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In watching a video of Horace Luke from HTC talk about the Touch Diamond, he revealed three interesting things bits:

1. By utilizing the phone's accelerometer, if you flip over the phone when a call comes in, the ringer will mute. Imagine having your device out on a table while at a meeting, and you see a call come in. This is an elegant way to silence the ringer.
2. The stylus is held in place with a magnet. When you remove the stylus while in a call, the phone will automatically launch the notes application.
3. The Diamond was designed to be a haptic-feedback phone, meaning that the user would feel a vibration with every touch. The reason they pulled the idea, according to Horace Luke, was because "it just sucked."

"SMS-Chat is a Windows Mobile SMS messenger that organizes your SMS correspondence into threaded SMS conversations. This way you have a separate chat for every contact with whom you exchange short text messages. You can easily follow a conversation scrolling thru chats with a finger: all messages are grouped by date. Manage your mobile texting with a flick of a finger!"

It is a good thing third party developers come up with applications that should be built into our devices to begin with. Oh I forgot, WM 6.1 will have threaded SMS when it arrives in 2025. The good news is you don't have to wait that long because Vito has come up with an interim solution. This one looks pretty good.

"An intelligent personalized agent monitors, regulates, and advises a user in decision-making processes for efficiency or safety concerns. The agent monitors an environment and present characteristics of a user and analyzes such information in view of stored preferences specific to one of multiple profiles of the user. Based on the analysis, the agent can suggest or automatically implement a solution to a given issue or problem. In addition, the agent can identify another potential issue that requires attention and suggests or implements action accordingly. Furthermore, the agent can communicate with other users or devices by providing and acquiring information to assist in future decisions. All aspects of environment observation, decision assistance, and external communication can be flexibly limited or allowed as desired by the user."

This sounds interesting at first glance, but also a little creepy. Look at a few other examples of what this service would be capable of doing:

• Not only does the guardian angel 140 monitor an environment, but also a user (e.g., heartbeat, body temperature, mood, etc.). In other words, as the guardian angel 140 is focusing on its main goal of, for instance, detecting users with a disease (e.g., as evidenced by, among other symptoms, a high body temperature) and precluding those users from entering a restricted area, the guardian angel may be informed of other supplemental issues that may or may not be directly related to the main task.
• In another example, while monitoring a user's environment for weather and traffic, the guardian angel 140 can suddenly notice that the user's heartbeat has stopped and therefore takes automatic action to call for help.
• The user can initially load and return to update his/her schedule and list of preferred dry cleaning services, restaurants, stores, etc. as well as corresponding contact phone numbers, addresses, menus, and ratings. As the user travels through a new environment, the user-attribute store 130 is continually updated with data relating to the new environment that will likely apply to his/her preferences. The information in the user-attribute store 130 may be supplemented, deleted, and modified at any time by multiple parties, but the owner (user) of the user-attribute store 130 can limit access to certain areas or times (e.g., modification by another source is authorized to update a restaurant phone number, but not authorized to change the user's schedule).

I'm not so sure I'd be terribly keen on having my device capable of some of those functions. Why am I posting this here? Because Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are among the patent holders. The patent was filed April 3, 2008. I'm sure it will have a catchy name like Windows Live OneCare Life Guardian.NET.

With full page rendering and a quick and easy way to zoom in and out of web content, the iPhone Safari browser has made for a great mobile web browsing experience. The newest addition to the browser wars for Windows Mobile Makyama's TouchBrowser. This application was introduced on April 15th and promises iPhone-like web browsing. Is this the browser we have all been looking for? Read on to find out!

The Good

First Dual-Mode CDMA & GSM Windows Mobile phone

iPhone-like flick scrolling

Three on screen keyboard format options

The Bad

Only supports 900/1800 GSM bands

No GPS

No WiFi

For the geeky amongst us, you may be interested to know that the HTC Touch Diamond has now popped up at the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is a US agency charged with regulating communications in or originating in the USA. This document shows that the US launch is obviously on track.

However, we've spotted quite a few stories about the iPhone of late. Many have compared the new Touch Diamond with the iPhone and it's rather strange to see that supplies of the Apple device are vanishing across the UK and now the USA. It's showing as "currently unavailable" on the Apple store in America and across the o2 and Carphone Warehouse here in the UK. There's no 8Gb version and no 16Gb version available. Hmmm... What's going on? Well, many are suggesting that the 3G version is just around the corner but, with supplies now completely running dry, it's a little strange that the 3G version hasn't already appeared. Some are suggesting that the availability of the new handset may be still a few weeks away, which could give the HTC Touch Diamond a rather convenient window of opportunity.

