Sedagive? and I were able to run a little ad hoc test of the camera capabilities of three mobile phones. I have a Samsung Alias 2, Sedagive? has an LG enV2, and our friend has a Motorola Droid.

We shot roughly the same picture at the same time with standard settings for each phone. We expected the Droid’s 5.0 megapixel camera to produce better photos than the nearly year-old Alias 2′s 2.0 megapixel camera or the 2.0 megapixel camera in the enV2, which was released in March of 2008.

We were pretty surprised with the results, and further convinced me to wait on Verizon’s latest super smartphone.
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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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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.

I used to run my main computer 24/7 when I worked from home. I was either on it all the time, or would use it for a quick fact-finding mission on Wikipedia or IMDB. I expect computer components to fail; there are some wear items like the hard drive that will eventually conk out on you. My current computer, Crunk, was a Frankenstein of new parts and parts from a machine I built almost three years ago.

Once I started working at a “real job” I started turning my computer off every morning to save power. As they say, “no good deed goes unpunished.”
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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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I did something today I have never done in over fifteen years of using the World Wide Web. I bought a Web browser. I can’t believe it, either.
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