New Phone

I got an Audiovox XV6600 PDA with cell phone capabilities. In order to make it generally useful as a phone I also have a Jabra BT350 Bluetooth headset. So far, things seem fine, though I miss the voice recognition on my old Motorola T720 phone.

Part of the reason for going with this was to give me a good personal reason to learn programming for the Pocket PC, since Pocket PCs are what are being used by Diane for recording sound on sage grouse leks during the field season (mid-February to April) in Wyoming. It looks like it will be a steep learning curve. I have downloaded about half a gig of stuff from Microsoft to get set up for this.

If anyone out there has some pointers for getting started with Pocket PC programming, let me know. I was thinking that maybe I should make a Pocket PC version of the “Finite Improbability Calculator” as a beginner’s project.

I also have (perhaps just for this month) Internet access through the phone, which has me looking at web pages in a new way. It turns out that my pages for austringer.net and this weblog show up pretty nicely on the PDA, while some others could use some work, including Panda’s Thumb. It also made clear that Squirrelmail is almost unusable on a PDA as it comes out of the box, but someone has already figured out how to turn it into “Squirrelmail Lite”. Frames really are evil, and PDA users would agree wholeheartedly.