Category: Hardware

In the market for a mobile phone? PC Magazine has several articles to help guide your decision. I recommend consulting multiple reviews before making a decision, but these will at least provide some context and they’re aimed at a relatively non-technical audience.

Smartphones for global travel
First crop of Windows Mobile 6 phones
Mobile phones recommended for small [...]

I recently switched to a VoIP service (much more on that later) that can send me my voicemail as e-mail. Cool. But when I try to open them on my Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC, all I get is this error:
“Cannot play back the audio stream: the audio format is not supported.”
A fuller explanation of this [...]

Suppose Joe leaves the company and is replaced by Jane. Joe had a company-owned Pocket PC that Jane will now use. What do you do?
You wouldn’t think this would be so much of a challenge, but the steps are actually hidden pretty well. The answer was posted at Experts Exchange. Scroll all the way to [...]

Linux fans, say what you will about Microsoft’s recent follies with regard to Daylight Savings Time, but at least they acknowledge that DST exists. Today I was configuring a Linux-based NAS device. To get it to work properly on my network, I had to make sure that its clock was synchronized with my server. It [...]

I know Apple gets high marks for style and ergonomics in some quarters, but today I had a Nano freeze on me and I had no bloomin’ idea how to turn it off and on again. Where the hell is the reset button? How do I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete? I tried all the button combinations I [...]

If you’re trying to set the permissions on a Buffalo Technology LinkStation network attached storage device, here’s something to keep in mind:
[Automatic User Registration]Select this to register any user permitted by authentication server to authentication user list of the LinkStation automatically.Example:By unabling the automatic aquirement after acquiring some users by the automatic registration for a [...]

Things had been looking up for my Exchange mailbox rebuild, but they got really bad again the first time my Pocket PC tried a wireless sync. All of my contacts, which had just been imported back into Exchange from the .pst file I’d created, were seen as new entries by my phone. So it synched for [...]

ActiveSync 4.5 for Windows Mobile devices is now out of beta. According to Pocket PC Mauritius, it’s a “minor upgrade.” I agree. It certainly didn’t stop me from getting occasional error messages about an unrecognized USB device when I cradle my phone. The biggest change I’ve noticed so far is a jazzed-up version of the [...]

Fascinating article in the Windows Mobile blog about how hard it is to get a device with a very small keypad to dial a number like 1-800-FLOWERS. It reminds me of my own experience with my previous PDA phone, a Blackberry 7250. (See the article titled “ABC, Not as Easy as 222.”)

All of a sudden, my Verizon XV6700 Pocket PC Phone stopped synchronizing with my PC via the USB cradle. I’d had this problem before (twice, actually), so I figured that after the right combination of PC restarts and phone soft resets all would be well again. But not this time. I ran through the ActiveSync [...]