If you are like me, as soon as you start using Instant Messaging (Octrotalk, Windows Live Messenger, IM+, Palringo) on your Windows Mobile Device – your battery life goes out the window. I’m talking, 12 hrs max. That is not a good thing for a mobile device where you need it to last at least a full day, if not multiple days.

The problem is that IM networks need to remain connected – a ‘heartbeat’ signal is sent over the network to ensure the client is still online, and so that if you receive any instant messages they are delivered to you, well, instantly.

The reason text messages do not eat up battery life is because the cell phone network does not require your phone to have a heartbeat data connection to the cellular network – if a text message is sent to you, your phone picks it up when it communicates with the cell phone towers over the “control connection” – which all cell phones use to keep track of which cellular tower it is in range of (for more information on how SMS text messages work, see Howstuffworks).

Apparently this problem is due to IPv4 and how most devices use Network Address Translation to route traffic to your phone. This is where your phone has a private IP and keeps a connection open with a main server, using a keep alive signal, to maintain connectivity. According to this talk from Nokia, IPv6 solves this problem since there are enough IP addresses to assign each device a unique one. No longer will they need to juggle this IP, meaning that there is a substantial savings in battery time.

It can’t come a moment too soon. This has really made me look forward to the coming IPv6 transition. Even though IPv6 is a few years away, services are slowly coming online and eventually a ‘critial mass’ will propel adoption of the new protocol across all installation.

When I bought the Nokia N800 a key feature is not only the ability to surf the internet with Wifi but also to pair it with your phone via bluetooth and access the internet anywhere. have a Cingular 8525 (I guess now an AT&T 8525) which has 3G internet available, but it did not work out of the box with the N800.

To begin with some definitions, there are 2 ways that you typically connect to a phone for internet. Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Networking) and Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network). Bluetooth DUN is the “old” way to connect, and some of the updates Microsoft is pushing out to their Windows Mobile devices are disabling it. Unfortunately, this is the way that the N800 uses to connect to the internet.

To fix this problem, some maemo hackers put together a package called “maemo-pan“. This package enables the ability to connect to a bluetooth PAN and use the shared internet. The announcement and directions are here. In summary:

• Go to the system preferences and add your phone in the phone settings. Do not enter the wizard for configuring the dialup settings. PAN does not use them.
• Start internet sharing on your phone. It depends on your phone how and where to do this. On Windows Mobile 5, open the Start menu and select “internet connection sharing” from there.
• Make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your internet tablet. Now open the connection dialog and you will see that there is a new connection called “Bluetooth-PAN”. Select it and you will be connected to the internet via PAN.
• When you’re finished, just close the connection the usual way. Wasn’t this easy?

Now on the 8525, this didn’t work for me flat out. I was using rom named “vp3G” which was Windows Mobile 6.0 which was released before the official AT&T one. I don’t know if this was causing my problem or not. I couldn’t get the N800 to find the 8525. I could get the 8525 to find the N800 but I still could not get bluetooth pan working.

I decided to flash the 8525 to a new cooked rom, because it had been several months since I had done so. To hedge my bets, I picked a ROM that included the old Bluetooth DUN package. There is an excellent webpage with far more information than I could provide on the subject of Flashing your 8525/Hermes – see MrVanx’s ROM Flashing Guide here. I chose Schap’s WM6.1 4.40 ROM. After the flash was complete – I tried to pair the two and had much better results.

I first paired them and it seemed to take this time. After that, I click “Internet Sharing” in the Programs on the 8525 and enabled it. Then I went onto the N800 and selected “bluetooth-pan” as the type of connection. Voila – it worked! I was surfing on a nice 3G connection. So for anyone out there trying to get this work without success – keep trying! It definately works but takes some configuration.

