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June 02 We're moving (again)Spaces URL structure will change soon. Therefore we had to move our blog, since http://spaces.msn.com/mobile (our previous URL) will be a reserved URL (it will redirect to http://mobile.spaces.msn.com which is the URL for the mobile version of Spaces). Our new URL is http://spaces.msn.com/itsallmobile/. If you are subscribing to our feed in an RSS reader or have our space bookmarked, please update the address as starting sometime next week this URL will no longer function. April 07 Send to mobileYou have to check this out (it's cool, trust me):
That's my experience using a Windows Mobile 5.0 device anyway, but any device that can get an SMS message should be almost as good. Very, very cool. I now have the details of the restaurant where some friends and I will be going to dinner on Friday. Yes, I used to live on a houseboat very close to it and the owners are friends of ours, but still, it's really cool technology - and usefull!
Published Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:17 PM Power up Your Mobile Device with a Data PlanWhat’s the big deal about having a data plan?
Surf the Web. Read and send e-mail. Check the weather and latest sports scores. Search for your favorite restaurant—all from your cell phone. Now that’s cool. Mobile versions of your favorite services make it fast, easy and convenient to get things done. And having a data plan helps get you all the information you want, when you want it—without breaking your bank account.
What kinds of data plans are available?
The tough part of getting a data plan is figuring out what type and size you need, so you don’t end up wasting money. Data plans come in all sizes and price points, just like regular cell phone plans. Check your mobile carrier’s web site to find out more about what they offer, and how they charge for their data plans. Some offer “all you can use” plans, plans based on the number of minutes used, or the amount of data used by your phone (such as file size that is sent to your phone).
Advantages of paying by minutes—some mobile carriers allow data usage to be part of unlimited evening/weekend minutes. If your plan allows you rollover minutes, or if you have a sufficient cushion of minutes in your existing plan, you may not need to commit to an extra plan.
Advantages of paying by megabytes—if you spend 20 minutes reading an article, you only pay for the data consumed, not the minutes spent. Additionally, a number of mobile carriers are starting to offer unlimited usage megabyte plans on their networks. On such plans, they provide you an unlimited amount of data usage for one monthly fixed fee, often for a low monthly rate.
Get the data plan that works for you
Figuring out the best data plan for you based on your usage and budget is akin to shopping for the right gear for your favorite sport. Everyday sneakers will get you around town in style and comfort, but you will probably want to invest in great-fitting athletic shoes for performance sports. Same goes for your data plan.
How often do you read your e-mail on your phone, or conduct a local or Web search? For instance, how many e-mails can you read with a 1 MB plan? To view one e-mail using Windows Live Mail for Mobile you will use up approximately 25 kb of data. That’s 17kb to open the inbox view and another 8kb to open an average-size e-mail. Doing the math, factoring in that one megabyte is equal to 1,024 kilobytes, and then you should be able to read nearly 40 e-mails (if you read only about one email every time you access your inbox), or up to 90 emails (if you read about 5 emails every time you access your inbox) on a 1MB plan, at an estimated cost ranging from $10-20 a month.
How many searches can you execute before you exceed 1MB? Well, if you want to find the closest coffee shop using the Windows Live Local Search, you’ll use up about 29kb of data. That’s 4kb to open the Local Search page, 6kb to get to the results page, 9kb to view details of the location (which includes a map), and 10kb to view detailed driving directions. That means you can do about 35 searches for 1MB (more if you don’t always need a map but rather just the phone #), at an estimated cost ranging from $10-20 a month. Ask your carrier for more details on the various bundled packages of voice and data plans that they offer
So if you purchase a 1MB data plan assuming that on average you view 5 e-mails every time you go to the mailbox, you’ll be able to read about between 90 e-mails, or find about 35 locations, including driving directions to each of the locations. Of course these numbers can vary, depending on your browser. Some browsers are better in caching content and the above numbers can be slightly better (you'll be able to get more out of your 1MB data plan) and some browsers don't do as good job caching, and the numbers above can be slightly worse (you'll be able to get less out of your 1MB data plan).
TIP to save money: If you are on a limited data plan – you can conserve by disabling the icons in Windows Live Mail and thus allowing for less data needing to be transferred back and forth –this will save you on time it takes to display the browser page on your phone and the data used.
Making the most of Windows Live Mail: Using ContactsAs Michael Smuga said last week, now when you compose an email, you can just use a few letters of your friend's name in the To line, and it'll search your contact list for that name and prompt you with its best guesses as to which of your friends you meant:
...except it didn't quite work that way. Why not? Because Michael Smuga isn't one of my contacts. The feature only works for you if you have contacts in your contact list.
How do you add contacts? Well, there's a few different ways:
Enter contacts manually.
Now if we go back to compose, like we did above, and type "Smuga" in the To line:
Voila! The mail form knows who my buddy is now.
Add a contact from an email message. Selecting this link will take you to the contact card for this sender in your contact list. If you don't already have the sender in your contact list, it'll automatically pre-fill the 'Contact Add Form' from the data in the message. Once the data is pre-filled, you can simply select the Ok button to save the sender as a new Contact in your list. It's that simple!
