Panoramic moTweets is certainly a good piece of software for Windows Mobile, but there is better out there and it costs less. If you head to the Marketplace on your device you can download the wonderful Twitter client TouchTwit for the princely sum of £1.69. This is a real bargain for such a quality piece of software. It has all the features one would hope for in a Twitter client (such as: URL shortening, posting images to TwitPic, Geotagging (with links to Google Maps), follow and unfollow other Twitters, @reply, re-Tweets and direct messages, posting video, Twitter searching, deleting Tweets, blocking users, support for multiple Twitter accounts and much, much more).

So why choose this over moTweets? After all, they both have a pretty similar set of features. Firstly, it is cheaper, which is a good enough reason by itself. Secondly, TouchTwit has a much faster and generally more slick user experience. It is filled with useful little features like swiping your finger from left to right to page between views and give you more options about what you want to do with a Tweet. Finally, the design of the user interface itself is far more pleasing and less clumsy than moTweets, it looks like a piece of software that has been touched by a skilled designer.

Here are some screenshots to give you an idea about how good it looks:

 

This is clearly a very well-designed and smart piece of software, all the more impressive that it has been written by two 22 year olds; well done those chaps! If you want to Tweet on your Windows Mobile device then clients do not get much better, or much cheaper, than TouchTwit.

I’ve mentioned one method of always showing a battery meter on the Windows Mobile taskbar, but I’ve found a better way of achieving this.

There is a piece of free software called BattClock, which you can get here, that allows you to always show not only a percentage battery meter in your taskbar all of the time, but you can also show your choice of a clock, the date or the amount/percentage of free memory in addition to this. My taskbar now shows the time, date and battery meter as you can see below:

One thing that I did have to do was slightly increase the width of what BattClock displays, as a couple of pixels from the Windows Mobile standard clock were visible poking out from the right of the BattClock information. This is really easy to achieve as the program has a configuration application (the icon in the Programs folder called battconfig) which allows you to change not only the size, location and colours its output, but also what information it does display.

I am very pleased with this bit of software. When I next get some cash I will certainly be donating some to the author.

You have to fiddle with your device’s registry to do this, so if you are a bit nervous about that you may want to stop reading now.

In a registry editor (I use Resco File Explorer’s registry editor plug-in) go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shell\TaskBar and change both values to 1. This will make the battery icon always visible. You’ll need to restart your device for the registry change to take effect.

Unfortunately, the battery icon in Windows Mobile 6.5 is ugly and uninformative, so I suggest you install a better one. The best battery icon I’ve seen comes from the Misfortune Taskbar, but the complete installation of that does not work on WM6.5. However, if you go here you can get just the battery icon and it does work. As the instructions there say, install SDKcerts.cab (there is a link to it on that page) then download and install the Ahen 6a taskbar. Restart your device and you’ll have a much better looking and useful battery icon.

I played with something really clever today: called Swype it is a clever take on solving the problem of typing on a small screen. Rather than poke  around typing each character of a word individually, you drag your finger across the onscreen keys so your finger crosses each character. The software is clever enough to work out what word you have ‘Swyped’. This may sound a bit difficult and contrived, but I loved playing about with it, it is a fast and intelligent system for writing words quickly on a small screen. Perhaps it is not so surprising that this software is so neat as it was invented by the same chap who invented the T9 text entry system for mobiles. You can view videos of how it works on the Swype website.

Sadly, Swipe Inc currently only sell their software direct to mobile phone manufacturers, the Samsung Omnia II being the phone I tried it in. This means, alas, you cannot just download a copy, or even pay for one at the moment. Some people have extracted the installation file from an Omnia II and distributed it on dodgy sites, but you shouldn’t be searching for or downloading such dubious stuff. If you want this brilliant software for your touch screen phone I suggest you do as I am going to and email Swype saying you want them to sell their brilliant software direct.

I updated the firmware in my TG01 so it now has Windows Mobile 6.5. I care little for most of the UI improvements as I use SPB Mobile Shell which provides the perfect smartphone UI. What has pleased me no end is that the update fixed a piece of TG01 flakiness: the reliability of bluetooth connections. I’ve read reports of this from other people. It would often take many attempts to re-connect a bluetooth device after disconnection and you could be fiddling about for a while getting it to recognise your headset again. This fix has resulted in me blogging on the TG01 when I am out and about using a fold-up bluetooth keyboard. That excellent boozer The Greenwich Union has free Wifi and I have been reporting on the beers live from the pub.

The other mobile thing that has tickled my fancy is the new beta version of Opera Mobile that is out, Opera Mobile 10. It is hilariously fast, in terms of downloading content and also panning and zooming about on pages. It is a very mature browsing platform and you do not feel limited by browsing on a phone.

