Removing lint from 2.5mm jack - unjamming microswitch

My (awesome!) phone is "naked" in my pocket all the time so lint, & gunk get into the 2.5mm headset / audio jack at the bottom:



And the microswitch inside would occasionally jam, so that the phone would never come out of "headset mode," even after the jack is removed. One day last year it just would not come out of "headset" mode at all. So for several months I have been walking around with a bluetooth headset all the time because the phone could not function without a bluetooth headset or a wired headset. It was very inconvenient. Finally, today, I started searching for a way to unjam the microswitch and found it here. live.com search is awesome! To unjam a 2.5mm jack microswitch:

• Start playing a music file or anything that should go through the main speaker
• Make sure it is playing by attaching headphones to the jack, then remove the jack.
• Soak a Q-tip in WD-40 and twist the cotton end into a tiny corscrew that fits in a 2.5mm hole.
• Twist the WD-40 soaked cotton into the 2.5mm hole and twist for three minutes.
• Put the headset in to make sure music is still playing
• Repeat if necessary

It works!

activesync via bluetooth

1 – Update to the latest windows mobile device center
2 – Follow these instructions to add and change the registry entries on the PC to COM5.
3 – Pair the devices
3 – On the phone, UNCHECK the [] Activesync capability the PC offers when the devices pair. Hit done, done, done.
4 – On the phone, in Activesync, select “connect via Bluetooth” and follow the prompts (add serial connection to PC).

This voodoo to make it work is insane but it does work and I can now sync outlook to my phone, yippee!

wishlist for my mobile phone

1 - I would like to add a USB wifi device.  Are there drivers for them available for windows mobile 5 or 6?

2 - I would like to get the camera to work better. Is there better camera software available?  The pictures have good resolution but the optics, colors, contrast, and focus are crap.  Can one attach external optics?

3 - I would also like to buy a bluetooth GPS device for use with streets and trips or tomtom or garmin  or other map software. Any recommendations?

Piping Audio from Phone to Car

I am listening to a great audio book (Beton by Thomas Bernhard) in my phone. I actually have a few queued up in the phone to listen to them when I jog or otherwise have time. But my car has a CD player and radio and no easy way to get at the audio content in my phone. What I currently do is play CDs from the library or burn CDs with audio book content. But then I cannot continue listening to the same book and have a few going at the same time.

So my thought was to have the car stereo bond via bluetooth to my phone as a stereo headset. And I looked around for some way to bluetooth from my phone to the car stereo. My product search came up with some bluetooth to FM transmitters but they were rated poorly because the FM transmitters are too weak. And they were quite expensive. So I looked around for other alternatives. I finally decided to get a "full range" FM transmitter that has an audio-in jack and a 2.5 mm --> 3.5 mm converter to plug in to my phone. My wife had an old mounting bracket that mounts on the vent tines on the car's air conditioning vent and my phone mounts snugly onto it, just above the cigarette lighter. I ordered this device with some trepidation because it costs only $11.50 (including shipping and handling).

It arrived this week and it works perfectly! I am now playing audioboks from my phone through the device. And it has a built-in mp3 player that plays from SD cards or USB flash drives. I tested both and they work perfectly as well. The "full range" FM transmitter has no static at all at the lower range (87.5) but had a bit of static at 107.9. I am really thrilled with the device. Now I need some way to pad it when I pack it up for trips where I rent cars.

It's really cool. I love it.

Encode Videos for phone

I was trying to get DrDivx settings tweaked to encode videos for my phone and I started looking online for the optimal settings when I found a French program called "Pocket divx Encoder." It does exactly what I want and it is very fast. You just point it at the video and it creates a divx encoded version optimized for the smartphone (or other hand-held device). Cool.

StopWatch-8 - Cool Stopwatch for my Phone

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Windows Mobile 6.1 apparently does not ship with a standard stopwatch with the base OS release so I downloaded the first one I found, which happens to be really cool. It is actually 8 different stop watches on one screen. Each lane of the track gets a separate area of the screen and each one can be separately started, stopped, lap-time frozen, etc. Or you can start them all at the same time (the usual race timing) and stop them separately by pushing the button on the phone of the lane number. The application is actually small, elegant C# code that uses the compact .NET framework.

Best Media Player for Windows Mobile

I finally found a media player that does what I want. It plays divx movies as well as the .avi, .mpg, .mp4, and other formats. The standard player (Windows Media Player) that comes with windows mobile did not work well on my older slower phone. I have to transcode the videos and even then it would often just freeze and not play the videos. I use DrDivx to transcode DVDs to .divx format. A 2-hour movie typically uses under 150 MB of space on the 2 GB card I now have in the phone. I shall be traveling again this month so I loaded some "guy" movies that the family does not want to see into the phone ("Sweeny Todd" and the latest "Rambo"). I plan to watch them in the airport lounges and on the plane. There is still a free version of this player -- TCPMP available for download.

best ebook reader on windows mobile

I finally found a great etext reader for the books I read in my phone -- allreader v1.31. It has 16 bookmarks, automatically bookmarks your spot between reboots, auto-scrolling at an adjustable pace, great font support, screen rotation, etc. It reads all text formats including .lit, .pdb, .pdf, .txt, .htm, etc.

