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.

Introducing systemBash’s first Windows Mobile theme: Black Grass.

This totally free theme features a grass background and a black menu bar. Text is white and accents are green. It in meant for pocket PC / Windows Mobile version 5 and above.

In case you are wondering what the clock/center menu uses, it is phoneAlarm and uses this theme.

I received an interesting mail from CallWave this morning:

Great news: CallWave is reinventing voicemail – again! — with two fantastic enhancements to the CallWave service:

1. VtxtSM: A new feature that transforms your voicemail into a concise text message that you can read on your cell phone or email.
2. PhonePage: A permanent, searchable web-based archive that lets you treat all your mobile messages just like email. Use your PhonePage to read, hear and save your messages, send texts, call back, organize your contacts and more.

You have been selected to participate in the CallWave VtxtSM and PhonePage Beta Test. There’s no charge to participate. All we ask is that you agree to provide feedback and answer a brief survey after using it for a few days.

If you would like to try the new CallWave VtxtSM and PhonePage features, simply reply to this email with your mobile number, and tell us you want to be included. We’ll notify you when it’s activated.

Thanks for using CallWave!

Sincerely,

The CallWave Team

I’ve been using CallWave’s Visual Voicemail feature for a few months now. It is great - instead of using Cingular/AT&T’s voicemail system, I switched to CallWave’s system. It has a number of features AT&T simply does not have - including e-mails with voicemail attached as a wave file, and SMS notification of voicemail which replaces the “Voicemail” notifier on my phone.

This service that CallWave is going to be testing - Vtxt and Phonepage - sounds like it is going to be speech-to-text detection of voicemail messages. I’m curious as to how accurate the translation will be because in the past PC based speech recognition has been hit or miss, but a lot of time has passed and maybe it is a bit more accurate than it used to be.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Click here to enter into the CallWave Vtxt beta!

I recently installed the demo version of Teksoft Smartbar. Instead of doing my own review, I will point to the 4WM Review of Teksoft Smartbar. I came up to the same verdict:

It is a nice piece of software. It gives you a lot of functions missing in Windows Mobile - a task manager, better close button, a “desktop”, and screen capture. However, it must be buggy as it great slows down and even locks up your device frequently.

It also show a program called SimPolicy - which I am not sure if it is an actual Windows Mobile program or something shown by this program, but it frequently used up my CPU.

This bugginess in the software will have you tearing your hair out in no time, and you will find yourself uninstalling it. Stay away until they have released a version with less bugs and better performance!