Import your contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express. Remember, the more of your buddies that you have in your contact list, the easier it is to send them a mail from your mobile browser. We know how hard it is to type anything on a phone, and this is one of the ways we help you type as little as possible to do what you need to do. Let us know if there are any other ways we can make it easier to send mail from your phone!
Mike Agney Windows Live Search for Mobile Launches!We just launched a beta of Windows Live Search for mobile devices. This beta is available for WAP 2.0 and HTML capable phones. You can access it from the mobile home deck (navigate to mobile.msn.com on your phone) or by entering the following URL directly: http://mobile.msn.com/search
This beta includes a brand new web search feature. This makes it easy to get details on a breaking news story, to answer bar trivia without needing to whip out your laptop; it helps you quickly find and read information you want without typing full URLs using your phone keypad. Hopefully you’ll add this as a favorite on your mobile phone and use it every day. Here’s a summary of what’s available:
Web search uses the latest algorithmic search from MSN Search and presents the results in a mobile friendly way so you see as many results as possible on each screen. There are two viewing options for the results: adaptive mobile rendering and the original page. If we detect that your phone supports HTML we link you directly to the original page. On WAP 2.0 browsers, we link you to the adaptive mobile rendered version. If you want to see the other version of the site, say to check this out on your desktop browser right now, you can click the Mobile or Original link provided in the search result.
Our Windows Live adaptive mobile rendering is a brand new web viewing option for mobile phones. It is novel in that it uses a table of contents collapsed view. I hope you like it. It is designed to provide a balance between short download times and making it easy to find the elements of the page that you are looking for. We automatically group related content on the page into what we call panels. All panels are ranked using the query terms you provided and relevant panels are notated with a red star. The highest ranking panel is chosen as the default open panel. The page is then presented as a table of contents of the panels, plus one open panel. We provide a Jump to Content link at the top of the page and hook it up to the 2 key on your phone pad to jump directly to the open panel; in fact most browsers jump there automatically. Clicking on a table of contents link opens that panel and closes the current panel. This makes it easier to navigate large pages which otherwise would be split across several pages without any way to know if the paragraph you are looking for is on the next page or not. Large images are resized on our servers to fit the phone screen reducing data transfer size a great deal.
There is a really simple way to provide us feedback on how well the pages you view are rendered on your phone. Just click on the ‘Feedback: problem with page’ link and we will capture the description of your phone type (the UAString) and the page you are looking at (the URL). This provides us with a prioritized list of sites that you, our users, want us to focus our improvement efforts on.
There are some aspects of the HTML pages which this version of mobile adaptive rendering does not support. But we’ve gone the extra step to clearly explain this by showing static text in its place. For example we show [unsupported content] when we had to remove something like a flash animation that doesn’t currently have a mobile equivalent.
I hope you’ll enjoy our new web search with adaptive mobile rendering, and please leave comments if you have any feedback.
Timothy Sharpe
Windows Live Mail for Mobile Launches!We just launched a beta of Windows Live Mail for mobile devices. You can access it from the mobile home deck (navigate to http://mobile.live.com your phone). It’s a brand new web application that runs in all mobile browsers that can render either xHTML, cHTML or HTML (that pretty much includes all browsers running on wireless devices with color screens and which can display images). The goal for the mobile beta version of Windows Live Mail is to provide a clean, easy to use and fast experience. Here’s a summary of what’s now available for you to explore and provide feedback to us about: First, we used some very light graphics to make everything look nice for readability but also fast to download even on a slow connection (and if you have a very small data plan you can hide all icons altogether). To make it easy to remember and to use, our navigation is consistent throughout the whole application and the same key shortcuts are shared with Windows Live Search (Mobile). We also have two special shortcuts: # will take you to the menu section of the page and * will take you to the top of the page. These two shortcuts are a great way to avoid manual scrolling and to speed your use. Second, interaction with your contacts will be much easier. If you select a contact name while reading email we’ll try to find that contact in your address book, and if the contact is not in the address book you can add him or her with a single click (we’ll even pre-fill some fields for you). Composing emails is also much easier and faster. You no longer have to memorize email addresses or open the address book and search for your contacts. You can simply enter several letters of the contact’s name in the To/Cc/Bcc fields when composing a new email and we’ll find all contacts that match what you entered in your address book. If there are multiple matches, you’ll see a list from which you can select the exact contact that you intended to email. A significant number of our users complained about unnecessary confirmation dialogs, so we eliminated nearly all of them; if an action is reversible we no longer ask you to confirm it (so now you can delete emails without having to confirm each deletion, since you can always recover deleted emails from the trash folder). And you no longer have to CC yourself on emails - if you want to save a copy. We’ll save a copy of each email that you send automatically in the sent emails folder. You can find contacts quickly in the address book by using our new search functionality. And you can even call your contacts directly from the address book by selecting “Call” Everything else that used to be in the old MSN Hotmail application is still there: you can view folders, move emails between folders, create/edit/delete contacts and now you can do even more. I hope you’ll enjoy the new design, and please leave comments if you have any feedback. Michael Smuga |
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