UPDATE: Because this site is in a state of suspended animation for the moment, I’ve disabled all comments as well (they were mostly being used by spammers).

“I have compressed all my audio files to 64 kbps MP3 file because I was using an MP3 player with a limited storage space back then. Now I was planning to buy a player with bigger space and I want to “uncompress” my 64 kbps audio files back to 256 kbps. Can I just use my converter software and convert all my audio files from 64 to 256 kbps, will it sound as good as it was before i compressed it? Or do I need to rip the files again one by one so I can achieve better quality?”

Unfortunately, you need to re-rip them again. Once you rip at 64 kbps, that’s all the data there is - everything else has been thrown away in order to get those files down to the smaller size. The best thing to do is rip at 256 kbps the first time, then using Windows Media Player, configure it so that it will convert to 64 kbps on the fly as it syncs (using this method), keeping your original files intact at the original bit rate. This will make the sync take longer, but ultimately it’s worth it. But in your case, it seems like you’ll have enough storage space for 256 kbps files, so you don’t need to bother with that.

One of the greatest things about using a Windows Mobile smartphone or PDA is that the operating system running on the device is more powerful and flexible than anything else out there today – and that means a lot of benefit to you as the owner. Personalization is one benefit of having a flexible operating system – in the same way that people using Windows on a desktop or laptop computer change their desktop background, system sounds, cursors, themes, and even the colour of application windows to make it more personal, Windows Mobile can deliver many of the same benefits. This article is going to cover some of the ways in which you can personalize your Windows Mobile smartphone or PDA. I won’t go into great detail about each method – think of this as a 50,000 foot view of what’s possible. In future articles I’ll explore the exact steps required to do these things.

At the most basic level, nothing is more personal to you than the information about your life, and the built-in applications allow you to do bubble that information up in various ways. On Windows Mobile Professional smartphones (devices with touch-screens, commonly called Pocket PCs), you can configure a variety of today screen plug-ins. On my Palm Treo 750 for instance, there are plug-ins that allow you show not only your next appointment, but also upcoming appointments as well – meaning you can see much of your day at a glance. The Tasks plug-in allows you to keep track of your to-do list, and you can specify whether you want to see only high-priority tasks, only tasks due today, only tasks that are overdue – or any combination of those. Your owner information can also be displayed, so if you happen to misplace the device you’ll have a better chance of getting it back. The Treo 750 in particular has some unique plug-ins that make the Today screen extremely useful. They include a single-line contact lookup plug-in, a speed-dial plug-in that can be configured with either photos or text (meaning you just tap on the picture of someone to call them), an SMS (text message) plug-in that allows for one-click access to your text messages, and even an online search plug-in that loads up Google’s mobile site and delivers you search results. Palm did a superb job in adding their brand of personalization to the Today screen.

If you’re looking for things more advanced than the default plug-ins, Today-screen plug-ins designed by software developers take things to the next level: there are plug-ins that show you the current weather, plug-ins that keep track of your stock prices, plug-ins that you can use to launch your favorite applications, plug-ins that display recent news feed (RSS) items, and plug-ins that allow you to see your entire daily schedule in a visual way. There are also plug-ins that will display a Google calendar, show the device battery life and available storage memory, and even plug-ins that do nothing but display pictures. Windows Mobile has a large number of developers creating software for the platform, so there are a lot of options out there for selecting the best combination of plug-ins to suit your personalization needs. A great place to start looking for plug-ins is the Windows Mobile Certified Software Catalog.

The Today screen story is a bit more complicated when talking about Windows Mobile Standard smartphones (the kind without touchscreens). They don’t have plug-ins that you can easily turn off and on like you can with Windows Mobile Professional devices, and customizing the Today screen requires editing an XML file – though I should note that there are an increasing number of tools to help make this process easier than before. Hopefully a Windows Mobile Standard evolves further it will eventually be as easy to use as Windows Mobile Professional in this regard.

