The outage of the Blackberry service last Monday was caused by one of their recently upgraded systems failing. The loss of service affected North American customers for a few hours… and some felt as though the end of the world was nigh.

There is another way to look at this though and it is a strangely comforting thought that a simple outage for a few hours could cause so much disruption and cries of outrage on web forums and even government institutions. Without doubt, RIM’s reputation took a minor knock but it does highlight just how widespread their service is and how completely millions of people rely on it. Because of this, there is a safeguard that if the company suddenly went bankrupt tomorrow morning steps would be taken to keep the service running, and these steps would be taken at very high levels. Stock brokers, CEOs, government officials and countless other organizations would be affected and this would no doubt bring swift action from a variety of sources.

When my MS Exchange server failed a couple of weeks ago, my provider spent four days fixing it and this affected many people. The problem is that no one else noticed and why should they? If a few thousand people with accounts from an ISP lose their email for a week it will cause barely a blip. I set up a back up Googlemail account for these such times, and realised that the same outcry would happen if the Google service dropped, or the Yahoo mail service and many others from the very large corporations dominating our personal communications.

There is a shield when using the most popular services, because they can have a negative impact on the economy when they go wrong. The Blackberry outage served to highlight that and makes me more likely to use their service in the future than not.

PocketWeather (PW) 2 was released by SBSH at the end of last year. It’s taken a long time to arrive, but even at first glance it seems to be well worth the upgrade price.

I looked at PW a long time ago and while I liked it (I think) I regretted the fact that I needed to have it taking up valuable Today Screen space. While you can set it up as a tab within PocketBreeze (also from SBSH), I found that doing so meant that I never looked at the weather which rather defeated the object of having it installed.

With PW2, SBSH have now come up with the solution to my problems by integrating the two packages together. My PocketWeather forecast is now displayed within PocketBreeze on my Today screen and I’m very happy with the results. (To me, this change alone makes the update worthwhile).

I could stop the review there but that would be doing SBSH a disservice since a lot more work has been put into this new version of PocketWeather than just PocketBreeze integration. One of the reasons this update has taken so long to appear is that it appears to be (as it is claimed to be) a ground-up re-write. Many of the same features are still there, but they now look and work very differently.

As an example, on the surface PW on the Today Screen presents data much as it always has. Looking a little deeper, though, you realize that the skinning options are now enormous. PW always allowed the weather icons to be skinned but the format of the display itself was limited to a selection from a few predefined options. With the new version, the number of predefined formats has not only been massively expanded, but a configuration facility has also been introduced allowing completely bespoke screen presentations to be defined.

As well as the Today Screen display, the Weather Console has also had a massive overhaul. Weather Console is the background application that provides more details than could ever be made available on the Today Screen, allowing you to page through data for the next week rather than the 4 or 5 days presented up front (depending on the data available from your weather source). Historically, this was about the limit of what the Weather Console allowed you to do.

What you get now (where data is available) is the facility for an hourly forecast as well as the daily ones with detail of all of the weather parameters you could possibly imagine. In terms of current data one also gets a lot more information, both textual and graphical, from all the weather stations local to the locations you have configured. (Of course, this again depends on the availability of the weather data to support the formats that are presented on screen. This version of PW allows you to write your own configuration files to specify those too).

On top of that, a rather nifty facility has been added for buffering and then animating a number of versions of any of the images that PW is configured to monitor. I download the Radar precipitation map for the UK from the BBC, for example, and once I have a number of sequential images, PW allows me to animate them together. You need to try it to understand the full benefit, but suffice it to say that being able to watch the rain clouds march across the country is useful when trying to predict whether it will be raining in a couple of hours time.

In a sense, describing PocketWeather in this way doesn’t do it a lot of justice. So much of it is graphical and most of that is far too detailed to fully encompass in words. Hopefully, however, I’ve said enough to convince you to at least take a look at this, particularly if you’d previously investigated version 1.3 (which was getting very long in the tooth).

If you want weather information on your Windows Mobile PDA or phone (Professional or Standard edition) then PocketWeather is the best way I’ve seen of achieving this. Additionally, if you use PocketBreeze or Façade on your device than the integration with those packages should only enhance the PocketWeather experience.

Available as a trial from SBSH, download it here and see what you think!

SoliCall announced today the release of SoliCall Mobile - an enhanced version of its unique personalized noise reduction technology for Windows Mobile.

Too often, an important call catches you on your mobile in a bad time: whether a client just called in the middle of your lunch in a noisy restaurant; your wife can’t hear a word you’re saying calling from that crowded mall; or your boss phones you when you are driving your kids to school.

With SoliCall Mobile you will be able to customize your cell phone not just with your favorite ringtones, music and wallpapers. SoliCall Mobile offers an innovative solution, different from the ordinary solutions available on today’s mobiles. SoliCall identifies the voice of the specific speaker and reduces all other background noise.

SoliCall Mobile is targeting mainly manufacturers of mobile phones and mobile VoIP providers. Manufacturers, operators and end-users alike will enjoy its benefits: better sound quality and improved customer satisfaction; reduced power consumption which will increase battery life; and lower OPEX for the operators by reducing the required bandwidth to handle phone calls.

