Solo Technology

While I don’t always love the folks at Sprint (for instance, see this old post) I do have to admit that I sure am happy with how they’ve been supporting my HTC Mogul phone since I bought it last fall. The updates have been coming along at a reasonable rate and each offers new features.

For instance, earlier this year a flash update enabled the built-in GPS capabilites (that had previousbly been theorized to exist but not proven). That takes programs like Google Maps to an entirely new level of usefulness. I love it and use it all the time.

This weekend I noticed another update. It introduces an update to Windows Mobile 6.1. Not a major upgrade, but I was certainly surprised to see that it was coming to an “older” device such as the Mogul.

Threaded text messages rock and that is, so far, my favorite feature from this upgrade. The “zoom out/in” features in Pocket IE are groovy too, but I’m hoping Opera Mobile 9.5x beta stabilizes the memory usage soon (it really is sweet to use when it works!). And I’m glad there are features I like because when doing these flash upgrades it is certainly good to have a reason because you are wiping the machine back to stock.

Fortunately the phone settings aren’t lost, but everything else goes bye-bye… make sure you have your license codes and software for any 3rd party apps you bought and installed. I use a product called PIM Backup to backup most of the info related to contacts and calls. It has worked flawlessly for all 3 flashes I’ve done so far.

One of the things I lost in the flash was the configuration I had done to enable using my phone as a modem. I had a couple hours invested in that one (a series of careful work-arounds and hacks) and sure wasn’t excited to do it all again on the “new” phone. So I found a commercial alternative: USB Modem (clever name, eh?) by the folks at Mobile Stream.

The trial is limited to 14 days or 30 uses, so we’ll see how it goes. If I like it I’ll have no problem dropping $20 to register it. The install and configuration process took about 5 minutes from start to being online. I dig that.

While poking around doing the upgrade and re-install of apps I stumbled over a nice little media player plugin. It offers the ability (finally!) to have a “resume” feature with the built-in Windows Media Player on theses things. I traditionally have used GSPlayer just to get the resume feature (priceless when listening to podcasts) but it doesn’t do so well with incoming calls. The built-in WMP handles calls with an auto-pause and resume so now that this plugin exists I might try using it more often.

Final note: I had purchased Resco Explorer 2007 last November and promptly deleted/lost the install package. Still had my key but couldn’t find it anywhere on the Resco site — they’ve since upgraded to a 2008 version of Explorer. I sent their support an email asking for help locating the 2007 version. They replied with a note containing the key to 2008 and an invitation to just do the free upgrade. Now that’s service.

Now if I could just figure out why neither PocketPuTTY nor zaTelnet Light can seem to connect to my Linux servers over SSH… Dunno if either worked before the flash — this is my first time trying them. (oops, I just noticed that zaTelnet Light is telnet only, no SSH. Doh.)

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