When I got my first satellite radio from my wife a few years ago I loved the thought that I could listen to ad-free radio any time I was driving. Well, I quickly found out that not only can you listen in your car but you can log onto the provider’s site and listen for free as well. This gave me hours of enjoyment but I found that I’m not always in the car or at my computer. I needed a mobile solution. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, R-Capi on the PPCGeeks.com forums has created a great app, C-ApiSRO, to do this very thing for you!

You will need to sign up for PPCGeeks.com to download this file, but if you have Sirius/XM you know the importance of having access to your tunes at all times!

I use a Mac to do all my work at home, including this site. So I need a syncing program that works well with my Mac to test apps and move files around on my phone. I tried MissingSync, like I’m sure most Mac/WM users have, but it just couldn’t do all I needed. So I brought the topic up in an IRC channel and a fellow WM user sent me to SyncMate, and so far it’s better than ActiveSync!

SyncMate does a whole lot more than sync, but that’s where it is strongest. You can synchronize with your Mac’s Bookmarks, Contacts, iCal, iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, and many more! They also have extra plugins that allow you to do things like, view your phone’s info, view apps installed and darg-and-drop apps to install immediately, view calls and read and manage SMS. There are two versions of SyncMate available, a free version and an Expert version. There is a list on the SyncMate site with a comparison of the features in each, but I’ll tell you — it’s worth it to get the Expert version just for the Applications list plugin.

SyncMate Video

Of course, the best feature, and the one I use SyncMate the most for, is the ability to mount your phone as a disk in OSX. Just plug your phone in, let it connect, and then click on the Mount Disk button. You can drag-and-drop files straight to your phone just like it was an external drive, which makes it super easy to move files around. The mount sometimes fails but I found if I just disconnect the phone, unplug and then plug it in again it usually works just fine.

SyncMate can be downloaded for free or you can purchase a license for $39.95.

Sometimes you just don’t want to talk to the person you need to call and a text message would just be too much. So what do you do, call and hope that other party just doesn’t pick up? Well that’s what most people would do but you have another option: slydial.

According to the slydial website, slydial is “a voice messaging service which connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail.” The service was previously only available by calling a toll-free number and then typing the other party’s number in, but for most of us we don’t remember the other party’s number, that’s the reason we have contacts saved on our phones. Slydial has recently released a Windows Mobile client that allows you to choose your contact and then “slydial” them.

It’s easy, first, create an account at slydial.com, then install the client on your phone and you are ready to start dialing straight to your friends’ voicemail. Either use the slydial client and choose a contact, or choose your contact, go to the menu, and then choose slydial. slydial will automatically call the contact but you won’t hear a ringing, it will go straight to their voicemail.

slydial is free to use, but there are short ads before it connects your call. If you don’t want to listen to the ads, slydial also offers Premium Memberships starting at $0.15 per message or monthly ($4.95) and yearly ($29.95) tiers.

Here are a few videos to give you some ideas on slydial’s uses.

So you have your Windows Mobile phone in one pocket, ready to take calls, and in the other pocket is… what, your MP3 player of choice, perhaps one that even streams YouTube videos and plays synced podcasts or records audio? Why do you carry a phone capable of playing music already and an MP3 player? Because your phone doesn’t specialize in music or video playback. Well now it can, and BETTER and FASTER than the iPhone, all because of Kinoma Play!

Kinoma Play is the product of 3 years of hard work and that hard work shows, it’s a clean app and the first time I used it I knew that it was made by professionals. I had the privilege of speaking with Charles Wiltgen, Kinoma’s Director of Social Marketing, and he gave me insight into the wonderful application that is Kinoma Play.

At its most basic function Kinoma Play is a media player. The first time you run Play it scans your device and puts all your media into order in the app itself so you can easily find what you are looking for and open it directly from Play, be it music, pictures, movies, playlists, or documents. The interface is very “Apple-esque” and reminds me a lot of my iPod Touch; it’s very simple and easy to find things. You can also search through your media directly from the “My Media Files” menu, a great touch to the interface. But there are hundreds of media players for Windows Mobile, and they all play movies, music, and some even show your pictures. So what makes Kinoma Play different? The Guide.

The Kinoma Guide is a powerful aggregator that goes out to all kinds of sites and feeds and pulls them all together for you to listen and watch. Want to hear an audiobook? Well just go to the Audiobooks and Literature channel in the guide where you can sign into Audible.com and listen to books you’ve already bought, streamed directly to your device, or listen to one of the hundreds of free books on LibriVox. Perhaps live radio is more of your thing, then check out the Radio channel. You can listen to one of the thousands of channels on the Clear Channel network, Fox News, Radio Disney, NPR Stations, and many more. What’s that, you like Sports? Got it. Technophile? Yup, plenty of podcasts to take care of your techno-lust. Weather? Uh huh. Religion? There’s even a Religious channel on here. There is half a terabyte of content on the Guide at any one time and it’s ALWAYS changing!

You want more? Okay, here’s what Kinoma did — they threw in syncing with services. Yes, you can send the pictures you take on your device to Flickr, the videos you record to YouTube, or if you have a MobileMe account with Apple you can even sync with that. As soon as you send that picture or movie it’s on the web. Yes, as soon as the progress bar fills up you can email your buddy and show him that picture you took last night.

If you are interested in trying Kinoma Play before parting with $20 for a license, there is a free version on the site as well, which has everything that the normal one but is more focused on YouTube, podcasts and photos. Charles assured me that Kinoma works with most Windows Mobile phones, but if you do have problems you can reach him on their forums or on Twitter.

Here’s a few videos on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/kinomaplay

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.