On a side note – being able to access an internet tablet via SSH is very cool. Here is top while playing Borat:

Mem: 124908K used, 1920K free, 0K shrd, 8K buff, 39452K cached
Load average: 1.56 1.20 0.98
PID USER STATUS VSZ PPID %CPU %MEM COMMAND
1574 user RW 26000 1573 69.7 20.4 mplayer
742 root SW< 15132 331 5.5 11.9 Xomap
864 root SW< 2176 331 2.3 1.7 esd
1573 user SW 11788 1 1.1 9.2 atabake
1592 root RW 1960 1578 0.9 1.5 top
1556 user SW 24556 1 0.3 19.3 python
788 root SW< 0 6 0.3 0.0 dsp/0
594 messagebus SW< 2428 331 0.1 1.9 dbus-daemon
1018 user SW< 40840 943 0.0 32.1 maemo-launcher

Downloading a CAB file to install onto your Windows Mobile device can be a pain – after downloading the cab file to your desktop, you need to first copy it to your device, then find the cab file to install and then proceed to install it.

CABviaActiveSync is a simple, free program that adds a context menu to automatically parse the cab file on your desktop and install it via activesync. This can save you a bunch of steps and is incredibly handy if you are like me and are always installing/uninstalling programs to check out.

Download CABviaActiveSync from Modaco.

This happened on a few of my accounts – specifically the IMAP accounts on my Windows Mobile 6 device. Apparently this was a problem back with Windows Mobile 2003 but it seems to have resurfaced in Windows Mobile 6.

Even though all messages in an account are read; the “1 unread message” message still shows up on your Today screen. This happens when the internal unread message count becomes de-synced with the real message count. Instead of polling the server for unread messages, Windows Mobile keeps an internal database/registry key with this number. This problem also manifests itself in having “-1″ unread messages or another off-count.

Luckily, it is pretty easy to fix. Download this program from freewareppc. Transfer and run the .exe from your device. It analyzes your accounts and fixes the internal database “unread” count.

Meebo, which I have recently been turned on to, yesterday released an iPhone client which is basically a web interface to their chat website (which integrates AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, gtalk, and more). It looks great, take a peek:

That is great that they are developing this and I applaud them for their efforts of releasing updates on mobile devices.

Now, maybe I have iPhone envy, but wouldn’t it make sense to release this for Windows Mobile since the market share that Windows Mobile has is MUCH greater than iPhone? According to Gartner, Windows Mobile shipped a little over 3 million devices in the 1st quarter of 2007 alone (and that number does not even include “Smartphone” devices). iPhone, according to their own estimates [MacNewsWorld], will sell a million units by Sept 30th.

I asked Meebo about their plans for Windows Mobile. Here is the response I received from Sue:

As far as a Windows Mobile version of meebo, it’s
something that we’ve thought about and are interested in, but at the
moment we don’t have development time and resources to add support for
every device we’d like to.

Here is where it gets tricky. There may be a great market penetration for Windows Mobile – but it is not easy to develop a web app for it because there is no standardized browser platform. Sure, you have Internet Explorer Mobile, but let’s face it – IEM is program is not very good at rendering web pages and would be a nightmare to develop for. Each version of Windows Mobile has differences in IEM that designers would have to be conscious of. The other browsers that Windows Mobile users have the option of using: Opera Mobile, Netfront, Minimo – do not have enough market penetration to make it development worthwhile. [on a sidenote, Opera Mobile is the best browser for Windows Mobile, give it a try if you haven't already.]

Hence, we have the major difference between Windows Mobile and iPhone OS. Windows Mobile, although an “open” system that allows developers to create their own programs, has the problem of having a high cost to develop because you need to have Windows Mobile programming experience.

On the other hand, the iPhone, with it’s “Closed” OS, has a standardized browser that works well and is easy to write web code for. Web publishers around the world are free to write code for it in their native programming languages because the browser is the component that renders the graphics and takes care of the network.

So how is this problem resolved? Nintendo seems to have fixed this very same issue by offering Opera for Wii via the Wii Shop channel. Wii users who install this browser have many options available out there for web interfaces that are designed specifically for the Opera browser on Wii – most notable of these is Orb, which has a beautiful interface for the Wii. Microsoft, ever the profitable company it is, wants users to use IE on Windows Mobile and therefore bundles IEM.

Microsoft needs to get with the program and make their browser easier to write for and more standards compliant. If that doesn’t happen, then we are definitely looking at an iPhone future for mobile devices.

If you use Windows Mobile, please contact Meebo and let them know that you’d like to see a Windows Mobile version of Meebo!