At Comex, 2 retailers have started taking in pre-orders for HTC Touch Pro. SingTel has also started to take in pre-orders at a yet-to-be-announced price. And StarHub is also taking in pre-order at a price of $688 for contracts on low-end voice plans. I'm patiently waiting for SingTel and also some retailers to start offering it. Yippee! New phone for me soon...

I just bought a Transcend 16GB SD Card (Class 6) for my Asus Eee PC 900 from Comex. In anticipation of HTC Touch Pro, I also bought a Sandisk 8GB microSD card (Class 6). When I started sorting out my storage cards, I started counting how many Storage Cards I actually own. I'm amuses at my findings:
1) Sandisk 8GB microSD card (Class 6) - spare
2) Kingston 4GB microSD card (Class 4) in HTC TyTN II
3) Kingston 2GB microSD card - spare
4) Sandisk 1GB microSD card in LG KS20
5) Sandisk 1GB microSD card in Dopod 595
6) Wiz Tech 512MB RS-MMC card in Nokia 3230
7) Kingston 512MB miniSD card - spare
8) Transcend 16GB SD card (Class 6) in Asus Eee PC 900
9) Kingston 8GB SD card (Class 6) in digicam (Samsung Digimax L700)
10) Kingston 2GB SD card (50x) in E-TEN M600
11) Adata 2GB SD card (150x) - spare
12) Toshiba 2GB SD card (Class 4) - 2 pieces spare
13) Toshiba 1GB SD card (Class 4) - spare
14) Kingston 1GB SD card (50x) - HP iPAQ h1940
15) Kingston 512MB SD card (50x) - spare

Wow! That's 15, of which about half are actively in use. It may be not so worthwhile to sell those unused ones, which is why I kept them as spares.

Yippee!! HTC Touch Pro has finally been launched in Singapore yesterday. Pre-order will start at COMEX tomorrow. I can't wait to lay my hands on it. Hopefully, there is a functional demo set for platy at the botth tomorrow.

What I like about it compared to HTC TyTN II:
- TouchFLO 3D user interface
- Slimmer, smaller, lighter!
- More RAM
- Better keyboard (5 row, has CTRL button, no more awkwardly placed softkeys)
- More responsive system (according to video reviews)
- Better camera (more responsive and has camera flash)

What I have to compromise with compared to HTC TyTN II:
- Less hardware buttons
- microSD slot is under battery cover
- No tilting mechanism
- Slides out from the left (I'm too used to the right side)
- No dedicated camera button

EVERUN Note seems to be a pretty cool UMPC to be hitting our shores soon (Trends Mobile will be bringing it in). It runs on WinXP Home and is powered by a Dual Core processor. It even comes with a USIM slot so that you can add HSDPA capabilities to it by inserting your 3G SIM card. It's one of the most portable and lightest 7" UMPC and also comes with a touchscreen, The specs are really pretty decent and the design is more conventional this time round.

Very tempting, but I'll stay with my Asus Eee PC 900 for quite some time. My leather case just arrived and I'm pretty happy with it.

It is just plain annoying, sometimes even infuriating. Even after explaining about WM6 compatibility of DictMgr so many times in my blog, there are still users asking me the same thing over & over again. And what's worse is that I am asked the same question even after giving an answer.

Firstly, DictMgr is a collection of 6 software. All 6 software have their own requirements, which may be differing. It is not practical to use the mimium set of requirements for the 6 software to be used as the mimumum requirement for DictMgr. That's simply because very very few devices will fall into that category then. In fact, no device will support DictMgr out of the box.

For example, T9Editor requires HTC Phone Pad to be installed while TPalEditor requires TouchPal to be installed. The common denominator of the 6 software is that you must have a WM2003 or WM5 device that has both Phone Pad and TouchPal installed. Try finding such a device.

Instead, it is fairer to state a general requirement and then specify additional requirements for each software in the suite. That is what I have been doing for both DictMgr and UI Tweaker. It makes more sense, or does it not?

Anyway, I'm not going to explain the compatibility issues in detail, so you should read these blog entries to find out more:
DictMgr: WM6 Compatibility
Built-in Dictionaries on the Pocket PC
DictEditor for WM6?
Word Completion for WM6
Word Completion in WM6
DictMgr and WM6

Sorry if this blog entry sounded too offensive, but it is really more annoying than nagging to have the same question popup so regularly. Perhaps I should stop trying to be too informative in my e-mail replies to such queries. The more I try to help, the worse it gets. Sometimes, it's just so discouraging that I have thoughts of "killing" these projects or even just shutting down the site and support altogether. Besides, freeware developers don't owe everyone a living.

Well, I have already started working on the next version of ClearTemp which will include some optimizations and also new feature(s). At this point, the new feature added is a new screen for cleaning the MRU (most recently used) list of applications.

So far, I have managed/intend to add these applications to the MRU cleaner page:
1) HTC Streaming
2) CEdit
3) UKNote
4) File Explorer
5) PlaylistMgr
6) Resco Photo Viewer

If you know of any 3rd party application which uses a MRU list and you also wish to clean it using ClearTemp in future, do drop a note here on the software name (and preferably with the website URL as well). If you have any other suggestions for ClearTemp, do drop them here as well so that I can add to my looong task list.

mToday has been released for a week or so and has received some feedback in several sites. The main (and very big) complaint is that it takes a long time to switch between today screen profiles. You may be puzzled why an alternative like SecondToday does it much faster.

Firstly, I have to explain why the profile switching takes so long. After toggling of today plug-ins, the today screen needs to be refreshed in order to show the changes. So, mToday sends a command to the system to refresh the today screen.

Unfortunately, the device takes a long time to refresh/redraw the today screen and this is something which is out of control of mToday. Try going to the Today settings page to toggle plug-ins and return to the today screen to see what I mean.

And this screen refresh actually eats into bulk of the profile switching time of mToday. This simply means I cannot improve the switching speed significantly. The most I can do is to improve the processing by milliseconds but not able to do anything about the screen refresh speed.

But why does SecondToday do the screen switching so quickly? After trying this application out in the emulator, I observed something special. Apparently, SecondToday don't seem to be toggling the today plug-ins. Instead, it is really an application which emulates the today screen and displays today plug-ins of your choice.

How did I arrive at this conclusion? I noticed the number of icons on the toolbar changed when toggling to SecondToday. I also noticed the "OK" button appearing in the today screen, which doesn't quite make sense if it is using the default today screen. Hence, I believe it is a "second today screen". Pretty smart way I guess.

Even though Apple has re-positioned the iPhone as more of a Smartphone platform by opening up the SDK, they still aren't really helping the developers to make the iPhone community more vibrant. Firstly, the SDK can only be used on OSX machines. Secondly, the irritating developer program that costs money. And I just found out that they have a nonsensical NDA that prohibits developers from discussing anything regarding the SDK anywhere. Check out the hate site over here.

Seriously, I'm pretty shocked at such annoyances to the developer comminity which they are trying to build up. iPhone was protrayed to be more "open" and "smart" with the release of the SDKs, but they still aren't doing any favour to the developers. This is in such a huge contrast compared to other Smartphone platforms like Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, Android, etc. Even J2ME is doing better than that. Time to knock some sense into Apple, the developers and also the users. It's a cult, so do check the facts.

Check out this page for a tutorial on how to move the cache folder of Opera Mobile to a destination of your choice. Tsk tsk.....I may make this tweak available in a future version of ClearTemp. Other Opera Mobile Tweaks can also be found here.

Created a PPCSG Group page on Facebook. Check it out here.