If you are using a Windows Mobile phone that has a turn of speed to it (in terms of having OpenGL ES accelerated graphics) I’ve been playing two free 3D games which look just wonderful. Experiment 13 is a entertaining 3D puzzle game that has you warping gravity in order to save your avatar from the world he finds himself in. The Electopia demo doesn’t have the greatest control system in the world, but it is another looker of a 3D game. My long-time reader will know I like Xtrakt, a 3D shooty/racing kind of game. There is a lot of fun to be had with these new whizzy phones and mine certainly eats into the reading time.

As I’ve mentioned, I generally use Opera Mobile 9.7 as the browser on my Toshiba TG01 Windows Phone. It is a really fast and transparently simple browser. The beta version of this that is on the Opera website does not work with the TG01, but if you go here you can download a more recent build that will work.

I like Opera Mobile so much I’ve been thinking for a while about trying the desktop version. Last night I downloaded and installed the 10.10 Beta and so far I am quite pleased with it. It supports ad blocking ‘out of the box’, has a spellchecker, will sync bookmarks across computers and comes with Opera Unite.

Opera Unite is a built-in file and web server in the browser. System administrators’ hair is probably curling at this point with horror about how insecure this is, but it seems quite handy to me. You can share your media files as well, which is quite nifty, so you can have your music collection anywhere you can connect to the internet.

So, do I have any general views on the best browser I’ve used? Much as I like Microsoft software, I only use IE8 in compatibility mode to connect to sites that code against the IE6 ‘standard’. I’ve been pretty happy with Firefox as a general browser, but as to whether Opera 10.10 is better I cannot yet say. I’ve set Opera to be my default browser and I’ll play with it for a few weeks.

The first beta release of Opera Mobile 9.7 did not work on the Toshiba TG01, it had a lot of screen corruption. This lead me to try out other browsers and whilst I was pretty pleased with Netfront I had preferred the browsing experience using Opera Mobile.

Consequently, I am very pleased to report that a new build of Opera Mobile 9.7 is in the wild which works just fine on the TG01. You can get it here. It is very fast, looks good and works! Hooray! If you are responsible enough to change settings in your TG01’s registry I’d suggest you change the key ‘HKLM\Software\Opera\Prefs\Adaptive Zoom\Default zoom’ to 100. Doing this sets the default zoom to a level which looks good on the TG01’s screen*.

I think I would be serving my noble reader poorly if I did not mention that it is possible to install a full Flash Player v9.x on this version of Opera Mobile. Check out the instructions here.

*Edit: You don’t have to fiddle about with the registry to change this. If you type the url opera:config into the address bar you can change the default zoom level under the ‘Adaptive zoom’ tab to whatever you fancy.

I’ve spent much time playing with different web browsers on my TG01 (and the Xperia X1 before it) and, if I may, I’ll share some thoughts about them with you.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 was very good on the Xperia: fast, responsive and very good at rendering pages. Then I upgraded to the TG01 and found that there was a lot of screen corruption. I had to down-grade to Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. Unsurprisingly, Opera don’t have this on their website any more as it is an old version, so if you need it you’ll have to search for a torrent. The good thing about using 9.5 is it implements the ad-blocking urlfilter.ini which I have mentioned before. The irritating thing about this version is it uses the standard Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard by default and it is rather slow to change the keyboard each time you need to type something.

The other browser I regularly used on the Xperia was Iris 1.1.9. This is also no longer available for download as the maker has been purchased by a non-Windows Mobile friendly company. You can still find it on some download sites and there must be a torrent somewhere. I use Iris almost exclusively for viewing Google Reader. Iris pretends to be Safari on an iPhone (they both use the Webkit engine to render pages) so you get the good iPhone layout for Reader which works best on a mobile device.

I am a recent convert to the Netfront v3.5 brower for Windows Mobile Concept Version. The first thing you have to do when you install this is change the default font, the one it uses ‘out of the box’ is awful, but once you’ve done that you’ll find it is a fast, good-looking, capable browser which just zips along on the TG01.

Finally, after much fiddling about with other browsers for Windows Mobile I have, for the first time in a while, installed a non-IE browser on my desktop: Firefox 3.5 to be precise. The UI looks good and seems easy enough to get to grips with. Much as I like the ad-blocking feature of Opera Mobile I also love the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. I’ll still use IE8 with some sites, but for the moment Firefox seems perfectly useful.

I am so pleased with the new phone that I feel safe selling my old Xperia X1; the TG01 is serving me well.

