I will be going for my honeymoon next week and I’ve done a lot of research to prepare myself so that I won’t get really lost or waste a lot precious time when I am traveling in Europe with my wife. I will be bringing my Garmin Nuvi GPS along with me so that I know where is my current location. The Point of Interest feature in my GPS is also very helpful in finding nearby hotels, restaurants and etc. Another important gadget that will guide me along the way is my newly bought HTC Touch 3G PDA. At first I wanted to buy a simple and cheap Nokia phone but it lacks of third party software, so I went for a PDA instead. It’s running on Windows Mobile 6.1 and there are tons of software for it.

I know that most Europeans travel around Europe using trains and subways. I don’t want to go there then only learn about it so I looked for a software that can maybe help me find my way in public transport systems in Europe and I found MetrO.
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Every Windows Vista and the upcoming Windows 7 comes with .NET Framework preinstalled. I just got to know that even Windows Mobile has its own version of .NET called .NET Compact Framework which is designed to run on Windows CE based mobile such as PDA. It uses some of the same class libraries as the full .NET Framework and also a few libraries designed specifically for mobile devices. However, the libraries are not exact copies of the .NET Framework. The ones in the .NET Compact Framework are scaled down to take up less space.

Whether to have .NET Compact Framework or later versions installed on your Windows Mobile very much depends on whether you have run any third party software that requires it. I have a Garmin Nuvi GPS that can help me to locate places when I will be in Europe next month but one thing I don’t like about Garmin Nuvi is I had to type the exact spelling to search for the place. Unlike Google Maps, there are suggestions if I spelled it wrongly. There is an official Google Maps software for mobile but it requires GPRS to download the maps real time and it cannot work with wi-fi. After searching, I found a software called Google Navigator which can download street data and use it offline.
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I bought a Nokia N82 mobile phone on December 2007 for my wife as a Christmas present. It was newly released at that time and comes with a 5 megapixel camera. As usual, when we buy something that is so new in the market, it tends to be buggy. Just like when a new version of Windows is newly released, there are lots of problems and the end users will have to wait for hotfixes and service packs to make the system more stable. Many years back when I want to update the firmware of the Nokia phone, I’ll have to bring it to a Nokia service center and get them to do it. Now, Nokia allows us, the end-users to update the device firmware via Software Updater from our computer.

The benefits of updating the Nokia device firmware include getting new features, applications, and performance improvements to your device. Before updating the device’s firmware, it is advisable to make a full backup of the phone first in case something goes wrong with the update and you can still restore back your contact, calendar, text messages and settings.
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That’s right! Sounds impossible eh? It’s like running a Linux application on Windows! With the help of an emulator called StyleTap, you can now run Palm applications on your Pocket PC or Smartphone. StyleTap used to only support running Palm applications on Pocket PC but until recently, they’ve released a beta version of StyleTap that is able to run Palm applications on Windows Mobile Smartphone.

There are still some programs that won’t work, and Styletap only supports resolutions up to 320 x 320 pixels, so you’re out of luck if if you have a VGA Windows Mobile device, or if you want to emulate a Palm program that runs at 480 x 320.
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ActiveSync… that wonderful Microsoft program for synchronizing data between your PDA and PC. It loads itself automatically, syncs your PDA with your PC, then sits there, patiently waiting to synchronize any piece of data that you change. What if I only need to charge my PDA but not synchronize my data? It means ActiveSync is sitting around in memory using up valuable resources. Even more annoying is the fact that if you try to remove the registry entry that automatically loads ActiveSync, it very kindly adds it again (as long as it’s running) meaning it always stays open. So I need to kill off wcescomm.exe process from Windows Task Manager if I don’t want to sync my data.

Here’s an easier alternative method on how to disable ActiveSync from synchronizing.
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I remembered sometime last year I was on a Europe trip and needed to check my Gmail once in a while using my O2 XDA IIi PDA.
The PDA screen is too small to be using the normal Gmail web interface. So I searched around and found Gmail Lite. It’s open source, and to be honest, it’s quite problematic.
Gmail is still in beta and is always in constant revision. So there will be updates here and there and resulting Gmail Lite unable to use until the author or someone fix it to be compatible.

Now, Gmail has finally came out with their own Gmail mobile which you can use your browser on your PDA or mobile to check your Gmail if you have wireless internet access.

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Surprisingly found by Arne from the::unwired, but it appears impossible to create a Microsoft Passport account for an existing e-mail address using a Pocket PC.

Normally, you should think, that a company like Microsoft is offering highly integrated services and normally they do if you take the integration of Windows Mobile into the PC and server environment with all the sync functionalities, etc but now imagine you bought a new Windows Mobile Pocket PC, you would like to start using MSN Messenger the first time and a friend tells you, that you need a Microsoft Passport account. Not a big deal at all, since you have the Internet in your pocket and you should be able to easily create such an account right from your Pocket PC. Ok, so far the theory.
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