As Wayne posted earlier, HTC announced three new “Touch” devices today: The Touch HD, The Touch 3G and Touch Viva.

If you are looking for high resolution images of those, head over to Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com! where you can download them, print them and have drool material.

The US version of the HTC Touch Diamond is now available from Expansys. This version of the Diamond is identical to the EU released version except is now adds HSDPA/WCDMA: 850/1900 MHz support. This means that if you are an A&T subscriber, you can get all the 3G goodness!

The US version is the same price as the EU version, $684.99. You can get more information or purchase at this link and remember that you can use PayPal as well!

In the first part of my review of the HTC Advantage X7510, I covered the physical hardware of this new device that resides somewhere between Handheld PCs and Ultra Mobile PCs. If you haven’t had a chance to read the first part of the review, you can do so here and then pick up this review afterward.

In this part of the review I will be covering the software aspects of the device now that I have received the final shipping ROM from HTC. I will start by covering Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, the Operating System of the X7510 and will then go into the specific applications that come with the device. I’ll conclude with a general discussion of what I like and don’t like about the Advantage and if this is a device that you should consider.

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While most of you know me as Clinton Fitch, writer for Gear Diary and owner of Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com!, I do have a day job. That would be the Unified Communications Product Manager for Spanlink Communications. While we are not the biggest Cisco Systems partner on the block, we are one of the best when it comes to applications in Unified Communications and Contact Centers. As you can imagine, I have email constantly flowing into my inbox and thus onto my HTC Advantage on a variety of different topics, customers and solutions. My answer to managing all of this email are sub-folders. I love them. I have them for just about every category out there and it makes it quick and easy for me to find a message. This is great on my Windows PC but by default Windows Mobile does not synchronize any folders other than your Inbox via ActiveSync or Over-The-Air (OTA) Push Mail. Fortunately this is somewhat easy to change and in this How-To I’ll show you.

Now for a word of warning: What I’m about to demonstrate requires that the folders you are wanting to synchronize are on your Exchange server. This will not work if you are trying to synchronize folders that are stored in your PST file on your PC. It could also be that your Administrator does not allow folder synchronization beyond the Inbox through policies set in place. You will need to check with them if this does not work for you. Secondly, this will require a lot of bandwidth depending on how much you have to synchronize so make sure you have an unlimited data account. Gear Diary is not responsible for your $5,000 data bill!

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HTC has finally released the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional update for the AT&T Tilt. The new ROM Version 3.57.502.2 WWE brings Tilt users up to the news OS from Microsoft and includes:

* HTC Home
* Remote Desktop Monitor
* Video Share Calling
* Managed Programs
* Threaded SMS
* Push-to-talk button can now be reassigned
* MS Voice Command
* OneNote Mobile

The download is approximately 88MB and you should make sure you follow the instructions closely. You can download the ROM by clicking this link

UPDATE: Okay, so it appears that HTC has built out the page for the update but it is still linked to the older Windows Mobile 6 ROM.

I travel. A lot. While I’m sure that some of you reading this travel more than I, by then end of 2008 I fully expect to have covered well over 75,000 airline miles this year. The fact that I’m writing this review from the comfort of my townhome is, well, rare? Most of the reviews that I write both for Gear Diary and Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com! are written from hotel rooms… but I digress. You get the point.

As you can imagine, with as much travel as I do, receipts - and more specifically receipt management - can be quite a challenge. In the multiple years of business travel I have experienced, I have tried just about every method you can think of to try to keep track of receipts. Like most of you, I have to submit receipts when I submit weekly expense reports. That’s find and dandy right up until you have been on the road for 3 straight weeks in 6 cities (real trip, February 2007 - Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Houston and Oklahoma City) and you are trying to keep track of about 50 pieces of paper! That is where the Neat Receipts scanner comes in handy. With Neat Receipts you scan your reciepts using a self-feeding wand scanner which stores, organizes and creates PDF files of your reciepts. Further, you can export your receipts to Microsoft Word or Excel, giving you the ultimate flexibility to meet your companies receipt requirements. All of this in a small, slim package that easily fits into a travel computer bag. If you are a road warrior who is receipt management challenged, the Neat Receipts scanner could prove to be a real life saver.

Neat Receipts Scanner

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In part one of my review of Celio’s REDFLY, I covered the REDFLY’s physical attributes. For part two I will cover the functionality of the device.

