Well, that's what I meant by UMTS, which I suppose may or may not have been the right term to use. From what everything I know, though, Cingular doesn't have different tiers for their data, so signing up for MEdia Net should get you everything. But yeah - being able to get unlimited data on a pre-paid month-to-month is definitely pretty cool.

My comments about California:

According to PDAdb, you have both GSM850 and GSM1900, so you should be okay on either Cingular or T-Mobile.

I can't recommend T-Mobile on the West coast. They're using Cingular's old towers, and although Cingular's been building 850 MHz towers left and right, last I checked (a few years ago, when I was on T-Mobile myself), T-Mobile was stuck still using Cingular's 1900 MHz towers.

If you want to use your existing phone, as a result, I'd suggest Cingular. The pre-paid MEdia Net that smeg36 mentioned does, in fact, work on a SmartPhone/Pocket PC (although you might not want to mention beforehand that you'll be using it on such a device ) - all of the boards I've ever seen that talk about data for a Windows Mobile device suggest doing that. afaik, their attitude is that data is data - you get access from GPRS through to UMTS with the plan.

About smeg36's suggestion regarding phones: you'd need to take the PPC-6700 off the list. Sprint has deprecated the phone in anticipation of releasing the PPC-6800, so it's nigh-impossible to find the PPC-6700 anywhere.

WM5torage should work, but one of the things you have to make sure of is that you don't have any programs using the flash card at the time. This includes Today plugins as well. Once you turn all those off, it should work just fine. (This tends to be the most commonly encountered problem.)

What problem did you hit, anyways?

You've filed bugs, then, right? Hard for them to fix bugs if they don't know they exist!

I've been getting this error on Vista when I try to use it: "Application Manager cannot install this application on your mobile device due to an invalid setup file. Reinstall and try again." This happens no matter which .cab I attempt to execute it on. And yes, I'm an administrator on the machine. Any ideas?

The terms of the GPL just mean that if anybody other than the code owner makes modifications to it, they must also release the source to it. The code owner is allowed to change the license the software is released under, or license the code to somebody else with a different license (such as the SleepyCat Berkeley DB folks before they were bought by Oracle). They're under no obligation to keep the license up, or keep distributing the files. Such is the GPL.

Although, yeah, it's a pita that they're just letting TCPMP lay fallow.

The last official Sprint PPC-6700 ROM is available from either the Sprint site (under Windows Mobile (CE)) or from the UTStarcom site (picking Sprint on the right, then going to downloads). It's an AKU 2.x ROM.

The current unofficial ROMs are AKU 3.3 or 3.5 can be obtained from this site if you poke around a bit.

Just checking the obvious first: you downloaded and installed WMDC (Windows Mobile Device Center), right? Much like with previous versions of Windows and ActiveSync, Vista doesn't come with WMDC pre-installed.

Especially since (at least for me) it looks like they took that page down....

Granted, I've been using a PPC rather than a SmartPhone, but I haven't had to reboot my device to get it to "mount it as Storage Card again." All I did was launch WM5torage, plug it into my computer, and when I was done, I shut down WM5torage and went on with business as usual. The only problem I had was because I had a Today plugin (the equivalent to your homescreen plugins) that was scanning the Storage Card regularly for files, so WM5torage was complaining it couldn't get exclusive access to the Storage Card.

Also, getting "Storage Card2" usually happens when you already have something (usually an empty folder) as "Storage Card". After you do that, you should be able to pop out your card and pop it back in, and it'll get loaded as "Storage Card" again.

I've noticed that the "" and + options aren't working properly when performing a forum search. Is it just me?

And just think! You get to wait until WM7 before it's really fixed!

Although, that part is true, since they've increased the process slot size in Windows CE 6.0 from 32 MB to 2 GB. Unfortunately, WM6 is still based on Windows CE 5.0.

Ah, yes... this problem. This is one of those fun areas where your 25 MB of free program memory is deceiving.

I'm guessing that you have quite a bit loaded on your Today screen, other SIPs, or special programs that load on startup? The catch is that all of those things share a single 32 MB chunk of memory, and that can disappear faster than you expect. If you want more technical details, you can read this MSDN article, but suffice it to say that the 25 MB of free program memory doesn't mean that you have 25 MB of OS memory left. I've been hit by the same problem myself plenty of times....

For some reason, when I try and pick a different theme under Settings -> Personal -> Today... nothing happens. It keeps showing the Windows Default theme. The spinner spins for a couple of seconds, the control panel applet insists that it's selected the new theme, the registry reflects the new theme... but it still looks the same. A soft reset doesn't help either. Anybody have any ideas why this might be happening?

