Over at TreoCentral, some users have discovered a very simple way to double your battery life on the Palm Treo 800w. It turns out, the GPS stays on at all times and this is one of the reasons GPS programs like Live Search can get a fix on your location almost instantly. Shutting off this feature when not in use, will increase your battery life. So how do you do it? Tap the cross-hairs icon …
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Race My Treo! – Usability Speed Tests with the Treo 800w
So you’ve got your shiny new smartphone and you think it’s the best in the world. So easy to use and fast! Anyone can say that, but nobody ever shows any quantifiable data about exactly how easy to use the devices really are. I decided to make up some generic usability speed tests that are intended to help you figure out exactly how easy it is to use your device. Mind you this is not …
Continue readingLive Search Mobile with Weather Radar
This post is hopefully going to fall into the “fact following fiction” category. Live Search Mobile is one of the most indispensable Windows Mobile applications out there. It makes finding location based information so much easier than using a web browser. So in thinking about what else I still use an annoying web browser for, one of the major things was animated weather radar from Accuweather. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a weather radar …
Continue reading“Forget about the Mobile Browser” and more from the Future
Forget about the mobile web browser. It sucks. They all suck. There is no way anybody is going to ever make huge desktop-designed cluttered web pages easy-to-use on a tiny mobile phone screen (without reformatting the data), and according to statistics, most people don’t have any interest in viewing web pages on a phone. I apologize for using the “i” word, but some of you might say, “What about the iPhone? Apple tells me it’s …
Continue readingThe Diamond’s Screen Shut Off Problem is a Feature
A number of people have been complaining about how the Touch Diamond’s screen shuts off very quickly after you make a call. It turns out that’s actually part of an almost very intelligent feature. As realized by yelitterulez at xda-developers, when making a call the screen stays on if you leave the phone lying flat on a table. If you wait 10 seconds into the call, you can pick it up to your ear and …
Continue readingBringing Manual Screen Rotation Back to the Touch Diamond
As you may have heard, the Touch Diamond has removed the Screen Orientation options from the Screen control panel. This means that you cannot switch to landscape mode except in the programs that support the accelerometer screen orientation switching (Album and Opera). This can easily be fixed with a registry hack. Using a Registry editor, go to: HKeyLocalMachine/System/GDI/Rotation Change the “HideOrientationUI” from 1 to 0 Then if you want to expand the rotation options further, …
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