It is apparantly developed in Russian and the documentation is scarce; however it is a great program. It has no installer; you just drop the gh.exe on to the phone and you're good to go.

Now I need a decent movie viewer; windows media player won't play feature length videos, so I have retreated to the mobile divx player until I find a decent video player for my phone.

Living the Windows Mobile Life Style

I went jogging at noon and had just made it up the hill where 40th St dead ends into bridle trails park

(the park was nice in the sun) when I got a call from the admin that I was supposed to present and facilitate a "human performance consultation" in half an hour.

I was listening to Bach, using my phone as an mp3 player and those groovy a2dp bluetooth stereo headphones. When the phone rang, I pushed the button on the headphone and it picked up the call; I had never used the headphones as a bluetooth headset before. The microphone apparantly sucks but we were able to communicate.

So I ran (quickly) back to work, prepared the hand-outs and questions, and went to the meeting. I love this phone. I plan to add home movies and slide shows to show relatives when I fly east next week.

I sometimes wish the phone had wifi or gps (or I had a data plan) but mostly I am thrilled about not paying the ridiculously high rates to the phone carriers.

My phone runs Windows!

A good friend of mine at Microsoft took a job in Microsoft China and the company got him a new phone. He had no use for his old one and gave it to me. I was very happy with my old Nokia 3220b. It has great reception; it is small. The battery lasts 10 days. It is relatively rugged. And I put some extra Java games and text things in it using the data cable. However I decided to try out the HTC Tornado which AT&T/Cingular labels the "2125." The reason I tried it out is that it is the same size and shape as my tiny Nokia and it has no silly "touch screen" (I can't stand those phones). The gadget freaks at work all have the new "Tilt" touchscreen with slide-out keyboard or the older models that lack a GPS and high-resolution camera. My wife uses one of them as well. They are bulky, fragile, and stupid (a two-handed phone?).

The reviews on the 2125 are mixed. Many people have the same problem as my friend, namely that the joystick in the middle of the phone sticks. When the phone arrived, I unlocked and flash upgraded to the latest wm6, installed all the usual suspect stuff (office, games). I found, purchased, and installed 9-way keypad to overcome the joystick stickiness and it works better than a functional joystick! (It includes copy/paste functionality and some other features).

I tried out the “pocket informant” calendar replacement my wife runs in her phone but that program is too big and slow for this phone and I don’t need to coordinate 7 calendars so I don’t need 99% of the features she uses. I deleted that application.

I used drdivx to convert NFL afc and nfc championship games from 10 GB mpg2 movies to 250K pocket-mobile divx and I installed the wm6 divx player on the phone. I watched them at the airport and on planes during my last trip. I don't like the divx player and plan to replace it as soon as I find a better one.

I own a Kyocera wireless Bluetooth a2dp stereo headphones that doubles as a Bluetooth hands-free mic and headset. I love the head phones (very good sound quality, very comfortable on the ears, and battery life is awesome); they Bluetooth bonded perfectly the first time with the phone so the phone is also now my mp3 player. I have a bunch of music on the storage card and also an audio book. I love it!

I never owned a camera phone before and started travel logging photos during a recent business trip. I also capture whiteboard and poster results from my class with the camera phone. I also captured a few videos but the quality is very poor.

I have e-text of a book I was reading so I stuffed that file into the phone and now I read it from the phone’s screen instead of paper (much lighter, always with me, etc.). E-text is very small so I have the next book in the series on the phone as well. I am looking for a better e-book reader than pocket-IE or ms-word; it appears the e-book readers all want you to web in to their site and buy e-books. I just want an ebook reader that will read files instead. I need it to remember my place (book mark) when I reboot the phone so I don’t have to scroll down to where I was.

Similarly, I would prefer a media player that lets me drag mp3 or video files to the phone's storage card and watch / listen to them. The concept of using the PC's media player to "sync" is silly. I was able to create playlists on the phone with some classical music and some Carla Burni songs but I don't know how to save / edit them yet. I actually like Microsoft's media player for the quality of the media (it uses the entire screen; divx player does not). But the interface is really difficult for me.

One thing missing is a GPS. The "tilt" has a GPS and it works great with the map programs, both online and offline (Pocket Streets 'n Trips). The other thing I miss is wifi. I can sync and get "net" via bluetooth but wifi has a longer range and works where I don't have a computer that does have net and bluetooth.

I really like the form factor of the 2125. It is much smaller and thinner than the 8125 / tilt / wing / mda family of phones

Here is a short video of my 4-year old that I took with the phone today: