Over on XDA Developers someone has taken a bootable copy of Linux and made it run Android, that’s right, Google Android, on Windows Mobile phones. It’s a simple hack to run and easy to install. Get all the files and follow the instructions on this site and you should be in business.
Remember this will be a bit buggy and you won’t be able to get to all your applications or your contacts (found this out through my own discovery). On my HTC Touch the right directional button opened up context menus, the left directional button went back to the previous screen, and the camera button brought up the onscreen keyboard. I sent and received an SMS with no problem but when I told an incoming call to go to voicemail the vibrate in my phone stuck and I had to take the battery out to restart it.
The distro runs in RAM so you don’t have to worry about it running all the time, all you have to do to quit it is to perform a soft reset and you will be back to WM. But any time you are ready to show off your Android phone, just run the Haret boot loader and in a few minutes you will be ready to wow.
For years the eastern world have been using QR (Quick Response) Codes to point users in the right direction, bringing them URLs, contact information, and text at the scan of a 2D barcode. But us in the west have been blissfully unaware of all that QR Codes can do for us, up until now. There are more places adopting QR Codes, especially online where it is easy to make your own code for whatever need you might have, and for those of us with Windows Mobile phones it’s been hard finding an app that will read the codes as most of them are in Java. But, fear not young technophile, I-nigma has brought a reader forward that just might do the job!
The I-nigma Reader is an application for Windows Mobile and does exactly what it was meant to — read and decrypt QR Codes to make them useable. Just download the app to your device, install, and run. The only screen, besides options, is the camera viewer, which you need to scan in your code. You don’t have to perfectly line up the code for the reader to pick it up and decrypt, actually it will probably decrypt and display the code’s message before you even get the whole QR Code in the viewer, just move it towards it and let the app do the rest. It will then switch to a display page where it will let you open the URL, display the message, call the number, or whatever else the QR Code is encrypted to show.
The reader works, that’s it, it just works. The only gripe I have about it is that it flips the camera over so you have to kind of work upside-down and backwards, so it’s a little different at first. Other than that, though, it’s a great little app that does what it does wonderfully. I-nigma Reader is freeware from I-nigma, no strings attached. You can check to see if your device is supported here, although it seems that pretty much all phones are.
Also, if you would like to make your own QR Codes for your site, publication, or whatever else, I-nigma has a free code creator that generates the codes on the fly. There’s also this one by Kaywa.com, it has a few more options.
Recently I’ve begun reading books on my HTC Touch just because of the ease and always having the book on-hand, but I ran into a problem with Word (the built-in resource for ebooks): when I quit Word I lost my place. I searched and searched for some way to bookmark my place in Word and finally gave up and resigned myself to getting a third-party ebook reader, settling on uBook Reader by GowerPoint.
uBook Reader really shines through as a reader, it can display pretty much any document file as well as image files. Of course it really helped me out when I would close the application and then return and was greeted with the same page I had exited with. The user interface is very nice, although not very touch friendly, and covers all of the Windows Mobile UI; also most of the UI is customizable — a huge plus. To choose a book you must click (or touch) the Start button and then choose “Open”, you won’t be greeted with your normal open dialog but a built-in screen that, once you get used to it, is a bit confusing.
After opening the book you will see your book and you can begin to read (if you are using the demo version you will be shown the uBook splash page every few pages to remind you that you aren’t using a registered copy). When you are ready to quit reading just click the Start button and choose “Exit”, there is no “x” button at the top right to press (the Go button will show the WM taskbar if you need to get to it without exiting uBook Reader).
Overall, uBook Reader is wonderful to use with a few quirks, but most have workarounds if you play with the app long enough. You can pick up a copy yourself at GowerPoint’s website for $15.
