About a month ago, my HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.1 on Verizon crashed while I was reading my email. I finished reading my messages when the phone rebooted, but the phone kept displaying one unread message. It bothered me, but I couldn’t find a solution online. I learned to live with it, and stopped getting excited when the Touch reported one new email. That is, until it happened again last night, but this time with text messages.

I text a lot. It’s the primary reason I own a mobile device — I don’t like talking to people I can’t see. I turn my ringer off when I am at work, so it is very important to me to have an accurate unread text message count. I searched again, but this time I found something: FixUnreadCount by R. Elmer. I am not sure how it works, but it resets the unread count for email and text messages. I am not sure if it sets them all to zero, or if it knows how many messages you’ve truly read. In my case it didn’t matter. I set off in search of the application.
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The problem: you want to listen to Pandora.com Internet radio on your Windows Mobile phone, but it doesn’t have a headphone jack (3.5mm). The phone only has Bluetooth.

The proposed solution: buy an adapter for the mini-USB jack on the bottom of the phone that allows for a 3.5mm plug, which can be routed to my car’s stereo.

The product: the iTrek mini USB to 3.5mm adapter, purchased from Semsons & Co., Inc via Amazon.com for $5 shipped.

The verdict: it works … sort of.
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I love my HTC Touch (known as the VX6900 on the Verizon network). I use it for all sorts of stuff: check Gmail, send text messages, approve Gibberish comments, listen to Internet Radio awesomeness Pandora.com, use the built-in GPS and Google Maps, and sometimes I even call people on it. Even though the upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.1 improved battery efficiency, I still have to recharge the phone several times a day. I used to get really pissed off about it, especially coming from my fantastic Samsung u740. I could rock that Samsung for three to four days without recharging its extended battery. However, once I thought of the Touch as a small computer instead of a phone I started treating it like a laptop. I wouldn’t expect my Dell Latitude at work to go all day without a recharge, would I?

I used to carry around a mini-USB / USB cable in my work bag that let me charge my phone via my laptop. Every time I plugged it in, though, Windows XP kept trying to setup a relationship with my phone via ActiveSync. I got tired of clicking “cancel” a couple times a day and just tried to hold out as long as possible, hoping the phone would have enough juice to survive the work day. I needed another way to charge my phone, and damn it would be helpful if I had a spare battery, too ….

Then I found this cradle / dock on eBay that claimed to charge the phone and a second battery at the same time. At $22 shipped it was probably a piece of shit, but aren’t dodgy product reviews what Gibberish is all about?
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It’s that time of year: I look around my house and look at all the stuff I bought. What was the best thing I purchased all year? What was the worst? Here’s 2007, and 2005 … looks like I skipped 2006. Whoops!

The best Gibberish gadget of 2008
The HTC Touch / Verizon vx6900
I never gave my Windows Mobile phone a proper review, but that was probably because I was too busy checking email, sending text messages, taking pictures, and approving Gibberish comments on it. Oh yeah, you can call people, too. When I first started my job they didn’t allow access to private email like Gmail or Hotmail, so Touch to the rescue. Thanks to an update to Windows Mobile 6.1 and an unlocked internal GPS receiver, my HTC Touch is a lot more stable and feature-filled than when I bought it at retail. I liked the phone then, and love it now.

Honorable mention: Kapoosh Universal Knife Block. Yeah, it may be droll, but I use it almost every day. The Kapoosh is a product of quiet genius. It is simple and effective, and you don’t realize how much you needed it until you have it. A great product, and a great value at $20.

Worst Gibberish gadget of 2008
Motoport
This is a no-brainer. The multiple fitting issues, the ranting and admonishment at the hands of Wayne Boyer, the owner of Motoport, and an equally disastrous return process put bitter icing on an already bad cake. In fact, my experience with Motoport may make it the worst Gibberish gadget ever. You have to be a mighty big asshole to dethrone a product that kills dogs, but there you are, Motoport.

Honorable mention:Navigon 2100 Portable GPS. How can you sell a new GPS in 2008 with maps from 2006? Long satellite acquisition times, poor user interface, and an insensitive touch screen display makes this off-brand GPS a stinker.

I love, love, love Pandora Radio, which suggests music for you based on the types of music you like. One of the things I’ve always wanted is a way to listen to Pandora in my car. I was jealous when iPhone users got to listen to Pandora on the go, and I hoped for a Windows Mobile version. Time passed, and passed, and passed, and finally you can listen to your favorite Pandora station on your Windows Mobile device.

Sort of.

The catch is that it only works with two phones right now, the HTC Touch (Verizon xv6900) and the Motorola Q9C. Luckily (for me, at least), I have an HTC Touch. The mobile version of Pandora.com works great. I had a problem copy and pasting my username/password into the application and had to peck out my password via the phone’s virtual keyboard. That took FOREVER, as I have strong password with all sorts of randomly-generated letters, numbers, and symbols. After I got past that, though, everything ran well.

I am a little surprised to see that you can’t buy music directly from the mobile version of Pandora. I have purchased a half-dozen albums from Amazon through Pandora. I am not sure if the iPhone version has this, but it’s a definite “nice to have.”

My next task is connecting my phone to my MazdaSpeed3’s stereo. The stock head unit has a 3.5mm standard headset jack, but my Touch does not have a headset connector. I will have to buy a mini-USB to 3.5mm adapter cable, and most of the ones I have found online are from dubious places I’ve never heard of. On eBay, every single adapter I found is sold out of Hong Kong. I’d rather not pay $15 in shipping for a $5 cable, but if that’s what I have to do to have Pandora in my car, then that’s what I have to do.

Here’s my favorite Pandora station, “Relaxed.” I used to listen to it while working from home. It is seeded with songs by Juno Reactor, Lamb, Mocean Worker, Mr. Scruff, Truby Trio and Weekend Players.

Running a Windows Mobile phone reminds me a lot of the older days of Macintosh computing, or when I got one of the early Palm PDAs. There were all sorts of small, weird-ass applications that did one thing very well. Some Windows Mobile utilities like the SPB Phone Suite are a little spendy, and some of them cost you more than you’d normally pay (I’m looking at you, Opera Mobile). And then every once in awhile, some are free, and are totally awesome.
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I hate talking on the phone and try to avoid it if at all possible. I especially dislike getting phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize, because I don’t know if I should pick up or not. About two and a half years ago I wrote about “whitelisting” phone calls as a way to avoid unsolicited marketing calls. I didn’t know this technology had made it into the mainstream until I bought the HTC Touch Windows Mobile phone. I purchased Spb Phone Suite call management software from Spb Software House as an add-on to Windows Mobile, and along came whitelisting. The “ah-ha” moment for me came when I realized that I could use phone profiles and whitelisting to only allow certain callers to ring my phone.

Here’s how it works.
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