Sunday, February 18, 2007

Sundance short films made for mobile devices

The Sundance Film Institute commissioned six independent film makers to create short films made specifically for mobile devices. The films were released last week at the 3GSM conference in Spain.

A promotional video for the project is here, and a CNET article on the project is here.

Sundance set up a system for downloading the films to mobile phones by sending an SMS message with the word "FILM" to +44-762-480-7811. But when I tried this from my TyTN, I was unable to download the films over the link that I received in return. If anyone is able to access the films through Sundance's system on their TyTN or other Windows Mobile device, please post details as a comment to this message.

After a little effort I found the following URLs for accessing the films directly, which you can enter in your device's browser:

A Slip in Time: http://e-clips.mobi/zr/videos/A_Slip_in_Time_15471.3gp
Learning to Skateboard: http://e-clips.mobi/zr/videos/Skateboard_15479.3gp
La Revolucion: http://e-clips.mobi/zr/videos/La_Revolucion_de_Iguodala_15475.3gp
King Tiny (dog): http://e-clips.mobi/zr/videos/King_Tiny_15474.3gp
Reno: http://e-clips.mobi/zr/videos/Reno_15478.3gp

But do try their SMS system also, and tell me in a blog comment whether it works for you.

Enjoy!

Monday, February 05, 2007

GPS built-in but deactivated on TyTN ??

As this comment points out, it appears that HTC TyTNs (and other devices as well) include some of the hardware needed for GPS (location tracking). Several tech blog groups are actively working on getting this working, but so far it appears that it can't be done as the devices exist.

The most active discussions on this appear to be:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=291181&page=45
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1094921&page=2&pp=15

If anyone knows more about this, comments welcome!

How to delete e-mail in WM5 (TyTN etc)

Following up on my previous messages about deleting e-mail on my TyTN, I've now confirmed how to handle e-mail on a WM5 device without accidentally deleting mail off the mail server.

To recap the problem, if you use your WM5 device like I do, to read e-mail on the road that you generally read over webmail, if you delete e-mail on the device but want to keep it on the server (eg, if it's not something you can read or handle on the device, do you want it out of your device's inbox, but still want to read/handle the message over webmail when you're on a computer), it will be deleted from the server when you empty your deleted items folder on the device.

THE SOLUTION: Never empty the deleted items folder on the device. Instead, if you set your mail on the device to only show messages received in the past X days (I set it to 7 days), periodically go into your deleted items folder and move all messages older than X days back to your Inbox, then do a send/receive. When you do the send/receive, the messages will be removed from your Inbox because they're older than X days old, but they will not be deleted on the server, since they're still in your inbox. I've tried this, and the messages definitely disappear from the device but not the server. But never empty deleted items, that will delete them off the server.

The right solution, of course, would be for Microsoft to have a setting whether or not to delete from server when emptying deleted items folder, like they do on Outlook and Outlook Express.

The other solution is to use another e-mail client on the device. I plan to try this, since I'd also like an e-mail client that shows HTML e-mails (rich text), but I haven't tried any yet. If anyone has e-mail clients to recommend, please post them here as a comment.