The SDK offered by SoliCall works on Windows Mobile and can be easily integrated as part of the audio path. Ideally the SDK should be placed in the audio path between the AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation) and the CODEC. More than a dozen leading telecommunication companies have already shown interest, among them some of the biggest mobile phone manufacturers. 

SoliCall’s technology has been commercially available on other platforms since mid 2007. “There has been a strong demand from individuals and users of SoliCall who would have liked to have this valuable feature on their mobile phones,” says Adam Moore, Director of Business Development for SoliCall (Ltd.). “With the cooperation of the manufactures, that are already running field tests, this will soon be possible. We expect that SoliCall Mobile will increase end units sales, and be especially attractive for the business community, for which the quality of the calls is in first priority.”

After 7 successful years in the market VITO Technology has so far released over 40 programs for Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Smartphone, and Symbian phones. The range of programs stretches from GPS navigation to multimedia, including communication and utilities.
 
Practically all VITO software titles - VITO AudioNotes, VITO SoundExplorer, VITO Voice2Go to name just a few - have become winners of the annual Best Software Awards held by Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine. You can find all these prize winning best sellers at www.vitotechnology.com and www.iwindowsmobile.com AVAILABLE JUST FOR $7* FOR 7 days. We celebrate our birthday by offering you the best of the breed mobile software for Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone that give you truly boundless opportunities with your mobile device.

You can use VITO Technology software for GPS navigation, for voice dialing, for controlling your device with voice, for audio playback and recording, for remote controlling, for creating ringtones, for various sports activities, for star gazing, not enough? The brand-new sparkling software at iwindowsmobile.com allows you to control your device just with fingers: scroll list of contacts in FunContact like on iPhone, indulge yourself in threaded SMS messaging with SMS-Chat, type with fingers on ZoomBoard, launch and manage tasks with finger-friendly GoodWin, and even more...

Make sure you get your slice of VITO's 7th Birthday Cake - $7* for 7 days only at www.iwindowsmobile.com and www.vitotechnology.com!

How to prolong lithium-based batteries is an old article but still relevant today- "Battery research is focusing heavily on lithium chemistries, so much so that one could presume that all portable devices will be powered with lithium-ion batteries in the future. In many ways, lithium-ion is superior to nickel and lead-based chemistries and the applications for lithium-ion batteries are growing as a result.

Lithium-ion has not yet fully matured and is being improved continuously. New metal and chemical combinations are being tried every six months to increase energy density and prolong service life. The improvements in longevity after each change will not be known for a few years.

A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles. The battery prefers a partial rather than a full discharge. Frequent full discharges should be avoided when possible. Instead, charge the battery more often or use a larger battery. There is no concern of memory when applying unscheduled charges.

Although lithium-ion is memory-free in terms of performance deterioration, batteries with fuel gauges exhibit what engineers refer to as "digital memory". Here is the reason: Short discharges with subsequent recharges do not provide the periodic calibration needed to synchronize the fuel gauge with the battery's state-of-charge. A deliberate full discharge and recharge every 30 charges corrects this problem. Letting the battery run down to the cut-off point in the equipment will do this. If ignored, the fuel gauge will become increasingly less accurate. (Read more in 'Choosing the right battery for portable computing', Part Two.)"

2 phones for everyone— if industry can't get its act together is a superb new article at ars technica- "It's not enough for everyone on earth to have a single mobile phone—Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser thinks that everyone will eventually have at least two. Glaser spoke at this week's Mobile World Congress Conference in Barcelona, insisting that it wasn't possible for a "do everything, no compromise" device to exist and serve people's every mobile need.

Glaser explained that his belief was fueled by differences in input methods, size, and functionality between devices. No single phone can do everything easily, he said, which is why the public will be driven to carry multiple devices. "Mobile penetration won't stop at 100 percent," he told the crowd. "It will go to 200 percent because the notion of a single device that does it all isn't the way (the market is) going to go."

Do most people really need two phones? Yes, the mobile landscape isn't perfect, even with the continued introduction of increasingly capable devices. And it's true that there are some people who do already carry around more than one mobile device because they need different functionalities from each one, but those people are still a minority..." Thanks to Luca.

Today's free eBook is Show of Hands by David Prill- "It was a fair, moonless August night, and in a farm field in southern Minnesota a bonfire blazed steadily. Apart from a handful of fireflies engaged in a courtship dance in the garden, all else was dark, you couldn’t make out County Road 249 or St. John’s steeple or even much of the corn and bean fields. All you could see were the bonfire lights, dotting the countryside, along the railroad tracks. There were bonfires, rustic pyres, spanning the entire township.

It was an event, a ritual, the coming of the circus train, an unforgettable show, only the show didn’t stop here. They usually didn’t stop at all, just slowed down long enough for the performers to wave and give something back to the farmers who left their white farm houses with their women inside, who had gathered by their bonfires to see something out of the ordinary.

The town of Goatfield was too small for the circus train to stop and give a performance. This circus was too high class.

Elton Hudnall remembered a circus of lesser renown that had visited Goatfield once, setting up tents in Misery Field on the edge of town. The ringmaster looked like a fella Elton had seen on the post office wall. The tiger wore a shabby coat, and the elephant paced anxiously, one giant foot chained to..."