It is slightly annoying that Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 has loads of display corruption on it. It is a real shame as it would be super snappy and quick on this phone. Because Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1 is rubbish (even if it does have Flash support in this version) I have installed Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. If you want this it is best to go looking on torrent sites, obviously Opera are not providing what is an old version of their browser for people to download. I occasionally load up the Iris 1.1.9 browser, for no other reason than to see if it makes a difference. It generally doesn’t, but it strikes me that Opera is a bit faster. Skyfire is crap.

The other thing that I decided was too rubbish to live with was the ‘rotating blinds’ UI that ships with the TG01; it is total toss. So I have purchased and installed SPB Mobile Shell, a great finger-friendly UI which keeps you generally away from the base OS. Not that I have any real problem with the base OS, but as I’ve probably mentioned I really like Windows Mobile.

I am surprised how well I am getting on with the virtual keyboard and generally not using a stylus. I have tried to connect the Bluetooth keyboard, and it works, but I don’t feel I need it as the virtual keyboard seems good enough. It is perhaps an obvious solution to the finger-unfriendliness of Windows Mobile 6.1 that if you have a larger display all of the widgets will be bigger and so easier to hit with your fingertips. The display itself is totally wonderful. After having a 3” display on the Xperia the 4.1” screen on the TG01 (although they are both of the same resolution) is a treat for the eyes. Games look fantastic on this screen.

So, I await the next release of Opera Mobile and fritter away the time until then playing Need for Speed on this very speedy phone.

I couldn’t resist it in the end and got the Toshiba TG01. So far I am very pleased with it. The screen is amazing and it is super snappy with its 1GHz processor. The on-screen keyboard seems easy enough to use. If I have any vaguely interesting thoughts about it I shall post them.

As my regular reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I am tempted to buy a new one, the Toshiba TG01. There are a few things that tickle my fancy about this phone: a 4.1inch 800x480 screen, a 1GHz CPU, a whizzy GPU and an accelerometer plus all of the other features of my current Xperia X1. However, it does not have a keyboard, it has an onscreen one.

The partner has constantly been going on and on to me about how I should be buying an iPhone as he likes his so much. One of the reasons I’ve given is that I don’t like onscreen keyboards. I also think the screen on the iPhone has a pretty ropey resolution. When I had my Nokia N800 internet tablet the first accessory I got for it was a Bluetooth keyboard. I briefly had an HTC Touch Diamond and didn’t really like it as it had an onscreen keyboard and even the larger one it came with that was designed for its high resolution display was poor.

Before all of these I had an i-mate Jasjar (a rebranding of the HTC Universal). OK, it was a brick, but I loved its high resolution display and its keyboard. Why did I stop using it? Because I knackered it installing custom ROMs. Ah well…

So has technology moved on far enough for onscreen keyboards to be useful? Some people think so, maybe I should give them another try. One of the good things about the TG01 is that it has USB host capabilities and Bluetooth so if I really want to type a lot I can attach a keyboard.

One of the things that strikes me about phones like the TG01, and I would include the iPhone in that list, is that they are mature, convergent devices. They are phones, media players, gaming devices, internet tablets, navigation tools, cameras, PIMs and work tools. Little, connected computers in your pocket, basically. Speaking as a superannuated toddler I remember when such things were science fiction.

For the past week or so I’ve been playing a lot of K-Rally from Infinite Dreams. This game is very much like Supercars I played on the Amiga (or Battlecars on the Sinclair Spectrum, come to that) only with better graphics. It is a 3D racing game viewed from above in which you can drive as dirty as you like and are armed with missiles and mines. Brilliant mayhem fun. It has several play modes and you can build up a character along with way with enhanced cars. It is hard enough to be a challenge, but not made impossibly difficult. What is fun is that you can have it loaded within 10 seconds of activating your device, race for a minute, then quit the game with your progress intact.

A few days after updating the ROM on my totally brilliant Xperia X1 they released a new version (known as R3A). Bugger. I couldn’t be bothered to install all of my applications again. Therefore I was very pleased to see that someone had extracted the main update in the ROM, the camera software, and made it available as a .cab file one can install on phones with a previous version. The new camera software allows the flash to be controlled automatically and you can geo-tag your pictures. I found after installing the .cab file, (which is here) I had to restart my phone twice before I could set the camera options successfully.

I’ve been fine tuning my Xperia so it behaves and looks just as I wish. This is why I am not really interested in getting a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, mine purrs for me. One of the things I thought might be fun to change is the taskbar icons. Turns out this is easy to do.

The first thing you need to install on the Xperia is SDKcerts.cab. Then, so the battery meter can display in 1% increments, you install this battery driver. Finally you need to install some icon files. The set I recommend vigorously is the Misfortune Taskbar v2.0. I like the battery meter especially. I thought this icon set was so good I made a donation.