We now have 50 images from the launch event online. You can see the new on-screen keyboard, volume control and me browsing a rather excellent website on it. We've also been tweaking the design of coolsmartphone.com today to make things simpler and more readable. A new font has been introduced and a lot of the duplicated menu items have been removed.

Links - FCC.gov - HTC Touch Diamond Images

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[image courtesy of digitalmediaphile]

Because of the server move we had to do last night and this morning, things are a bit back-logged on me getting the 31 Days of the Dragon contest up on Digital Home Thoughts. It will happen today for sure, but it won't kick off until tonight - sorry about that! Watch for it. In the meantime, here's an updated list on some of the contests that are still going on, and some that are ending very soon:

• www.arstechnica.com (ends today)
  
• www.osnn.net (ends tomorrow)
• www.jkontherun.com
• digitalmediaphile
• Boston Pocket PC
• The Gadgeteer
• The Digital Lifestyle.com

We're hearing more news on Windows Mobile 6.1 for existing devices. According to some emails we've received, Orange will be rolling out a 6.1 update for the HTC TyTN II mid-May, so we should see it pop up sometime next week.

Keep checking the TyTN II support section at Orange, and if we don't spot it ourselves, please do let us know if you see it!

Link - TyTN II @ orange.co.uk

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Recently while at the MVP Summit, I attended a session on Microsoft's new System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM) product. This piece of software, when set up and running, allows IT administrators to lock down many of the functions in Windows Mobile as well as deploy applications similar to the way admins do it on the desktop. I downloaded a version of the software, and while my test environment caused me more headaches than joyous occassions, the product does look like it has substantial promise. But that's not the point of this piece - I'm more interested in the strategy of mobile device administration that it allows corporations to utilize, and concerned that it may tempt companies to adopt a rollout strategy that may not be appropriate for Windows Mobile.

If you're the IT Executive of a company and you wake up one morning thinking "I want all my users to be able to use a Windows Mobile device", you have two options. First, you could get budget approval for training, implementation, and deployment of company-purchased devices (perhaps eventually shifting the cost to the user, but most likely the company will spend a considerable chunk of change on the actual devices). This would also require your IT department to receive devices in bulk, and configure them in bulk (This is where many other company's managment suites come into play, as installed agents put on devices before users ever receive them from IT).

Of course you could go another route - the route popularized by RIM. In this route, your users learn about a great new device they can use to get their work e-mail and such at home, called a Blackberry. They go to their cell phone company see Blackberries displayed in the store. User buys device, user contacts their IT department and receives enrollment instructions. User plugs in enrollment values, device downloads settings from IT's servers, and device is configured.

Obviously the second model shifts much of the physical handling of the device to the end user, and this is the model SCMDM fits: Give the user an enrollment password and let them set it up. This model shifts the IT department from an active role in deployment to a passive one - a good thing as far as enterprise adoption is concerned, right? Well maybe not quite - because the model also depends on users taking the first step: namely knowing about and buying the device.

Since Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft has focused many resources (Some say too many) on enterprise functionality, with SCMDM being the latest offering. But if you want your device to be successful in the enterprise, is it a good idea to shift responsibility for buying the device to the user? Especially since Windows Mobile has yet to reach the name recognition of Blackberry. It just concerns me that while SCMDM is a great tool for enterprises, it may cause them to put the responsibility of buying a device on their users, which may in turn actually hurt Windows Mobile adoption in enterprise environments. This is really bad for Windows Mobile as a platform, as it prides itself on its budding enterprise support. But if users never buy the devices, they can't be used in the enterprise!

What do you think - is the model of "user buys device" going to help or hurt Windows Mobile, with special attention to enterprise adoption of the platform (and perhaps enterprise conversion from Blackberry to WM).

PDAmill's award-winning snails are back to unleash a world of pain once more. Snails Reloaded promises new and improved eye- and ear-candy, enhanced performance, three different races, fifteen unique levels, twenty-five destructive weapons, and three playing modes. If you're a huge fan of turn-based artillery games such as Worms, Scorched Earth, and Gorillas, then you'll definitely want to check this one out. A version for Classic/Professional (Pocket PC) users is available now for $14.95. A version for Standard (Smartphone) users is on its way.

We've just received the Orange press release for the HTC Touch Diamond. Like the T-Mobile variant, it'll be arriving in July, so it's looking like HTC will be selling these in June - a few weeks before the networks. The Orange branding has been carefully weaved into the handset and many Orange services will be added into the Diamond. Orange TV, Downloads, Music and Photo applications will be available to give you access to games, ringtones, wallpapers, tunes and HDTV... for a price.

We'll be keeping an eye on the suggested plans for the Orange version, and will let you know if Orange have anything up their slieve to let people browse the net without worrying about the measly 30Mb data cap on the "Anytime Browsing" tariffs.

Read on for the full press release and larger image.

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