California Dreams

My CingularAT&T 8525 running Windows Mobile 6 (also happened with WM5) seems to have an issue with Internet Explorer Mobile where after a day or so of device being on, IE will just stop loading pages or show a blank white screen after it has loaded any web page. It seems I am not the only one.

Like the others, at first I resorted to doing a reset. While it temporarily solves the issue it takes quite a bit of time, which is especially annoying when you are trying to check something quick, like Caltrain schedule.

After experimenting a bit I found a faster workaround. First, stop all programs (Start > Settings > System > Memory > Running Programs and hit “Stop All” button). In some cases that step may not even be needed, so you could try skipping that. Next, launch Comm Manager (8525 has a button for this on the right side, or you can get there also through Start > Settings > Connections) and kill the data link (on 8525 you click the PDA symbol that has arrows going in and out). When you launch Pocket IE after that, it will first create the data connection and browsing will work fine.

Since I released the first version of Caltroid (Caltrain schedule application for Caltrain) the de facto homepage for the project has been the release announcement blog post. That is far from ideal, so I finally made a real project page for Caltroid. It has the download links, source links and so forth and will be updated if and when I continue the project. Now that there are rumors about T-Mobile shipping a real Android device in September, I have some motivation to actually do some more work on Caltroid.

The major problem my CaltrainJS application had with iPhone was that the page stretched too big and the iPhone browser zoomed so much it was impossible to read any text or operate the controls without continually zooming in and out. After checking some other pages optimized for the iPhone I noticed there was a meta tag I had not seen before. Doing some searches I finally found the Apple page that describes how to set the viewport so that iPhone displays the page in a more mobile friendly way. Now my application works in iPhone too.

I finally decided to sit down and fix some annoyances in my Caltrain schedule applications written in Python and Javascript. I added the ability to filter trains that don’t stop at either your departure or destination stations. For the Python version I also added the ability to install the package simply with easy_install caltrain. Even nicer, when you have setuptools installed (as you do when using easy_install), the installer will place a script named caltrain in your $PATH, which makes it a snap to launch the application. The magic part in setup.py for the script is simply:

    setup_args["entry_points"] = {
        "gui_scripts": [
            "caltrain = caltrain:gui",
        ]
    }

where the line "caltrain = caltrain:gui" means that the script will be named caltrain, and it will call the calltrain.gui function (caltrain is the module).

I also finally made a proper page describing the project. Much nicer than needing to find the last post on this blog about the topic.

I noticed Caltrain has a page listing mobile applications. I wonder what it would take to get them to include my little apps there. I quite prefer the UI in my applications to all the others (except for the PalmOS version). This is what the latest Javascript version looks like:

Online Caltrain Schedule Application for Windows Mobile in Javascript

The 8525 has been on the market for about 1.5 years (Cingular shipped it in November 2006). It has a 400 MHz processor, 128 MB flash and 64 MB RAM. It takes microSD cards, and at least in the summer of 2007 2 GB cards were common. It comes with almost everything you could ask for. My main issue is missing GPS, and if you’d think of it as an entertainment device it does not have builtin radio or TV.

Assuming Moore’s Law holds for mobiles too (of which I am not completely sure), then 4.5 years or 6 years (depending on which version of the Law you subscribe to), the 8525 power should double three times, to about 3 GHz processor, 1 GB flash (or equivalent), 512 MB RAM and taking microSD or similar worth 16 GB. Apart from the processor these actually don’t look too impressive, considering that the iPhone came out roughly 6 months after the 8525 with 620 MHz processor, 16 GB flash. So let’s up the flash or equivalent memory for our future phone to 32 GB, and given that Sandisk is promising 12 GB microSD this year it seems we can fit 32 GB in microSD easily.

