Saturday, April 12, 2008

Battery Life 2

After calling in to T-mobile support to complain about the battery life on my Shadow. T-mobile has offered to replace my Shadow and battery free of charge.

Full post here.

Battery Life

I use my Shadow mostly for going online when I'm in places that its either impractical or impossible to use anything but a smartphone to connect to the web. When I first got the Shadow I was very pleased with the phone itself, but very disappointed with its battery life.

After a few days of using the Shadow to its fullest capabilities, I was hooked. Even if it meant carrying around a power cord and plugging my Shadow in constantly.

So I've started looking for ways to make my Shadow's Battery last longer.

Full Post Here

Saturday, April 5, 2008

T-Mobile Shadow First Look

Quick overview of the shadow and its capabilities.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Smartss.cab Screen Capture working link.

Smart SS a screen capture utility for Windows Mobile smartphones. The program has been reviewed elsewhere.

The download link on the creator's site has been broken for some time.

After a bit of searching for an alternative download link, I found one here.

http://mymits.korea.com/zboard/zboard.php?id=pds&page=10&category=17&no=1861


The page is in Korean, but the link to smartss.cab is prominently displayed in English in the center of the page.

Also featured is pocketsnapit.cab, another smartphone screen recorder.

These .cab files will install directly when clicked on from your Shadow, or other windows mobile smartphone browser.

Enjoy.

Post submitted from a T-mobile Shadow.

Jb5 Browser Screen Shots.

These are screenshots of the Jb5 Browser in action, taken off of my Shadow with Smart Screen Capture and sent with Shozu.

http://tmobileshadowfiles.blogspot.com/2008/04/ss000.html

http://tmobileshadowfiles.blogspot.com/2008/04/ss001.html

http://media.shozu.com/cache/portal/media/9e05c2/33554444

http://media.shozu.com/cache/portal/media/9e05c2/33554442

http://tmobileshadowfiles.blogspot.com/2008/04/ss004.html

finally updated my shadow.

When I first found out about the Shadow update from T-mobile I was pretty excited and I immediately pulled up the update site on my Shadow's browser.

After about twenty minutes of futzing around, I realized that the only way to get the update was to plug the Shadow in to a desktop computer and install it from there.

I have to say I was disappointed by this. Its reasonable to expect a smartphone to sync with a pc to back up files and reconcile email inboxes and whatnot. But to have to hook your phone up to a pc for a critical update sort of defeats the purpose of having a smartphone, mobility.

So I put the update on the back burner for a while. Choosing to live with no alarm clock and having to plug my phone in every twenty minutes to keep the battery charged.
the other night I crashed at a friends house, and I happened to have my shadow's usb cable with me so I pulled up t-mobile's upgrade site and downloaded the update.

Updating was fairly painless, though I needed to have my phone plugged in for an hour.

I didn't back up any of my files but most of the things I use, TCMP, jb5, Google Maps, are easy enough to download again.

I did lose some contacts that weren't saved to my sim card, so you might want to back up your contacts if you have a lot of numbers card to your shadow.

The verdict; the update is worth it just for the improvement in battery life alone, its only a 1/4 to 1/3 improvement but it allows me to leave home and use all of my shadow's features without the battery dying on me prematurely during my commute, a huge improvement.

The accuracy of text input on the Shadow is also vastly improved with this update.

Windows Live driving directions have been added; I already am using google maps but its a nice feature for those unwilling to go with google. A feature called Audio Postcards was added as well; it seems like a glorified mms program to me, but it could be fun.

Get the update here;

http://www.t-mobileshadow.com/update.asp

Mike at allshadow.com has a lot more info on the shadow update.

http://www.allshadow.com/