A few websites are showing the follow-up phone to my Xperia X1. The bigger display and keyboard look an improvement over my X1, but how tempted am I really? I hate to sound like a bit of a luddite but I am not sure I would instantly upgrade. I’ve got my X1 set up just perfectly, it does everything I ask of it in a manner that I find pleasing. Windows Mobile 6.1 works just fine for me whereas I feel 6.5, with its supposedly improved finger-friendly interface, might change the user interface experience to something I find less to my liking. I’ll have to have a look at one when they are out, but I think I’ll stick with mine.

I was so impressed with Opera Mobile 9.5 on my previous and current mobile phone that I’ve been tempted to download the desktop version. I was very pleased when the beta of Opera Mobile 9.7 was released for download a couple of days ago as it promised some good new features. Here are my thoughts.

The big thing that Opera are raving about is Opera Turbo; this is server side compression of webpages to speed up transmission of them to phones with low speed connections. That ‘low speed connections’ qualifier is very important, as Opera state it will not make much difference on WiFi/3G/3.5G connections. How many people really surf the web on GPRS/EDGE these days? Everyone I know has a 3G phone and WiFi hotspots are fairly easy to find. At best this feature seems somewhat trivial.

At worst, it is a bad thing. In the beta you cannot download files if Opera Turbo is enabled. This seems somewhat crap if you ask me.

The only other thing that really vexes about the beta is that there is no support for the ad blocking urlfilter.ini file I mentioned a few days ago. I hope this feature is added in soon.

There are a couple of features I really like. Firstly it is very fast, both at downloading and rendering pages. The latter in particular is quick because the browser uses hardware graphics acceleration if you have a compatible phone. Zooming and panning a webpage is super speedy.

Secondly, the rendering engine, Presto 2.2, is extremely standards compliant. It scores 100% in the Acid 3 test which means it should be displaying webpages properly with no non-standard glitches.

It also has good AJAX support and the pages it renders look so good any Skyfire user will be green with envy. I am pretty pleased with it and have set it to be the default browser on my phone. All I hope is that they get ad blocking implemented once more.

I was in bed playing a game on my Xperia earlier and someone texted me to ask about a philosophical term. I'd never heard of it. Rather than head to the bookshelves or desktop, because I was most comfortable in bed, I decided to use my phone.

I copied the name of the term, loaded Opera and pasted it into the search box. The wikipedia entry came up which I read. It mentioned a few books on the subject, which I looked up on Amazon, again using my phone. I then replied to the text message with a brief summary of what I had read and the name and price of the best book on the subject. All of this on a phone whilst laying around in bed. Modern technology is brilliant.

So, naturally, I am writing this blog post from bed on my Xperia just because it amuses me to do so. Lots of things amuse me...

One of the things I really like about Firefox is the Adblocker plugin. Such a thing would be even more useful for a browser on a mobile phone as it would reduce the amount of time taken to download web pages on a limited connection and save some of that precious data transfer usage on your data plan. A bit of digging has resulted in me finding such a solution for Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Xperia X1. Best of all is dead easy to achieve.

First of all, download this file (urlfilter.ini). Then, using ActiveSync or Mobile Device Centre, copy the file to the My Device\Application Data\Opera9\ directory on your Xperia. And that, as they say, is that! When you start Opera next time and visit an ad-heavy page all of those unwanted adverts will not show up. Brilliant, eh?

Latest bit of software for the groovy gadget. This works fine on my Xperia X1 but I am sure it’ll be alright on other Windows Mobile phones. You install this .cab file, restart the phone then go to Settings and you can see the SRS control panel which allows you to make great improvements to sound quality on your phone. Makes a serious difference.

There are all kinds of wonderful gems out there that people have written for Windows Mobile. Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing with Webcam for Pocket PC.

This is a tiny program which runs in the background whilst you are taking pictures and it will automatically upload pictures as you take them to an FTP server of your choice. It’ll also take pictures at particular time intervals and upload them. I’ve been finding it quite amusing to have a free webcam running on my mobile phone.

You can get it here.

A few pounds/dollars is not so much money to be frittering away each week. So I’ve been buying games for my Xperia X1.

PDAmill are selling some fun games for a few dollars each. The two I’ve tried are the adventure game Arvale and the 3D space combat game Anthelion 2. OK, they both run at VGA resolution rather than the WVGA that the Xperia can manage, but that is not such a chore. They are both perfectly distracting in my quest to fart away days. Pretty good games if we are honest. $2.99 really is pin money, not even a pint’s worth, so even if you only play the games for a couple of hours before you get bored (I’ve played them one hell of a lot more than that) that is good value entertainment.

PDAmill also has games for the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone I admire, but I don’t feel the need to own one. I really love my Xperia. In my endless quest for the great gadget (the entertainment value of new gadgets will never be defined or reached) the Xperia X1 is that which tickles my unmentionables in the most satisfying manner (so far).