So I am looking at a higher end consumer PDA with 3 GHz processor, 512 or more MB RAM, 32 GB internal flash and 32 GB removable memory coming out 2010-2012. I wouldn’t actually be surprised if 100 GB in storage could be broken, but you’d have to pay premium. It will have everything the 8525 and iPhone have except better, and will include GPS, maybe radio and tv, and it is going to be powerful enough to replace a regular computer for most people. The processing power, memory and storage are enough for the tasks that most people use computers for: browse the web, use email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, view photos and videos and so forth. Of course, with the GPS, it will also function as your navigator. You only need to add wireless full sized keyboard and wireless full sized display to be as productive as you are right now with a regular desktop or laptop. And with some new user interface ideas coming around, maybe we won’t be so tied to the keyboard or giant displays anymore.

The future is going to be small.

I released a new version of CaltrainPy and CaltrainJS yesterday. Caltrain changed schedules on March 3, 2008 and these releases incorporate the new schedule information. Incidentally, I found two errors in the official Caltrain online timetables, and this release fixes those as well. The issues are:

1. Train 146 (weekday southbound) from Menlo Park to Santa Clara has times 13:XX (should be 1:XX).
2. Train 195 (weekday northbound) arrives in San Francisco at 10:01 (should be 11:01).

This change also fixes the AM/PM bugs in the previous releases. The algorithm to determine AM/PMness of entries is much clearer now (and correct!).

You can download the package from Cheeseshop. To install, you must do: python setup.py install. easy_install does not work. I have also updated http://caltrain.heikkitoivonen.net/.

If you want to stay notified of updates for this software, I recommend you subscribe to the CaltrainPy Freshmeat project page.

Update: I forgot to mention that I contacted Caltrain about the schedule errors. Train 195 is already fixed, and they also acknowledged the errors with train 146, so that will probably get fixed soon.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I went and tried the Xpress Mail on my 8525 that CingularAT&T had provided for my phone… The end result was that I had to hard reset my phone, and because ActiveSync failed to restore my data, I had to manually reinstall all applications and I lost my contacts for good.

The Xpress Mail installation seems extremely invasive. Maybe it needs to be for simple devices, but I don’t see why that would have to be the case for a phone running WM5 or later. The installer asks for your phone number (what has that to do with email?), your ISP, login and password. Then it seems that it passes my login and password (in this case my Comcast account) to AT&T. There are no security settings anywhere, so I don’t know if all that is even being transmitted in the clear somewhere. The Xpress Mail UI has just a handful of preferences, and none that seemed to be of interest to me. For what it is worth, it did work with my Comcast email, and seemed to integrate that into Pocket Outlook.

But I really did not like the fact that I had no firm idea what had happened with my account information. So I reset my Comcast password, and uninstalled Xpress Mail. And started noticing major problems. It used to take just a couple of seconds to connect to network after reset, and now it was taking about a minute. Battery was draining at an alarming rate (full charge in the evening, and battery drained empty sometime during the night).

So now I have spent a day trying to restore everything, and all is good now except for the lost contacts. The additional software I installed included PTTFix, BART Quick Planner, Google Maps, GSPlayer2, PIM Backup (won’t lose my data anymore!), Pocket Putty, QMail3 (for Comcast email), Skype, vncviewer, WM6 Remote Desktop, and zsIRC.

Since I upgraded my 8525 to Windows Mobile 6, I have been unable to read Comcast email. Granted, it was really slow even with WM5, but it worked. Not so with WM6. I talked to both Comcast and AT&T support, but no luck. I did get a phone number for HTC support, but haven’t made the call, and rather figured I’d live with it.

But enough is enough. I finally figured I’d search for a good, free mail client for Windows Mobile. It seems QMail is hands down the best in that category. QMail is really capable, but it is seriously lacking in the documentation department, and even most of what is available is in Japanese. Luckily I did find an old guide, which clarified some issues (the latest version comes with SSL builtin, so you can disregard that part of the guide). There is also an English FAQ that explains how to create filters and actions to automatically download only messages that are newer than X number of days and download messages automatically every Y minutes.

QMail had no difficulty with Comcast’s POP or SMTP servers; even TLS works.