The week of July 2nd in My Digital Life

It has now been over a week since I changed the page pool on my T-Moblie Wing. Along with the scheduled nightly reboots via Sunnysoft's Backup Manager, the usability factor has gone up exponentially. I no longer have to worry about the amount of memory left to run things like the camera or SlingPlayer.

With all the iPhone buzz, it is interesting to note all of the functionality that is missing (gathered from ipodlounge.com iphone forum):

• No Bluetooth file transfer
• No Bluetooth A2DP support
• Music files can't be used as ringtones
• No MMS support
• No video capture
• No Java support
• Email/Internet/Passwords cannot be saved
• No third party application (no SDK available for application development)
• Recessed headphone jack won't accept standard 3.5mm headphone plug.

It is incredible that they bungled the headphone jack, well we sort of have the same problem with the Wing (mini USB headphone jack) but at least I am able to use my Bluetooth A2DP headphones. Granted this is version 1 of the product and none of these are product killers, but it does show that Apple has a long way to go before matching the functionality available in Windows Mobile 6. Bottom line, cool industrial design and iTunes does not come close to justifying a switch from Windows Mobile.

On the Bluetooth A2DP front, I have not had a skip in many hours of listening to Windows Media Player Mobile using my Motorola HT820 headphones. I finally figured out that I needed to use the USB cable for WMP 11 on Vista to recognize the Storage Card as a sync device. This is really too bad since syncing with Bluetooth is so easy. I did get WMP 11 to play unprotected AAC content from my iTunes library with the Orban AAC/aacPlus plug in. Unfortunately WMP 11 won't add native unprotected AAC content to its library. It looks like I can create playlists with AAC content which I should then be able to sync with the Wing. More testing required...

This week:

• Post my Today screen updates.
• Time to update my Wing tweaks
• Windows Media Player syncing with the Wing

Comments

[Wayne]

Hi Stephen,
Do you know if a soft reset would revert my page pool size to 12MB? I don't use the voice command capability so I decided to move it out of start up. I did a soft reset after doing that and the RAM seems to leak a bit faster. Or it could be removing voice command doesn't buy any RAM back anyway and I am now hyper sensative to watching the RAM slowly go down.

[Stephen Skarlatos]

No, a soft reset will not revert the page pool size back to 12MB, the hex editing process hard coded the page pool size in the OS.

I also had taken out the voice command .lnk but it did not seem to reduce memory usage so I put it back. I am teaching myself how to use it with my BT headset. It works quite well. Here is a link to some tutorials from MS which are very useful http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/voicecommand/tutorials.mspx

I start the day with about 10MB free and by the end of the day (with nothing active in HTC Task Manager) I am at about 7MB. At 7MB I can run the camera or SlingPlayer without any problem.

[Wayne]

Thanks. I must say, you have helped me out quite a bit. I appreciate you being willing to walk me through many of these tweaks. I have about 10MB free at start and it is about 7MB by the end of the day. I have good mobile messaging to get corporate e-mail over the air and I think that program uses up alot of RAM. When I exit that program my RAM jumps up all the way to about 16.5MB. Looks like it is quite a RAM hog. I will check out those tutorials you mention.

[Stephen Skarlatos]

Thanks for the comments, it makes my blogging much more interesting.

I am assuming you are talking about ActiveSync and Exchange? ActiveSync seems to be quite a memory hog. When you try to terminate it, it does not release all of the memory it has used. This memory leak forces us into periodically rebooting.

[Wayne]

Good mobile messaging (http://www.good.com/corp/index.php) relates to the exchange, but I don't think it is integrated with ActiveSync Pocket Outlook. It works off of it's own database, and uses it's own applications on my mobile phone (Email, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts). It limits my options with using SBSH PB. Currently I use SBSH for managing my tasks only. There are requests in the SBSH forum to have the ability for PB to recognize data in the Good apps/database, but nothing is available yet. On a different topic, I am not using MyFaves. Do you know the right way to dump anything related to MyFaves on the Wing? Also, did you remove the IM and Java Applications that came with the phone?

[Stephen Skarlatos]

You should be able to remove all the my5* and myfaves* files under \windows, as well as the my5msgcenter.lnk under \windows\startup. I would move them to your storage card temporarely to make sure there is no ill affect.

I removed all the T-Mobile apps including the IM. I use MSN messenger when I need IM. I have not use the JAVA runtime, but it is part of the ROM and cannot easily be removed.

[Wayne]

So you removed HotSpot Login and Winwap Tech Oy t-zones?

[Stephen Skarlatos]

yes.