In my long post on software for the Xperia X1 I mentioned installing Flash Lite. Sadly, Flash Lite doesn’t run that many Flash-enabled websites, it is a bit pants. The solution that a lot of people have been raving about on Windows Mobile forums is to install the Skyfire browser.

Skyfire lists an impressive selection of video content it’ll play: Flash (up to version 10), Silverlight (2.0), QuickTime, Windows Media and BBC iPlayer videos. I installed it last night and gave it a go.

The first thing to note is that it is a really ugly browser, not only the UI but the way it renders webpages is highly unsatisfactory. It doesn’t seem to display pages at the full resolution of the Xperia screen, fonts and pictures seem very blocky. Opera Mobile 9.5 which comes with the Xperia looks much better.

Navigating pages is more difficult that it should be. When you try and click links it’ll zoom in and out in seemingly random ways. When it zooms in you really can see how ugly the pages it renders are. There is a zoom in/out button on the address bar, but once again Opera Mobile does this in a much more seamless manner.

Finally, it is very slow. Loading pages seems to take an age and when you do manage to navigate to video content it is really choppy and low quality. Basically, I don’t like it. I would suggest you download this only if there are Flash pages you absolutely need to look at on your mobile device.

If you just want Youtube on your Xperia then get the Youtube player and panel linked to here. This plays videos more smoothly and at higher resolution than Skyfire. You can get iPlayer running in Opera Mobile by following these instructions, again it looks better than in Skyfire.

I managed to step on the earphones for my mobile phone, this somewhat impacted on their ability to reproduce sound. So I ordered some new ones: Sennheiser CX 500 to be exact. You can get them for £35.99 from Amazon, or for £11.99 including postage from Ebay. There seems to be a slight disparity in pricing there…

I thought my old earphones that came with the Xperia X1 were good enough, I’ve only been playing MP3s through them after all. How wrong I was. When testing the new ones a couple of minutes ago I was amazed by the sound quality. The bass reproduction was quite incredible and they do a damned good job of stopping external sounds. Top bunny earphones, alright.

So I go to the partner and say that I never really thought the quality of earphones for playing MP3s was that important, being compressed music and all. He looked scornful and says, “The only people who complain about the quality of MP3 music are those who have just spent £2000 on a CD player.” I may be a superannuated, slightly spent toddler, but I can still learn things.

I highly recommend them.

Yet more software for my Xperia X1, I’m afraid. I just love my phone:)

I quite enjoy puzzle games where you can quickly solve a problem and then come back to the next puzzle a bit later. Such games are very good for playing on the underground or buses when you only have a short period of time in which to fart around. Two in particular have been sucking in my attention over the past few days.

Meon is one of those games where you have to hit all of the targets by bouncing light beams around. I played a similar game on my Amiga many, many years ago. Naturally, the graphics are a lot better on my phone. Ho ho ho. You can download a free trial here, and if you like it is doesn’t cost so much to buy the full version.

Spb Software, who are responsible for the brilliant Spb Mobile Shell for the X1, also make a few games. Spb Balltracker is a superficially simple puzzle game that soon becomes more of a challenge. You can finish off a level in a few minutes, so this is good for a quick play when you are travelling. You can download a trial (or buy it) here. If you buy it may I suggest you re-install it using the ‘install registered version’ option. When I tried registering mine just by entering the registration key into the trial version on my phone it started crashing. No such problems if you re-install.

I installed Xperia Tweak a few days ago, very handy. It allows you to change some of the default behaviour of the X1. I particularly like that you can use it to set a default panel to boot up into (ideally the SPB mobile shell I mentioned here) rather than going to the Windows Mobile Today screen and leaving you to choose a panel manually. My other favourite tweak is the ability to turn off the pointless ‘Message sent’ popup after you send an SMS. It is very handy. You can download it here. I think I might send the author a donation…

I am sure there will be more posts like this, as I love my phone and cannot help fiddling with it and adding software. For today I will update this post with an additional piece of software you should get rather than add another post.

If there is one thing I don’t like about Windows Mobile (and there probably is only one thing) it is that some applications don’t close when you hit the close button; they keep running in the background. This is not much of a problem, as modern phones are quite fast and have plenty of memory, but if you are running a demanding game (or suchlike) you don’t want background tasks running. The solution? Install tMan. This is a neat little task manager which sits in the top right of the screen. Hit its menu button and you can see, switch to or close any running applications. This is a ‘must have’ piece of software for Windows Mobile phones, it is free too. You can get it here.

One final point, as of today I am going to start tagging my posts a bit more seriously. When I first started this blog I didn’t know about tagging, but it is really time I got myself more organised.

I only recommended a couple of games in my post on Xperia X1 software, but I’ve found a couple more I like. I’ve been playing a free Tetris clone quite a lot these few days. Most distracting. You can get it here.

Universe Conquest costs the princely sum of $1.95 but is quite a good, simple, strategy game; it is basically Risk in space. I’ve been playing it a bit and it seems fun enough for very little money.

Playing games on my phone has been fun and a general success. Most of them don’t require huge playing time, and as my concentration span is not so long these days that suits me just fine.

I've had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1for just over six months and I bloody love it; it is the best phone I've ever had. The keyboard is great, as is the high-resolution display and it has a handy GPS for when I get lost. I thought I would suggest some software that takes advantage of its general brilliance.

The first thing you want to install is the SPB Mobile Shell (screenshot on the right). This is the main interface I use for navigating my phone, much better than the ones that come pre-installed.

There are a couple of things you should grab from this list of Xperia software. Namely, Flash Lite, Windows Live Search and Remote Desktop Mobile. Flash Lite will make browsing things like YouTube in the Opera browser a lot better. Windows Live Search is very powerful and will show results on a map, and Remote Desktop looks great on the high-resolution display.

YouTube will work with Flash Lite in the browser just fine, but if you are a YouTube addict you'll want to get the YouTube application and panel that are linked to here.

To take advantage of the GPS you really want to get Google Mobile Maps. Again, this looks great on the high-resolution display. You'll never get lost if you install this.

If you like instant messaging you will not go far wrong with Palringo. This connects to all major IM networks and also allows you to send sound and image files as part of your messages. This has kept me feeling connected to my friends when I've been locked up in the bin. Obviously, you'll also probably want to install Skype for cheap calls and messaging. Check your data plan allows you to connect to to Skype before you get landed with a huge bill, or just use WiFi.

I also go on IRC to chat to my friends in a schizophrenia support room. For ages I didn't have an even passably good IRC client for Windows Mobile, then I discovered IRCy which may look a bit crude, but it has full functionality. Good software.

For reading RSS feeds you can use Google Reader in the Opera browser, but I've installed Newsgator Go!, a great-looking and powerful RSS reader which syncs up with the Newsgator channels you subscribe to on your desktop.

Another crude but effective program is the blogging client the Diarist. This is good enough to leave quick blog posts when you are on the go, but won't win many awards for its design.

Finally, there are two games the Xperia owner should not be without. Xtrakt is a free 3d racing/shooty kind of game that looks an absolute treat with the Xperia's 3D acceleration. The other game costs $10, but looks such a treat and plays so well you really want to get it. It is Need for Speed Undercover, which is reviewed more fully here. It is a real game, which makes me really impressed with how mobile phone gaming is developing.

I'm just going to add to this post a bit, there are a couple of Xperia X1 websites that you might want to keep your eyes on for more software. Xperia-x1.com seems to be updated quite often and it has a category for software to watch. Xperiax1.net doesn't seem to be updated so often, but there is news there. Finally there is an official blog from Sony Ericsson here.

I've had a really groovy phone for about six months now: an Xperia X1. It has a great little keyboard, a fantastic high-resolution display and whizzy internet connection speeds. I've already installed a blogging client, Skype, an IM client and an RSS Reader. All I really needed to make this the ultimate tool for one who gets thrown in the bin regularly was an IRC client. There is a schizophrenia chatroom I go to a lot and I find it very supportive. I've been vaguely looking for an IRC client ever since I got the phone, but all of the Windows Mobile offerings I could find were total crap. Today I was fortunate enough to stumble across IRCy, which seems a great little program and the solution to my problem. OK, it is not much of a looker, but it works a treat and is cheap, too. That is just what I need.

I'm not planning a trip to the bin, indeed I am feeling quite good at the moment, but it is good to be prepared.

I had reached the end of my old mobile-phone contract, so I chose a new phone: a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. It may lack the G-sensor of the HTC Touch Diamond, but has a higher-resolution display, higher storage thanks to it taking microSD cards and a perfectly usable keyboard. I have had it about a week and am extremely pleased with it. There is a good review of it on Modaco. If you get one I strongly suggest you download the Spd Panel from their site, it is the main interface I use for navigating the phone's functions.

After a couple of weeks of perfect and generally enjoyable service my HTC Touch Diamond developed a problem with the Alarm functionality. The alarm would sound but there would be no pop-up allowing you to cancel the alarm. A pain, this. So, I fiddled about and found a solution. If you navigate to Start -> Settings -> Sounds and notifications and choose the notification tab. In the Event drop-down choose Reminders. There will then be an option to "Display message on screen". Choose this and the problem will be solved.

