If you can access the internet fine using PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) on your Windows Mobile device over Edge or 3G, but when you switch to Wifi Internet Explorer always times out (It says “Loading…”) - then you are probably dealing with the dreaded “hard coded proxy” problem. In this situation you have Wifi wireless enabled and Opera and other internet applications work fine - but PIE will not work.

The issue is that PIE is trying to connect to the internet via a proxy, however if you are using WiFi there is no need for this and the proxy server can not identify you since you are not on AT&T’s (Cingular’s) network.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

The default setting that forces the proxy to be used is:

"EnableAutoDetect"=dword:00000000

Change to:

"EnableAutoDetect"=dword:00000001

Do a soft reset on your device and PIE should now be able to access the internet again!

Windows Mobile 5 did not seem to have an easy way to have YouTube mobile videos (3gp files streaming over rtsp protocol) play to your phone.

However with Windows Mobile 6 Professional and HTC’s “StreamingPlayer” software - playing YouTube Mobile videos, at least through PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) is easy.

If you don’t have HTC’s StreamingPlayer - check here. After installing the software, you may also need to modify your registry in order to allow rtsp streams to be opened by the player. Here is a link to the registry entries you need to make - again courtesy of XDA-Developer’s forum.

Save the above text to a .reg file, and import to your device (for example, using RegEdit for WM6)

Hopefully if all went well - when you visit http://m.youtube.com, and click play video, the HTC player will launch and play the video. After the video is done the player will automatically close and bring you back to the browser.

Note that for the above to work, you need to either have wifi access or an unlimited data plan for your wireless account - because streaming video WILL take up a lot of data!

Update 8/8/2007:

Screenshots!

Main Youtube Mobile Screen on WM6

Video Page on WM6

Video Playing

In Landscape mode - you can see the quality of the video is not that great even over WiFi

For another great article on getting this working, check here.

If you try to use Z-index with Internet Explorer (I hear this is a problem on both 6 and 7), you may have problems getting it to “listen” when Firefox seems to handle z-index just fine.

The problem is a bug in IE which does not render z-index properly all of the time. If you just use z-index: XXX and do not have a position tag, then it does not work. By adding “position: relative” or “position: absolute” tag to your CSS div tag, it magically works!

Thanks for wasting several hours of mine IE.

See here and here for others with this problem!

I recently purchased the Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. The base applications are alright, but if you really want to use it to it’s full potential there are several “Must have” applications for it. I couldn’t find any sites that had a list like this, so I thought I would put one together.

System Administration

1. PHM Registry editor - (free) - This allows you to edit your registry, along with backing up and restoring it. I would recommend doing a backup as soon as you get your phone in case something goes wrong!

2. .NET VNC Viewer - (free) - Allows you to connect to a PC with VNC Server over the network.

Usability

3. rlToday - (free) - Adds a clock, calendar, and more to your today screen. Fully skinnable to your liking. Also displays registry keys, which then allows you to show if you have new messages or your phone signal.

4. PhoneAlarm - (US$24.95) - Skinnable today screen plugin which shows new messages, voicemails, missed called. Can also control Bluetooth and Wifi. Also allows you to schedule profiles for your phone, which control volume, message alerts and the like. It is great because you can have your phone automatically turn off rings for nighttime, or quickly set to a “Meeting” mode which sets your phone to vibrate.

5. SPB Mobile Shell - (US$29.95) - If you want to forgo designing your plugins to make the today screen a simple information screen (as I have) this this software is a good drop-in replacement. When you wake up your phone, it shows a clock, signal information, mails, weather, and upcoming appointments. It also replaces your normal menu with a “large font” version that makes it easy to navigate with one hand. However, there is a problem with this software. On my Cingular 8525 it causes the phone to freeze frequently, making a soft reset necessary. So, try out the demo before purchasing this software.

Internet Applications

6. Opera Mobile - (US$24, Demo available) - This mobile browser kicks Pocket Internet Explorer’s ass. Opera Mobile has single column rendering, javascript support, and more, all of which PIE lacks.

7. Google Maps Mobile - (free) - This mapping software kicks ass. You can get directions, display a road or aerial map, search for businesses, show traffic, connect your GPS, and more. All for one low cost price.

8. Microsoft Live Search for Mobile - (free) - A really nice mobile suite. Give you one hand access to a Category search (for example: restaurants, shopping, transportation, etc.), mapping (road or aerial), directions, and more. GPS access is also included. Live Search has a slight edge over Google Maps Mobile. It has the ability to go full screen, and also includes a nicer interface to the keys on the phone, allowing better one handed map browsing.

9. Boopsie - (free) - This little known application is one of the best things since sliced bread. If you are a nerd like me, sometimes you have contests with your friends to see who can look up a movie name, or who was that guy in some movie, or where in the world is Estonia. Using this software, you launch the program, select your search category, such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Dictionary.com and many more, and start typing your search term. As you are typing, it will narrow down the words so as soon as there is one entry left, you hit enter and it will bring up the page on that term. It is a really fast way to search for any kind of information you can think of. Highly recommended.

