) PlatformFamilyName (example, PocketPC) 2) PlatformID (example, ID corresponding to PPC2003) 3) SourceAssembly name 4) ReferencePath, i.e. assembly path 5) TreatWarningsAsErrors , a flag specifying whether PVT should generate Warnings or Errors and 6) PlatformVersion (example NETCF v2) What is required? A managed code analysis tool to examine the managed assemblies for correctness issues. Every managed code developer already uses it, isn’t it? As stated above...

The mobile phone virus fearmongering has kicked up a notch at this week's CTIA Wireless IT show. McAfee is making the rounds to warn us about a new malicious phenomenon called "SMiShing" -- SMS meets phishing scams, wherein the bad guys send...

Last week BT (British Telecom) launched its BT Movio mobile TV service in the UK on a wholesale basis. MVNO Virgin Mobile is the first service provider that will start providing this service to subscribers from October 2006. The service will be accessible...

I had an interesting meeting this afternoon with *** Lynch, CTO at Verizon Wireless. He observes that OFDM is the common denominator among CDMA2000 1xEVDO Rev. C, GSM Long Term Evolution (LTE), and WiMAX, and believes that there may be a strong opportunity...