My computer has been tits up for the past 4-5 days. There was much typing of arcane commands until I remembered I could just do a repair install of Vista. I did, and all is now well.

The only real bit of news that has occurred whilst I've been offline is the delivery of my HTC Touch Diamond smartphone. It is a really cool little device. The screen is ultra-sharp and because it runs Windows Mobile there is a multitude of software one can get for it. My favourite piece of software is an IM program called Palringo. It supports all of the IM protocols I use so I can forever be online, if I so choose. The entry I wrote yesterday from the phone was using a simple blogging client called Diarist. It is a simple program, but perfectly capable of making blog posts.

I am hoping that I will not have to be locked up in the bin at any stage, but having such connected devices as the Touch Diamond makes being incarcerated a lot more tolerable.

I am posting this from my hyper-groovy HTC Touch Diamond. I have installed a blog client and I want to check my 'blogging from anywhere'-ability.

I'm not very good at the whole deferred pleasure-thing; when I want something I want it now. It was reasonably difficult waiting for my new phone to be released, but this was not so tough as it was at a nebulous, distant point in the future. This has been nowhere near as hard as I have found waiting for Zoo the teddy giraffe to be delivered. A new security object, especially a really cute one, is more interesting than a phone and what makes it particularly difficult is that he is only days away. He should be here tomorrow or Wednesday and the closeness of it all makes it even harder to wait. Every time the entry-phone goes over the next couple of days my pulse will race and I will hope that it is Zoo being delivered.

My long time reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I have decided to get a super-gadget phone when they are released next month: an HTC Touch Diamond. It is pitched as an iPhone competitor, so you may wonder why I just don't get a 3G iPhone when they are released next month. Well, the Diamond has a higher resolution display, a faster processor and GPS-functionality, but more importantly, it will sync with my PC. At the moment, iPhones won't sync with 64-bit Windows, and that is what I run. I am not going to install a 32-bit OS just to sync a phone and lose a gigabyte of memory in the process. Moreover, I hate and despise iTunes, and that is the interface one has to use for syncing iPhones. The Diamond will sync with Outlook via the Mobile Device Centre in Vista (what used to be ActiveSync) which I will find terribly useful with my bulging contacts file and I can copy music and album art easily from Windows Media Player. Now all I have to do is wait a month. Waiting, aaargh!

Readers from last month may recall I got Skype working on my Nokia N95 mobile phone thanks to a program called Fring. This was all very well and good, but connection via Wifi on the N95 eats batteries like there is no tomorrow. It is also not so good for text-based chats/Instant Messages on a mobile phone keypad. Well, help has arrived in the form of the latest firmware update for my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet; it now supports Skype. The batteries of the N800 last a lot longer when connected via Wifi so it should be easier to make and receive calls when in range of a Wifi hotspot. Since I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my N800 I should also find it much easier to use the IM functionality of Skype, something I use quite a lot. The only problem with the firmware update is that it requires one to re-install all of one's applications. This is not as bad as it seems for if you have been diligent and made backups the settings for most of the programs will be retained (note the emphasis on 'most', as in: not all). The firmware upgrade also allows one to use SD cards with a greater capacity than before, so this is a boon for those who want to carry around a lot of music (like me) or videos. Mind you, I already have five gigabytes of music on mine, I don't really need that much more...

I went to bed an hour early and slept until half-three so things have improved a bit with the increased dose of anti-depressants (they are supposedly very sedating). Now all I need them to do is start cheering me up as I am still not terribly happy. I wonder how good the new anti-psychotics are, though, as I am still having unpleasant hallucinations and my paranoid delusions are really quite colourful.

As a side note to last night's Wifi fun with my Nokia N95 phone; it works a treat but leaving Wifi on all the time sucks the battery dry terribly quickly. Leaving Skype/Fring running over Wifi permanently just cannot be done. I even tried lowering the Wifi broadcast power to see if that would increase the battery life, but no dice. It will have to be a case of connecting when I want to make an international call. I will see how the battery lasts on my N800 when Skype comes out for that. I think both my N95 and N800 are great; obviously toys in some ways, but terribly useful. I would have been so utterly unhappy in the loony bin without the contact they allowed me to have.

I gave up trying to sleep at half-three. Brilliant. Oh how that cheers me up.

I was having problems getting the Wifi function of my Nokia N95 phone to work. It would not connect to my DG834GT router at all. I kept getting messages about 'Invalid shared WPA keys' when trying to connect to the internet even when I had entered the WPA key correctly. I found the solution in post number three by Plx here. I can now connect problem-free to my Wifi router, and hopefully other people's as well (assuming I have the network key or they are unprotected access points).

