Uncategorized

I saw about 50 articles today on the next generation iPod that will ‘speak’ the name of the song you are listening to. The thing that got me is that everyone is going nuts over this as being revolutionary. David Pogue even quoted Apple as saying "the new Shuffle is the world’s first talking music player, thanks to a new feature called VoiceOver." First? Wow, that’s impressive.

Then I whipped out my Fuze, went to Settings – Voice Command and made sure the Media selection was checked and the option ‘Announce media selections’ was checked and enabled Voice Command. I also mapped by PTT button on a short press to launch Voice Command then opened Windows Media Player and went to town.

What can Voice Command do with music?

Read more

One of the good features of the iPhone is a great WiFi scanner which roams through different networks and pops up nicely when it locates a new hotspot.

Windows Mobile devices have different ways to scan for WiFi spots, and lately there are a lot of free tools available.

Here are some of the free alternatives I found:

WeFi:

WeFi is software loaded onto your mobile device which enhances your existing WiFi management software with a more powerful connection tool. The WeFi software automatically detects and qualifies all WiFi access points within range and connects you to the spot with the best Internet connection. If the WeFi software detects a new access point, it allows you to be the first to map it. WeFi also provides you with Instant Messaging tools, Allowing you to create a buddy list, and to see where your friends are currently connected.

Download WeFi (or read more)

Read more

Long time readers will know about my obsession with getting the camera to work on the Fuze. It really takes good photos…when they’re not blurry. And that’s always been the issue. Well today my wife was complaining that her Touch HD takes blurry photos so I went and applied the tweaks that we’ve all gone through in the past to decrease the camera delay (those tweaks do help and I’ll repost them at the end for you) but none of them really resolved the extreme blurriness of her photos. So I  tweaked her registry so it would show me the frames per second that the camera was shooting at and that’s when I learned that my Fuze had about 50% more frames per seconds. And frames per second is a great indicator of blur (it’s literally the test of how quickly images are being captured or refreshed so one frame per second is like opening the camera lens and not reopening it until 1 full second has passed so everything in between is a blur). The specs and internal chips of the Touch HD and the Fuze are pretty similar except for the fact that the HD is a 5mp camera and at first I was thinking that the larger camera lead to a read delay but even decreasing it to 3mp did not change the frame rate. As I toggled through settings I realized there was one difference – the brightness level on my Fuze was set to 0 and her Touch HD was set to +2. And when I decreased the brightness level I watched as the frame rate jumped up substantially with each decrease…and that’s the answer. It’s now apparent that the higher brightness is caused by the camera keeping the lens open longer to allow more light in (like ISO settings on a regular camera and the reason why photos at night are often blurry with digital cameras). How substantial is it? Well varying the brightness from +2 to -2 leads to a 50% increase in frames per second on average but in a lot of cases it is far more than that (with very extreme darks and brightness having the least impacts but in dim light having the highest impact). Just take a look at the photo of the same area taken seconds apart with nothing changed but the brightness levels but that is admittedly a pretty extreme range (just so happens it’s the only sample I took so it is fair). Note that when using the onscreen FPS you will initially see a high number that comes down after a second – that is normal and you should wait for the number to level off before using it as an indicator.

So it’s pretty simple, just open your camera, hit the ‘cog’ icon to go to menu and then hit brightness and set it to -2.0.  And you can watch as a moving arm in front of the camera has less blur (not no blur – but less blur:)) and this applies to both the camera and video camera. In looking at the photos they aren’t ‘dark’ and in fact they are pretty close to the real color. The brighter the setting the brighter the photo (sometimes brighter than reality) but that’s at the expense of quality and I don’t think the cost is worth it. Maybe you can find a happy medium for yourself like -1:)

And now for the tweaks we’ve gone through in the past but I think are worth repeating for ease:

Read more