Omnia align screen success

Oh no!
I, along with so many others recently experienced the dreaded Omnia align screen bug. When Windows Mobile starts up, it forces you to align your screen. However, if the screen won't align, which is incredibly common with the Samsung Omnia, you can't get past this screen and your phone is completely unusable. Personally, I'm staggered that such a big company will ignore such a fundamental issue.

Since my phone is out of warranty, I decided to take matters into my own hands and replace the screen. So I went to ebay and found a new digitiser for $12.98. I bought mine from this seller (search for Omnia Digitizer) and was very happy with the service. The digitizer came with a selection of tools that were sufficient to do the entire job.

The digitizer is a clear panel that sits on top of the lcd screen. It's what is responsible for letting the device know when the screen is tapped.

Fitting the digitizer
Once the digitizer arrived I found these instructions and followed them. Although since I was only replacing the digitizer I didn't need to remove the camera or the keypad membrane.

I then reassembled the phone and crossed my fingers. It powered up then presented the dreaded "align screen" screen. I tapped each of the alignment markers once and.... it worked!

Success!
Since then the phone has been so much easier to use! The accuracy of the screen is so much better than it ever has been. It's still nowhere near as good as an iPhone or a HTC HD2 or a HTC Desire... but what can you expect from Windows Mobile 6.1?

From a brick to a fully functional phone for only $12.98. Bargain of the year!

Update
After a few days of living with the digitizer I have found that it's incredibly prone to scratching. I've been careful to keep it clean but still have 3 significant gouges out of the screen. So I'd definitely recommend a screen protector goes on straight away.

Windows Phone 7 Series

I've been experimenting and researching development on Windows Phone 7 Series. I've installed the CTP and written my first program! If you want to get started, look at this free book by Charles Petzold.

Here are some of my observations.

Dev Framework
You can only write apps using silverlight or XNA (Xbox development framework). This has some pretty big implications, such as the fact that all applications written for previous versions of windows mobile will not run on Phone 7.

All of them. Throw them away. All of those organisations who have built product and ip based on Windows Mobile will not be coming to the Phone 7 party with any advantage. In fact, most of the current applications will not even have a parallel in Phone 7.

It will be nice for people who are already familiar with Silverlight. So there might be some nice apps written targetting Silverlight. The downsides is that it will require a connection and the performance will be related to the speed of your network connection.

XNA might also bring some XBox devs across. But there's a fairly steep learning curve and isn't that accessable for noobs.

One really big advantage is that MS has taken a much stronger grip on the hardware. Their specs are much more stringent. For example there will only be two screen sizes allowed. Large and small. No more having to cater for 15 different screen sizes!

DataStorage
There is no database on the phone. Silverlight apps can access a sandbox storage location. The word I've seen on various forums is that you're supposed to use cloud for data storage and you can store simple data as xml in Isolated Storage. However, this guy (http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2010/03/sqlite-for-wp-7-series-proof-of-concept.html) has a POC with SQLLite running on Phone 7.

Target audience
The phone seems to be squarely targetted at the consumer. Most of the enterprise apps will mostly likely stay at version 6.5 and earlier. In a lot of ways, it looks like they've copied the iPhone but with bigger icons on the home screen.

Does the world need an iPhone clone with no applications currently written? Who knows.

The future of Mobile Development?

There are a number of companies out there that create products that synchronise data between a server and mobile devices. The type of synchronisation I want to talk about today is over GPRS.

Basically (very basically), a program is installed on the server back at the office. It monitors a database and if any changes are made, it sends the data out to the device over GPRS. Then a program on the device updates the local database.

One of the reasons for this approach is that GPRS is still too slow to have data requested from the server in real time. The local database is effectively a cache.

I forsee the day that WiFi coverage will be so extensive that we're not even going to need a GSM network. Hence products like this WiFi mobile phone.

