Microsoft Office Mobile 6.1

Office Mobile 6.1 has now been released for Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC and Windows Mobile 6 devices.

The upgrade is a FREE download from Microsoft.com and will allow you to open and edit Office 2007 file format documents from Word (.docx) and Excel (.xlsx) You can also view Powerpoint 2007 (pptx) documents.

Other improvements include:
• Enhanced viewing experience for charts in Excel Mobile.
• Ability to view SmartArt in PowerPoint Mobile.
• Ability to view and extract files from compressed (.zip) folders.

This free upgrade works only for Windows Mobile powered devices that have an earlier version of Office Mobile. If your Windows Mobile powered device does not have Office Mobile applications, this upgrade will not work for you.

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 device that didn’t come with Office Mobile (for example the HTC S620) you can now buy it from the Handango Retail store.

So…..

1) If you have a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC or Windows Mobile 6 device that came with Office Mobile you can use the FREE upgrade to get support for Office 2007.

2) If you have a Windows Mobile 6 Standard device (ie Smartphone) which didn’t come with Office Mobile (eg. The HTC S620) then you can buy Office Mobile from the Handango Retail store.

3) If you have a Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone there isn’t unfortunately an upgrade path or way of getting Office Mobile.

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Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Officially Released Today!

It’s official! The product we’ve all be waiting for is released!

I was talking with my boss this morning about finally moving on to Visual Studio 2008 and start building all new projects on .NET 3.5
He was really eager to make the jump to Beta 2 but I advise him to wait at least for RC1, little we knew that Microsoft was going to hit us with this one; they jumped directly from Beta2 to RTM.

read more | digg story

Windows Mobile Development Trends

Thanks to my boss who hooked me up for this gig, I’ll be presenting along side with him on Thursday Nov 22 at this event

It’s an academic event hosted by a local University and they requested a speaker from Microsoft, who then called my boss and asked him to give a talk about “.NET Development Trends”. He thought it would be nice to break the talk in two parts, one about “.NET Development Trends” presented by him and another about “Windows Mobile Development Trends” presented by me!!!.

Best Software Awards 2007 Winners Announced

Finally they are here!!! the winners have arrived!! 

The Winners in Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine’s Seventh Annual Best Software Awards for Windows Mobile software have been announced at www.Smartphonemag.com/Awards.  One hundred members of the Smartphone & Pocket PCmagazine Board of Experts judged 889 Windows Mobile products in 188 Pocket PC and Smartphone categories. Winners are also listed in the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine 2008 Buyer’s Guide first seen late November.

You can read the press release here, and a blog post by our good friend Hal Goldstein here

As the press release says it was a huge effort undertaken by Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine to coordinate an event this massive, a hundred judges, almost a thousand products, several months in the nominating and judging process and let me tell you they did a wonderful job, it was a very well organized and coordinated event. In the name of all the Windows Mobile community I want to thank Hal Goldstein, Noah Ouellette, Werner Ruotsalainen and all the people from Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine for the outstanding contribution they make to the Windows Mobile community.

So don’t delay!! hurry up to Handango or your favorite on-line store and grab all the best Windows Mobile software while it’s hot!!!!!!

Microsoft officially releases Windows CE 6.0 R2

Microsoft has officially launched “Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2″ at the Embedded Technology Conference 2007 in Yokohama, Japan. Today’s announcements included not only a laundry list of new Windows CE features and enhancements, but also “Spark,” an initiative designed to cut the cost of CE development for hobbyists and academics.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending the Virtual Launch of Windows CE 6.0 R2, in last years’ launch event they sent us a Win CE 6.0 T-Shirt and evaluation copies of all the Embedded line of products!!

For those wishing to attend you may do so by registering here.

read more | digg story

Update on my WM6 Experience

As I posted a while ago I upgraded my Axim x51v to WM6 A03 RTM (cooked by a super talented guy nicknamed “football” at xda-developers) everything was good at first, but after a week I lost the ability to connect to WPA-PSK enabled networks, leaving me stuck using the Odyssey Client bundled with the Axim.
Besides that everything was very good and I was very pleased.

Unfortunately, as time went by things got worse, frequent hangs, blank screens and strange behaviors made my device a burden to use as I had to soft reset several times a day, and last week, the drop that filled my cup, activesync suddenly stopped working. GGGGRRRRR
As you can imagine I was frustrated, but nevertheless y gathered my strength and before taking extreme measures, I just hard reset my axim and voila!!!! It’s like new again, I reinstalled all my software and everything is working perfectly, I can even connect to my WPA-PSK network without using any external client (using a fix a guy nicknamed “vagus” did on a WM6 WiFi DLL).

Now I’m enjoying my device again and happily syncing my Axim at home with activesync 4.5 and at work with WMDC 6.1 without any problems, I use Bluetooth at work and my cradle at home and I keep everything in complete sync.

Now I’m struggling with a new issue, as I posted last week I got an HTC S620 (Smartphone) and my WM6 Axim can´t connect to it to use my EDGE network. Apparently this is due to Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack not supporting Bluetooth PAN.

My quest now is to find a Bluetooth stack that works on the Axim, supports Bluetooth PAN *AND* plays nice with A03 ROM.

I’ll let you all know how that goes…

Windows Mobile + Cappuccino

I’m blogging from Dunkin Donuts and I’m amazed at how the whole WiFi+Coffee concept took over the world…

I known Starbucks is the one that started all but since there’s no Starbucks in Bogota (yet!!) I’m at Dunkin Donuts and most people here is connected to the net while taking their coffee.
Some on their laptops, other on their blackberrys and some like me in our WinMo devices…

It has become part of our globally connected culture.

QR Codes

 QR Codes are one of the things keeping me busy these days

I’ve been reading a lot about it and I’m working on a research project involving QR Codes with a group of students, it’s still in an incubating phase, but I think it has a solid chance of succeeding.

If you want to read more about QR Codes and download a J2ME reader here’s a link:

http://reader.kaywa.com/

There’s also a reader for some Windows Mobile Phones here:

http://www.quickmark.com.tw/En/basic/download.asp

Now I’m a Smartphone guy!!!

A while back I posted about the “Death of the PDA” and declared I was definitely a PDA kind of guy and that I still carry my PDA+Dumbphone combo.

All that changed this weekend as I could not resist and bought an HTC S621 (a.k.a T-Mobile Dash, HTC Excalibur) to replace my old Nokia 6131.

These are a few quick pics of the home screen and a mobile TV test I did yesterday using Orb

I’m on the road right now, giving some presentation, but as soon as I’m back home, I’ll post my impressions on my new device