Phone Today

[marlof]

<a href="http://www.burroak.on.ca/ptoday.html">http://www.burroak.on.ca/ptoday.html</a><br /><br />Phone Today looks like it is going to be an excellent Today screen plugin for the Pocket PC 2002. It shows the status of a connected GSM phone on your Today screen, so you know about your provider, GPRS availability, signal strength, new SMS messages and battery level all in one view.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/phone_today.gif" /><br /><br />The software is still in beta, and is produced by Burr Oak, the people who brought you the excellent <a href="http://www.burroak.on.ca/cih.html">Conversions in Hand</a>. You can download the beta, which will expire on August 31, through the linked product page. Source: Marc Zimmermann.

[Soyale]

Quite a nice idea but unfortunately crashes my 6310i :( Still, that's what beta software is all about.

Ideas:

* Reduce the battery drain.
* Somehow detect and release COM port usage so you could place a data call without having to manually disable Phone Today

[Marc Zimmermann]

Ideas:

I hope that you email them. They're asking for feedback on the download page.

[carphead]

Really nice software. Works a dream with my 3970 and t68i.

Now where's my credit card?

[denivan]

I hope that you email them. They're asking for feedback on the download page.

Frankly, I don't understand the use of this program. It locks my BT communications port, so that I have to disable the today plugin before I can open up another BT application. I could e-mail this 'suggestion' but personally I think the author should have come up with this themselves.

If anyone can tell me what the actual purpose of this program is (besides showing me the signal and battery strengt of my phone and besides locking up my BT com ports) I would love to here it from you. But now I really don't understand what this plugin is supposed to day.

Ivan

[carphead]

The key point of BT is to be able to keep your phone in say a coat pocket and get use your PDA to surf or dl email.

With this app you can instantly see if you've got single or GPRS connection or not. It will also tell you when you've got a new SMS message.

[denivan]

yeah, but you can't surf using BT and GPRS , because the today plugin locks the com port, so what's the use ?

[carphead]

Not on my H3970 it doesn't. All that happens is the Today plug in changes to searching.

Then when I disconnect it switches back to the display.

Mind you I have it mapped to BTI1: instead of a Com port. Still it might be the shacky BT stack on your nokia causing the problem and not the software. :)

[denivan]

I have a 3660 with socketcom BT card and a sonyericcson T68i. I guess the developpers of the plug in have to iron out alot of stuff, but I'll keep an eye on it to see if it improves.

[cp_stevenson]

We do indeed have a lot to iron out :wink:

As the author of Phone Today, I can give some background about this applet. I originally wrote this "for fun" back in January; I and a number of others have been running it since then, and I bowed to their pressure and made it publicly available. It isn't clear to me that it's something we (Burr Oak) will sell, give away or ask for donations for ('cause the cost of phones for testing is high to say the least).

There are a significant number of issues falling out - some are (I'm sure) with the software and some are with hardware. The Nokia 6310i simply does not work, for example. I'm actually shocked at the number of people who have downloaded this and I expect to be busy over the next couple of months fixing bugs and making enhancements.

Is it a useful applet? Some people think it is, and some people don't. I personally like it :wink:

Cam Stevenson
Burr Oak Software