Now I'm going to digress with a little trip down memory lane. Back in the early days of my programming career, we couldn't assume that the executing PC had a fast network connection. So we had to build complex data synchronisation products to get around this network limitation.

But as networks (both LAN and broadband internet connections) became faster and more prevalent, it became simpler to have a single data source and remote applications accessing the data in real time. Thus the spread of web based applications to the point that I haven't worked on a Windows Forms application for a very long time.

I hope you can see where I'm headed here. I'm not convinced that there is a future in data synchronisation across GPRS. I expect that once WiFi/3G connections are reliable and fast enough mobile applications will be replaced by web based applications. Especially as the newer generation of mobile web browsers get more sophisticated in their display options.

O2 Xda II Mini Part III

My Xda died today. Well, to be more precise, I killed it!

I was trying to free up memory on the internal storage by moving files to the storage card. One of the files I wanted to move was an application that's run as a Today screen plug in. It was in use, so I removed it from the today screen then copied it across to the storage card.

Then I had a brain fart and re-added it to the today screen. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The device crashed, then rebooted. But as it came up, it tried to draw the today screen which caused it to crash and reboot! Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

So I had to hard-reboot it, which is like a re-install the OS in desktop land. End up with a totally blank device. Now to re-install and re-configure all my apps :(

Windows Mobile 5.0

Yesterday I attended a Microsoft Developer conference about Windows Mobile 5.0. It was basically presenting what we'll be able to do when (if?) Windows Mobile 5.0, Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Compact Framework v2 are released.

The features are great. I've been developing on my Xda and it's really hard to do some things that seem so obvious. For example, it's impossible to tell if the backlight is on! WM5.0 provides lots of really useful APIs and events to detect things like this. It'll allow for much better applications for mobile devices.

The biggest feature they've missed is that you can't write managed Today screen plug ins. When you go to Pocket PC software sites, the majority of applications are... you guessed it... Today screen plug ins, so it seems amazing that they've not included this.

So if anyone's looking to get a PDA or smart phone soon, try to hang off until you can get one with Windows Mobile 5.0.

O2 Xda II Mini Part II

Last time I talked about my O2 XdaII Mini.

I'm pretty comfortable with my use of it. The 'Today' screen shows my upcoming appointments, any messages and my tasks. To display the tasks, I've installed a Today plugin called Task Plus. It shows tasks with more information than the standard task view. It also shows battery status.

I've also written some applications. One is a 'game' manager. I use it for playing Magic: The Gathering. It keeps track of the amount of damage I and my opponent has taken. It's a great app because I'm likely to have my phone with my and it saves having to write on paper or use beads.

The other is a budget. It keeps track of how much money I'm spending, which I find useful. It actually stores the data in a SQL database on the device!

The best app I've seen is one my friend Dave wrote. It's a scorecard for frisbee golf. Again, it saves having to carry a pen and paper around.

O2 Xda II Mini

I recently purchased an O2 XDA II mini. It's manufactured by HTC. It's also badged and sold as an iMate JAM.

I love it. I'm all for convergence. Where I used to carry around:
- A mobile phone (Nokia 6610)
- A 256MB USB flash memory stick
- A Palm Vx, which despite being old was still very capable.
- A paper based diary
- A flash based MP3 player

I now have just one device. It covers all these functions, plus it provides:
- A camera/video, albeit a really crap one
- Voice recording
- Masses of applications
- Wikipedia on the device if I'm ever curious about just about anything.

I also don't have to worry about synchronising people's contact details across my phone, palm and PCs. The Xda synchronises automatically with Outlook on my work and home computers.

Pros:
- Small form factor an ideal compromise between mobile phone and organiser with a useful screen
- I can write my own programs for it! This is one of the most important points for me.

Cons:
- If I ever want to just carry a mobile, it's a bit bulkier than my old mobile.
- Only 128MB RAM. I bought a 1GB expansion card, so that's okay :) I can't wait until they've got a multiGB hard disk built in.

Next time I'll talk about how I tend to use it and the applications I've written for it.