Last, but certainly not least, personalization can be achieved through what I call the “sights and sounds” of Windows Mobile. Like most mobile phones, Windows Mobile smartphones can have custom ring-tones: they can be downloaded from your mobile phone network (T-Mobile, Cingular, etc.), but they can also be loaded directly off your computer. This is a great option that means you can take any song you own, trim the part you want to make your ring tone, and you instantly have the exact ring tone you want. Or why not make your own ringtone from scratch? With inexpensive music looping and sampling programs such as Sony’s Acid Music Studio ($69.95 USD MSRSP) you can create short songs from included libraries of hundreds of sound effects (called “loops”). That’s what I did when I created over 30 different ringtones available for download from Smartphone Thoughts. So that’s the sounds, what about the sights?

Themes are a way in which you can customize the look of your smartphone or PDA. Themes not only change the Today screen background, they also change the color of the top and bottom navigation bars on your device. There are countless themes available for Windows Mobile Professional smartphones and PDAs free online: Pocket PC Themes.com is one of my favorite resources, but there’s also PocketThemes.com, LittleThemes, and many others that can be found with a Live Search. Themes for Windows Mobile Standard smartphones are a bit less in number, because the tools for creating them haven’t been out as long, but a good place to start is at sites such as Mobile 9 , Kleinweder’s Skins, EkoPapers, and Juni’s Skins.

Those are a few of the ways to personalize your Windows Mobile smartphone and PDAs – go on, make that device uniquely yours!

People with Windows Mobile devices – whether they be network-connected smartphones with the latest EVDO or UMTS wireless technology, or PDAs using 802.11b WiFi – all have one thing in common: they want to get rid of all the wires. I can recall the days when PDAs required connecting to a phone line or CAT5 Ethernet cable in order to get Internet access (yes, I am getting old). Now that we have the wireless networking part more or less nailed, there’s just one more wire that’s got to go: the cable connecting headphones for listening to music. Helium Digital’s HDBT-700 Bluetooth headphones aim to do exactly that.

These over-the-ear headphones (weighing in at a light 50 grams) are Bluetooth 2.0 compliant, with a range of around 30 feet. It requires that the connected device supports A2DP or AVRCP Bluetooth profiles. Most modern Windows Mobile devices have support for both profiles, but you’ll want to double-check with your device manufacturer to make sure. The HDBT-700 uses a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery, with an estimated run time of 6.5 hours. That battery estimate seems about right to me, though I never did any scientific testing. A built-in microphone is also included, featuring echo-cancellation and noise suppression – this allows you to use it with instant messaging programs for sending short voice clips, voice command software, and other functions. I tested it with Microsoft Voice Command and it worked really well – I was able to go from listening to music to checking my upcoming appointments, all without having to touch my smartphone.

Dual pairing, another feature, allows the headphones to be paired with two devices: for most users this will be a mobile phone and an audio player of some sort. Unfortunately, since most digital audio players lack Bluetooth, most people will end up partnering with their mobile phones. Windows Mobile phones – when combined with a large storage card – make excellent digital audio and video players, especially when combined with some of the great third-party software out there today.

All of the controls for HDBT-700’s are on the right earpiece: next and previous allow you to go forward and backward, skipping songs quickly. There are plus (+) and minus (-) buttons as well – serving as a volume up/down in most applications. The center button functions as the play/pause button in Windows Media Player 10 Mobile. Pressing and holding the button is how you turn the headphones on, off, and initiate the Bluetooth pairing process. The pairing process with my Windows Mobile 5-based T-Mobil Dash was painless: I put the HDBT-700 headphones in pairing mode by pressing and holding the power button until it started to blink in alternating a red and blue flashing light pattern. Then on the smartphone I initiated a search for new Bluetooth devices – after a few seconds it found the headphones and after authenticating with the passkey (four zeros) the pairing was complete. Whenever Bluetooth on the smartphone is turned on, and the headphones are powered up, the connection is made automatically. The entire process is quite seamless.