For background: I'm currently running WM5 AKU 3.3 on an HTC Apache (Sprint PPC-6700).

So, there's been a Windows Mobile 5 RamDisk available for some time (you can read some about it here). The catch about it, if you read down in the comments some, is that the RamDisk attempts to use the same 32 MB section of RAM that is shared with the rest of the operating system (standard DLLs, Today screen DLLs, SIP DLLs, etc.), and there's a pretty severe limit on the size of the RamDisk that you can create on your own system.

In my case, I'm not all too worried about the fact that the disk gets wiped inbetween soft resets, since I'm largely interested in using it as a cache (for IE, Opera, etc.). The problem I'm having is that with everything else I have loaded on my device, I can't actually create a RamDisk of any appreciable size without it causing problems with me running out of RAM for other things.

I tried replacing the LocalAlloc() used to allocate the memory for the RamDisk with VirtualAlloc(), updating all references as I believed was appropriate, but that didn't seem to help allocate memory outside of the 32 MB slot allocated to the operating system. Does anybody have any suggestions on how I ought to proceed? I think that this would be really useful for folks, particularly since the experimentation I've done with it shows that it actually speeds up browsing considerably when you use the RamDisk as your cache (since it doesn't need to write to any flash RAM at all).

References:

• Windows Mobile Team MSDN blog post where Mike Calligaro mentions that the Windows CE 5.0 Platform Builder comes with a RamDisk driver
• Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 download page
• MSDN page talking about the Windows Mobile 5 memory model

Thing is, that's the only point I've seen where it's better than Windows Live Search Mobile. There are a couple of things where it's better than Virtual Earth Mobile, but on every other point, Windows Live Search Mobile outclasses it.

imov Messenger is free for Pocket PC, and it seems to work decently (and it's free!). It needs a Jabber server, but they have a list of free Jabber servers, so that's an option. It'll work with AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, and Jabber (which includes Google Talk). You can find it here. Unfortunately, the SmartPhone version is pay-only, so I have to figure out what I can do on mine.

You should just be able to go to the official Opera site to download it:

http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/winmobileppc/
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/winmobile/

You should just be able to type your serial code in that.

This work?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923953

Edit: Good old Microsoft. They give the information, but not the files needed to actually do anything....

That's total garbage - I can't believe Handango would do something like that. I may not have spent as much as you have, but I'll stick join you on that no-purchase policy. I've posted a couple of threads elsewhere - hopefully, we can get more people to be aware of stuff like that.

Say, maybe we can get Paul to post something on the front page too!

MoDaCo is a Windows Mobile forum - I think what you want is this (Mobiholics), or more specifically, this (Mobiholics' Nokia forum).

For what it's worth, there's always the competition, which in this case, is compiled for Windows Mobile devices natively and supports GPS units right now. In this case, it's Microsoft's own Virtual Earth Mobile. No need to muck with any Java midlet managers or such - just install it and go!

A couple of the nice points:

• As stated, it supports GPS units, so you can always find out where you are.
• If you don't have a GPS unit, you can ask it to try and figure out where you are via available Wi-Fi networks. Not always reliable, but helpful if you have nothing else.
• It can hook up to your contacts list, so that you can look up contacts directly, rather than having to copy and paste contact information.
• Since it's compiled for Windows Mobile directly, there aren't any of these problems of trying to figure out why satellite images and such aren't working - everything just does.
• It has a local cache, so if you tend to look at the same areas, or you close the app and restart it for whatever reason, it doesn't have to redownload map sections it's already shown. You can set the size of the cache yourself, as well as the location (so that you can have your cache on your much larger Storage Card).

There may or may not be other things that are better and/or worse than Google Maps, but I haven't tried Google Maps, so I can't really say for sure. The points I made are based on comments that I've read here, things that Virtual Earth Mobile works better for. If somebody could actually make a good comparison chart, it'd be kind of neat to see.

And, makes me wonder how Google Maps is going to remain competitive on the Windows Mobile platform... or if they even care.

That would only be the case for WM2003 or WM2003SE. PPCProfiles doesn't play very nicely with WM5 - I tried several times, and then was informed by the author that WM5 isn't supported (and I presume there are no plans to).


I think I'd stay away from MS Reader at this point. Everything I've read so far seems to indicate that MS has all but given up on that product (along with Microsoft Pocket Money )...

I gave this a try about a week ago. For whatever reason, the battery usage on my phone went insane, though. Normally, even with a 15-30 minute POP mail check, my phone would last about 24 hours with light usage. When I turned push e-mail on, my phone would last about 12 hours with light usage. I'm not sure exactly what happened there....

But, it's definitely one reason why even though I have push e-mail configured right now, it's turned off.