Multimedia

10. Orb.com - (free) - First you install Orb to your home PC. Then you poke holes through your firewall to allow access to your digital media. Then you access the Orb portal at mycast.orb.com. You can stream any media you want off of your home PC, and onto your mobile device. This includes LIVE TV if you have a tuner card in your PC. The only tricky part is that you need to use a web browser to access your media, so it is not exactly easy to access your content if you have a large library.

Bonus - if you have a Wii, Orb has customized their portal to work with Wii. It will play your local content over the Internet Channel using a flash applet. It plays all of your music (with album art) and also video and Live TV.

11. PocketPlayer - (US$19.95, Demo Available) - This is the best music player I’ve found for Windows Mobile. It has “iPod” like menus which allow you to scroll through your music on your memory card. But, unlike what the iPod is capable of doing, it has many other functions. You can add Podcasts, which it will download and stream over your net connection, it will play some video (mostly WMV, it is not a great video player, see the next item) and also play music over uPnP so you can play music off of your Orb server, for example.

12. CorePlayer - (US$19.95) - This media player is not free, but it is hands down the best video player for Windows Media. It supports a lot of codecs, including H.264 (AVC), MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, WMV, MJPEG, Matroska, TS, PS, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, NSV. It also plays audio files, but it does not seem to have a library function and I found PocketPlayer to be superior in this regard. I’ve heard that you can use TCPMP (which is no longer seems to be in development and who’s website is currently down) plus a few plugins, but I found this media player to be much better and worth it for the time you would have spent.

Games

13. ScummVM - (free) - The SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) Engine runs classic games such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Since these games are not made for high resolution, they are perfect for the QVGA resolution of a Windows Mobile screen.

14. Pocket UFO - (free) - PocketUFO is a “pixel perfect” remake of the game X-COM UFO Defense (X-COM Enemy Unknown), which is one of the best games of all time. Like SCUMMVM, these games were not meant for the high resolution screens of today, but translate perfectly to the PocketPC.

Windows Desktop

15. ActiveSync - (free) - You probably already have this installed if you have a Windows Mobile device but I thought that this list would be incomplete without it.

16. ThemeGenCE - (free) - This is a little complicated to use but you can really cusomize your Windows Mobile theme. It allows you to grab the current screen from your device, and completely customize the colors and background for free. There is a tutorial for ThemeGenCE which describes how to use it a bit better if you are lost.

17. GetPDAScreen - (free) - Allows you to take screen captures from your PocketPC to a PC connected via ActiveSync.

Apache’s mod_proxy module is simply one of the best Apache modules out there. With it, you can do all sorts of things that you usually would not be able to do if you are behind a firewall or other limited network situations.

A problem that recently came up for me was how Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) needs to run on an exchange server, however my linux server is the one that faces the internet (I have the firewall forward the ports to this server). I also purchased an SSL certificate for one domain, so I wanted to use this certificate to access OWA with a proper validating certificate.

All sounds well and good. Using this mod_proxy configuration should work:
ProxyPreserveHost On

#OWA
ProxyPass /exchange https://exchangserver.example.com/exchange
ProxyPassReverse /exchange https://exchangeserver.example.com/exchange
ProxyPass /Exchange https://exchangeserver.example.com/exchange
ProxyPassReverse /Exchange https://exchangeserver.example.com/exchange
ProxyPass /exchweb https://exchangeserver.example.com/exchweb
ProxyPassReverse /exchweb https://exchangeserver.example.com/exchweb
ProxyPass /public https://exchangeserver.example.com/public
ProxyPassReverse /public https://exchangeserver.example.com/public
ProxyPass /iisadmpwd https://exchangeserver.example.com/iisadmpwd
ProxyPassReverse /iisadmpwd https://exchangeserver.example.com/iisadmpwd

Problem - it works ok - except in IE it will prompt you for the password indefinately and not allow you in. In Firefox (Mozilla) it rejects your password, until you hit cancel, then enter your password and it finally allows you in.

To fix this issue, you need to disable “Integrated Windows Authentication”. In the IIS administration panel, go to the website for your exchange server (”Default site” by default) and find the exchange share (This is most likely “Exchange” and “Public”). From there, right click, go to Properties->Directory Security->Anonymous Access and Authentication Control. Make sure “Basic Authentication” is checked while “Integrated Windows Authentication” is unchecked. Do this for any other Exchange shares. This allows authentication to work OK.

Second problem… in OWA, in Internet Explorer only, when you try to view your inbox the “Loading…” message appears indefinately. Microsoft’s Knowledgebase Article 280823 has a few workarounds for this problem, none of which worked for me. OWA apparently has two modes that it runs in, “rich” and “reach” modes. The “rich” client, which it uses for Internet Explorer, can have issues when running behind a firewall. It uses http-dav components which are not passed through correctly.

Now a fix, let’s make sure all clients run in “reach” mode! Using apache, we can hard-code the User agent that will hit the Exchange server. We use the mod_header module of apache, so make sure you compile it in with –enable-headers. Note: this only works with Apache 2.0. Once you have this compiled in, let’s set the User agent:
RequestHeader set User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7)"
You can use whatever you’d like in the user-agent string, as long as Outlook Web Access does not think it is IE, then it will serve the “reach” client.

After correcting all of the above issues, Outlook Web Access finally works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.