So how do the Helium headphones sound? It really depends on what you’re used to – in my case, my day to day listening headphones are Ultimate Ears super.fi 5’s – small, in-ear headphones that block out 90% of outside sound and boast a dual-driver design that delivers superb sound and great bottom-end. But they’re also $250 USD and come with an incredibly irritating cable that never seems to go straight. It’s unfair to compare the HDBT-700’s to headphones like the super.fi 5’s, because they’re completely different form-factors. Clearly, anyone who wants the ultimate in sound fidelity isn’t going to go for the over-the-ears headphones – the HDBT-700’s appeal to a different type of person, someone who’s willing to accept less than great audio quality but gains all the benefits that Bluetooth headphones provide.

So with that proviso out of the way, we return to the question of how they sound: the answer is, pretty good, but it also depends on what kind of smartphone you have. I tested the headphones on two Windows Mobile 5 devices: a T-Mobile Dash, and a Treo 750. The results were interesting – on the T-Mobile Dash, I could hear mild distortion and static in every song (kind of like a radio being not quite locked into the right station), but only when the singing started, meaning it’s likely an audio frequency issue. On the Treo 750, the audio quality was just fine – there wasn’t any static at all. This is a frustrating issue of course, because no one wants to buy a new set of headphones and hear static mixed in with their music. My fellow MVP, Werner “Menneisyys” Ruotsalainen, has had a lot to say on this issue, so I’ll direct you to his write –up for more information on the topic.

The headphones can’t overcome the physical limitation of not being inside the ear canal though, nor completely encasing the ear, which means very limited bottom end signal. Music that sounds best would include anything that relies more on sonic highs and mids – think Celtic and vocal music – but anything rock-related doesn’t sound quite right, and you can forget about those drum and bass-only tracks. Because of the headphone design – hanging over your ears rather than going into your ear canal – these headphones are ill-suited for use in a noisy environment. I tested them in a variety of locations – sitting on my couch at home or in a library, the lack of noise blocking wasn’t an issue at all. On a plane right next to a window? As they say in Brooklyn, “fuggedaboutit!”” – the noise level reduced my music to pure sonic mush, even at maximum volume. That’s a problem that would plague any over-the-ear headphones though (including the horrible airplane headphones) and not a particular design flaw in the HDBT-700’s.

The HDBT-700’s can be purchased directly from Helium Digital for approximately $70 USD. The HDBT-750 is a $115 USD kit with headphones identical to the HDBT-700 but it also includes a Bluetooth adaptor that you can connect to any 3.5 mm audio jack to turn any device into a Bluetooth device.

Getting the Windows Live Search on your smartphone is easy: open up Internet Explorer Mobile and go to http://wls.live.com. You’ll be presented with a Live Search page that offers a download for the United States and the UK. For the purpose of this article I’ll be looking at the USA version. There’s a Windows Mobile download link, and when you select it you’ll have the choice between a Windows Mobile 5 download or a Windows Mobile 2003 and 2003 SE. The download is a 410 KB CAB file that should download in around 30 seconds over an EDGE connection (it will be faster if you have an EVDO or WiFi connection of course). The install takes around 400 KB of storage space, and since programs work faster when launched from main memory instead of storage cards, I’d suggest installing it to local memory since it’s not too large. The program is a bit hefty when loaded – it takes 10 seconds to launch on my Treo 750, and uses around 2.5 MB of program memory to run. It does, however, have an Exit function on the menu, allowing you to shut down the program when you’re finished with it to free up the RAM.

Once the program is loaded up, you have a few options: first, you select the location you’d like to search. Live Search has pre-set access to the big population centres in the USA by default: New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, and a few others. You can also search for any city you want, quickly sorted by geographical area. It’s impressive how they optimized the selection for one-handed (stylus-free) use: you can select “Chose A New Location” with the d-pad (control pad) on your device, then “Chose City”. It then switches to a list segmented into geographical zones around the United States: Midwest, Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, etc. You can drill down in the list by pressing right on the d-pad, or go back up if you press left. That means you can quickly go Northwest > Washington > ‘R’ Cities > Redmond and search Redmond, Washington. Equally impressive is the fact that once you’ve searched for a city this way, it adds it permanently to the “quick list” of cities, allowing you to access it again fast. Unfortunately there’s no way to remove cities, so I imagine the list might get fairly long if you’re adding new cities frequently.

Once you’ve selected your city, you have the option of searching based on categories, map, directions, or traffic.

Selecting Map will load up an aerial view of the location, zoomed out to show the city and surrounding area. By pressing the center button on the smartphone’s d-pad, it will put the program into zoom mode. A blue box will appear and the more you press the center button, the more it will zoom in. This is where you get to see perhaps the most impressive part of the technology behind Windows Live Search: the streaming map images. Instead of having to wait for the map to completely load before you can see it, the map loads in small segments – anywhere from four to twelve segments will load on the screen.

This means you can instantly start to see what you’re looking for, and over the next few seconds the screen fills up further, and the image sharpens up as well. When you press left, right, up or down with the d-pad, your view of the map will change, and it will update in a similar fashion. This allows you to quickly move around the map, and there’s an option for full-screen mode for an even more immersive experience.

You can toggle back and forth between the aerial view, which is made up of lines like a traditional map, or the satellite view which is a aerial photograph. The level of detail in areas that are fully captured by the satellites is impressive – in the example above you can very nearly discern the make and model of the vehicles in the parking lot. While details like that aren’t always necessary for finding a coffee shop, being able to really see the place you’re headed is a nice touch.

The Directions function is fairly self-explanatory: you can select a start and end location, and the software will give you a complete route with turn by turn directions. It lacks the audible prompts or re-routing features that a dedicated GPS solution has, so it’s most useful if you have someone helping you navigate and can read the driving directions to you. Also supported is traffic reporting – assuming that you live in a location that has traffic data the Live Search application can tap into. I used it looking at the Seattle area and it shows you the level of traffic using a colour-coded scale: green for light traffic, yellow for medium traffic, and red for heavy/grid-locked traffic. If you have a regular commute through a high-traffic area, this feature is a real sanity-saver.

If you live outside the United States or UK, you’ll still find the application to be useful – the maps (both street and aerial photography) are still available, though the directory of businesses won’t be there. I used this product myself while driving in the countryside around my home city of Calgary, Alberta and the basic map data was enough to allow me to navigate to my destination. This application isn’t meant to replace a full GPS navigation solution, rather, it’s meant to supplement a GPS solution by offering the directory look-up data and by being a portable, all-in-one search solution.

Ultimately much of the functionality in Live Search is limited by the speed of your smartphone’s data connection. If it has GPRS/EDGE, the basic text look-ups are fast enough, but the aerial satellite data takes a while to load – it works, but it requires more patience. On the other hand, if you have a fast EVDO or WiFi connection, you can zoom around the maps quickly without much delay in loading. Windows Live Search is one of the best-designed applications I’ve seen for the Windows Mobile platform in terms of being optimized for fast, one-handed use: exactly the type of scenario you’ll likely be in if you’re looking for something while on the go. If you search with this application, the odds are very good that you’ll find what you’re looking for. This is a must-have application that has a lot of room for growth, and after meeting with members of the team that designed this application, I’m excited about the direction they’re taking it.

I’ve always been a fan of Conduits applications - they tend to run fast, stable, and contain great functionality. I particularly like the addition of the task manager - that will help keep memory use under control.

Speaking is the most natural form of human communication, but paradoxically, it’s also the most difficult way for computers to understand us today (though someone with truly horrible handwriting might argue that point with me). Being able to control a computer with your voice has been the Holy Grail of computing for years, but we’ve only inched forward in the past few years – the main challenge is around context. We might say something into a microphone, but unless we mean it as a command, we don’t want the computer to act on it. One way around the problem of context is to limit the number and types of input commands – this makes it much easier for the software to understand what we’re asking it to do.

In this vein, Microsoft’s Voice Command 1.6 ($39.99 USD) is a highly-focused voice-based program that allows you to control various aspects of your Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC or Smartphone. Installing Voice Command is easy enough – it requires 4 MB of storage space, and once installed requires no training (a big plus). After installation, running the Voice Command Setup will allow you to configure several aspects of the program: which hardware button will start it up, how announcements are routed (Bluetooth headset only, Bluetooth if available, or Speaker only), whether or not the program will confirm a contact you’re dialing, announcing of reminders and callers, etc. Voice Command can do a lot, so the easiest way to learn how to use it is to activate it and say “Help”. You’ll be prompted to select a help topic: phone, contacts, media, calendar, Start menu, status, or general.

Some of the things Voice Command can do include:

• Announce your appointments for today or tomorrow;
• Start any application installed by saying “Start” then the application name;
• Dial a specific phone number;
• Dial a specific contact (”Call John at Work” for instance);
• Redial or call-back someone who phoned you;
• What time it is;
• What date it is;
• What the signal strength is;
• Listen to specific artists or albums from your music library;
• Announce the battery level;
• What phone calls you’ve missed;
• Change profile (Silent, Normal, etc.).

Voice Command can help with email and SMS (text) messages as well. It will read out some of the basics of your incoming email message: who it’s from and the subject line. With SMS messages, it will read the entire message for you. The unnatural tone and timing of the voice can make comprehension difficult though, so you have to concentrate to understand what is being said. I found the more I used Voice Command the more used to the voice I became, and understanding it was easier.

Listening to music is delightfully easy: using a pair of Helium Digital HDBT-700 Bluetooth headphones, I activated Voice Command and said “Play music”. The software responded by asking me if I wanted to play a certain artist, a certain album, or anything (meaning all music). I verbally responded with “Anything” and a few seconds later Windows Media Player 10 Mobile started up on my T-Mobile Dash and music filled my ears. It’s just as easy to say “Play The Beatles” (artist name), or “Play Bleed American” (album name) and it will queue up the music. Worth noting, however, is that you can’t specify a specific song or a genre of music, which seems like a strange oversight. Genre support, for instance, would be helpful when you felt like listening to a certain style of music.

Voice Command uses Windows Media Player 10 Mobile for music, but that also means that the metadata on your songs (artist, album name, etc.) has to be correct in order for the music to be found. Windows Media Player 11 on the desktop has a handy song and album look-up feature that can help you get your music organized. If you have hundreds or thousands of songs to fix, I strongly recommend a software program called MediaMonkey. It’s free and allows you to lookup albums on Amazon.com to get cover art, fix file names, etc.

Music is a particularly interesting example of how Voice Command can help with a common scenario: let’s say you’re listening to music over Bluetooth headphones, and a phone call comes in. Windows Media Player will rapidly reduce volume and pause the song. By pressing a button on your headset (this will vary from headset to headset), you can pick up the call. When finished, you press the same button to hang up the call, and after a few seconds your music will resume. That’s slick!

I don’t know if this is unique to the combination of the T-Mobile Dash and the Helium Digital headphones, but I encountered a strange glitch when coming out of a phone call that results in the music dropping to really poor quality (think bad AM radio) for a second, then coming out of the speaker on the phone for a second, then finally it comes back into the headphones at the proper quality. Also, when receiving an SMS message, after announcing the message the music never came back on. Sometimes pressing Next on my headset would re-activate the music. Other times I had to press the Play/Pause button to get it going again (after receiving an email for instance).

Overall, Microsoft Voice Command 1.6 is a useful program that, while limited in some ways, offers a unique way to interact with your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. If Microsoft can continue to improve it, fixing some of the glitches and adding a more natural-sounding voice, the software will be even more useful in the future.

If travelling is part of your work or personal routine, an application such as WorldMate 2006 can greatly enhance the travel experience. Clinton has written a detailed review that covers many aspects of this rich program - check it out!

Engadget has some very interesting news on this new Windows Mobile device - it looks a lot like a Samsung device that was out a few years ago that bombed. Now that Windows Mobile is such an established platform, a device such as this might succeed in the market. There’s certainly a lot to be said for a device that has a large screen, a decent keyboard, and far more battery life than any laptop could give you. This is one device I’ll be watching with particular interest!

‘Tis the season, and Microsoft is offering up some free holiday-themed ringtones for you. Download ‘em now!