First, it is important to remember that the REDFLY will only work with Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6 Professional (PocketPC) and Standard (Smartphone) devices and currently only a small subset of the total number of devices available. For a complete list of what devices are supported visit http://www.celiocorp.com/smartphone. Having said that, I did test the REDFLY with a number of devices including several that were not on the Celio website. All of them worked just fine although older O2devices did tend to have a little graphics trouble. All of the HTC devices I tested - The AT&T Tilt, the T-Mobile Wing, and HTC Advantage - worked fantastically well. The same is true for current MWg devices - Atom Life and Zinc II - although I did not test it with the new Atom V. More devices are being added as Celio does more testing but if you use a device not listed on their site, they will not provide technical support for that device and the REDFLY.

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With Windows Mobile devices coming with ever increasing quality of digital cameras built into them, the need for applications to view those photos in a quick and easy way has also increased. While the built-in Photos & Videos application of Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6 does a reasonably good job, it still is somewhat stylus intensive. Fortunately the VITO Technology team has seen this as well and has developed a truly easy to use, simple and finger friendly - not stylus - application to meet the need - EyePhoto. EyePhoto is available through VITO’s iWindowsMobile division and is a simple but effective photo viewing application. EyePhoto does not have any editing tools built into it - it is strictly a viewer both of individual photos and in a slideshow. That said however, it is fast and easy, turning any device into a virtual photo album in a snap.

Figure 1: EyePhoto Main Interface
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Some of you may have seen me post about the greatness of Dashwire in the past. Dashwire is a service that runs on your Windows Mobile device that allows you to do a variety of things on your device through a web-based application on your PC. From Dashwire you can send/receive SMS’, share videos and photos and give the world a view of what you are doing at a particular time just to name a few.

Dashwire themselves probably state it best: Dashwire offers the industry leading Mobile/Web Connected Service to help people seamlessly connect their mobile phones with their computers and the web, enabling them to backup and manage their content, search and interact with their information, and share their experiences with friends and social networks. As you’ve seen with the Apple MobileMe and Nokia OVI initiatives, the Connected Services space is on fire, creating exciting opportunities and demand for a free, cross-platform solution like Dashwire.

Today the folks at Dashwire announced the release of version 2.0 of their application which sports a host of improvements including a whole new device interface. The new UI looks fantastic and so far I have been impressed with what I’ve seen.

Some of the new features include:

• Graphical phone experience featuring user avatar, status updates, and media gallery
• Mobile access to photos & videos located on your Dashwire web account – even if the actual media files aren’t on your phone
• Photo uploads from your computer to your Dashwire web account, which then automatically appear on your phone
• Media editing, blogging, and sharing with friends – on the go as you’re capturing your experiences
• Direct status updates to Facebook & Twitter
• Privacy controls & media publishing

Truthfully I’ve been playing with v2 for only a few hours but you can tell the Dashwire team has put a lot of thought and effort into this release. I’ll be sure to post a follow up in a few days to let you know of any issue/challenges I ran into - if I do.

To try this free service, visit http://www.dashwire.com to sign up for an account then point your mobile device’s browser to http://m.dashwire.com to download the client. Note that Dashwire (and us here at Gear Diary) highly recommend you have an unlimited data account on your phone as the service runs in the background and constantly updates your photos, SMS’, videos and other items you synchronize automatically by default.

You can always check out my Dashwire page at http://dashwire.com/clintonfitchdotcom

One of the challenges with using Windows Mobile devices, as with most mobile devices, is the size of the screen. It is great having Office Mobile on the latest and greatest device but doing a significant edit of a document on a 3.5″ QVGA screen is, well… fun? Granted, on bigger devices that have VGA screens, the HTC Advantage comes to mind, it is a bit easier but you still end up doing a lot of side-to-side scrolling. Couple this with either a soft keyboard on the device or a small thumboard to type with and once again, doing big edits on a document is, well… fun? How then do you get around this quandry? With a colorful insect of course!

The Celio REDFLY is designed to help resolve this difficulty for Windows Mobile users by allowing them to connect their device via a USB cable or Bluetooth to the REDFLY and gain an 8″, 800×480 VGA display and full QWERTY keyboard. The REDFLY has no memory, storage or operating system itself. It is literally an extension of your device, utilizing the memory, storage and operating system of it. Even better, the REDFLY has a VGA output so you can display on an external monitor or projector straight from the device, something only a select few Windows Mobile devices can do natively. All of this in a package that is less than 2lbs. and 9″ wide and under $500? If you a a true power user of your Windows Mobile device, you should seriously consider a REDFLY. It could save your eyes and thumbs!

Figure 1: The REDFLY Closed
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