Why did I want to do this when I have such a high transfer bandwidth from T-Mobile on my Web'n'Walk package? Well, my internet connection bandwidth cannot be used for VoIP programs like Skype, I paid for the cheaper option that didn't allow this. IRC, email and IM programs had served me well in the loony bin last week, but for making international calls it would be nice to be able to use my Skype account over a Wifi network. It is planned for Skype to come out for my Nokia N800 at some point this summer, but as yet there is no word about exactly when.

Luckily, I was searching forums about the N95 and someone linked to Fring. At first glance this is just another IM program that lets you connect to many networks (GoogleTalk, MSN and Twitter). However, it also allows you to connect to the Skype and use your SkypeOut account to make calls to any number in the world cheaply, as well as just calling other Skype users for free. Of course, other Skype users can call you (when you are connected to a Wifi network). I had Skype working on my N95 via Wifi! No need to wait for the N800 version (although I'll install that when it arrives).

So now I can do IRC, IM and email on the N800 using Wifi or connected to my Web'n'Walk via Bluetooth and cheap international calls via Wifi on my N95. Pretty cool, eh?

At the end of last month I got a Nokia N800 internet tablet to replace my old portable internet device. I've been terribly pleased with it, it is quite useful and there is a load of free software available for it including a blogging app that I am using to write this.

However, for surfing the web when not in range of a Wifi hotspot one needs to make a Bluetooth connection to a phone and connect over a cellular network. I didn't think this would be a problem until I spoke to my old mobile phone service provider and they said the highest data transfer limit I could get on my (not terribly cheap) tariff was four megabytes a month; this is also known as 'piss all'.

So I cancelled my contract instantly and switched to wonderful T-Mobile who give three gigabytes of data transfer for a little over an Ayrton* a month. This is pretty much all a wired toddler could want in a month when staggering about to playgroup and the like. I got the middle data plan; there is a cheaper one for £7.50 that doesn't allow one to use IM programs and a more expensive one that allows the use of VoIP programs like Skype. Since the voice part of my tariff allows an obscene amount of calls to be made I don't need to bother with the Skype option.

Of course, switching mobile providers means normally gets a new phone, and what a marvellous new phone I have. It is a Nokia N95. This has some nifty toys built in: a five mega pixel camera, a decent music player (it supports four gigabyte micro-SD cards for holding music and pictures), high speed HSDPA 3G data access for surfing the web (either from the phone or from the N800) and a GPS with mapping software. I admit, I've only used the GPS twice (I now know exactly where I and the neighbours live), but it is quite amusing none the less. I've downloaded an application called Mobile GMaps that integrates with Google Maps and the GPS so you can track your position using overhead satellite pictures as well as more traditional maps. It is a great phone and I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a new blower. There is a good review on The Register if you want to know more.

Sadly, fun as it is to have new toys, I am still pretty freaking miserable.

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*Ayrton Senna = Tenner

Thanks to my new purchase, a stereo bluetooth headset for my Jasjar, I can now make telephone calls using Butter. I just attach the microphone to his shirt and stick the headphones in my ears:

I can also give Butter commands to play music and navigate the web thanks to the power of voice recognition. I wonder what people would think if I walked around apparently chatting to my teddy bear.

My mobile phone contract has expired. Thanks to my cunning negotiation skills I have been offered a free phone and three months free line rental. The phone is quite a nifty one, a Sony Ericsson K800i, here is a review with pictures. It has a 3.2 mega-pixel camera and comes with a half gig memory card, I should fit plenty of pictures onto that. And I can make phone calls on it too!

I am just testing to see if I can post blog entries from my PDA. If I can I salute the mystic power of mobile internet access.=

My groovy i-mate Jasjar has been returned to me. Well, I am not sure it is that groovy as it is quite large and I look a bit of an arse when I hold the large block up to my ear to make calls. What I am still yet to try is the wi-fi ability it has. I am hoping to be able to update the spume of drivel when I am on the go thanks to its wireless ability. Not that really much happens to me when I am out and about, but rest assured if something amusing happens whilst I am in range of a hot-spot you, dear reader, will be the first to read my toddler-esque rantings.

My brilliant new toy has gone tits up. I am severely vexed, I don't mind telling you. I'd hardly played with it, only used it as a telephone and not used the 'oh fancy' features like wireless networking or Skype. Now it is dead and I am fuming whilst waiting for a reply from the local service centre. How is a toddler supposed to take pictures and update his drivelly blog on the go without a whizzy PDA/mobilephone?

My excuses for avoiding writing for the spume of drivel on my many trips and sojourns in novel locations have just decreased. I've got a new toy. When new SIM card with new telephone number activates I should be able to post to the spume of drivel no matter where I am or what I am doing. I imagine it'll all be pretty banal.