I’ve been using Skyfire for a while now and I’ve been pretty impressed so far (especially as they added Silverlight support for the Olympics) – although I’d used it initially on a 3G Touch device I’ve been using it a lot recently on my trusty 2.5G non-touch Shadow smartphone and for most things it’s become my browser of choice.

The good news is that there’s now a new release (with no waiting list for folks in the US if you’re not already on the beta program).

As well as the Silverlight support (I can now show people the Silverlight powered slideshow of my car on my phone!) it has improved performance and stability (as any new release should) and has added a really handy combined search/address bar (similar to what appears on Chrome or in Internet Explorer if you type a “?” followed by the words you want to search) to get you where you want to go quickly.

It still has some small hiccups with sites requiring text entry (though again that has improved significantly in this release) and performance with really interactive / Ajax heavy sites suffers because of the network and translation lag – but it does a better job than any other browser I’ve tried on a Windows Mobile phone up to this point.

They set out to bring the PC web experience to the constrained mobile platform and while the iPhone may get a lot of credit for their WebKit implementation Skyfire opens up options for plugins such as Flash and Silverlight that may be slow in coming to other platforms.

Are you a developer with strong skills and experience in database and data warehouse development, distributed systems, mobile applications and services, and advanced data visualizations?

Are you interested in working in beautiful and vibrant Dublin, Ireland, on Microsoft’s 2,000-person campus, which includes an on-site gym, Starbucks coffee, Xbox, foosball, and all the other typical amenities? For the right candidates the job also offers a remote work option if you are interested in telecommuting from elsewhere in Europe.

The “Global Product Development – Europe” team are recruiting. This team do core development work for several Microsoft businesses, including Hotmail, Windows Mobile, adCenter, and Microsoft’s datacenters. They build core software that reach millions of people, and have openings for dev, test, PM, and leadership positions at all levels.

If are innovative, strategic thinkers and passionate about working for Microsoft you can find more details at the “Join Microsoft Europe” site, check out the currently available jobs or if you think you fit email your resume to eurojobs@microsoft.com.

To find out more about what the team do you can check out their blog for some insights into the sorts of projects they are involved in.

As a geek I’m guilty of perhaps not getting as much exercise as I need. Part of the problem is finding the time but that comes down to motivation. With the wonders of this socially networked age it’s easier to use technology to help with that motivation.

The geek in me likes stats. If I know I’m doing good, and overall improving against myself or friends then I have the incentive to keep going and doing better. You can do something simple like maintaining an excel spreadsheet or twittering your workout but as someone who’s recently rediscovered cycling after 20 years in cars I’m really blown away by SportsDo. All you need is a Windows Mobile device with GPS capabilities, a data connection and … to get off the computer and get some exercise!

Your first step is to register on the SportsDo.Net website and create a profile. From there you can download and install the Windows Mobile client (other devices are supported) or you can visit their over-the-air provisioning site directly from your phone (you can try out the application before buying – you’re just limited to the distance you can cover).

You’re not limited by specific sports (and you don’t have to pre-select or choose anything up front) – when you start a new activity on your device you can choose from a predefined list (cycling, walking, canoeing, running, snowboarding, skiing, rowing, adventuring, motor-sports, horse riding and many others) or create your own profile.

Once you hit “new” on your device it starts recording GPS data so it knows where you are and how fast you are going (and from that it can calculate calories etc).

When you are exercising – be is a brisk walk or a full out cycle race – you can stop and take photos to record the even. They are, of course, geo-tagged and will be uploaded along with the rest of the data to your online diary.

Even if you don’t stop you can check the display at any time to see how far you’ve gone or how long you’ve been out. You can also choose to have any of the statistics (location, speed, distance traveled, gradient and calories burned and others) announced via your phones speakers or headphones.

You can choose to share your stats live (if you have a phone with a data plan and coverage) and there is also an option to automatically text buddies with updates.

Once you complete an activity you can edit the description and upload it (with any photos) to the web where you can then share with friends – including a Virtual Earth animation of the trail you took (shows relative speeds), synchronized to graphs showing gradients and speed. An example of the sort details and an animation of one of my recent cycle rides.

If you are going on an activity in an area you might not know that well SportsDo also have Location Packs available. These contain details of trails, restaurants and other amenities, ski lifts etc. The packs are continually updated as information about an area improves, and the packs cover many popular resorts.

As well as documenting your sporting prowess you can use SportsDo to tell friends and family where you are (similar to the option for Navizon users). You can even embed the information in your blog if you want to share that much ;)

You’re probably very familiar with the plethora of widget or gadget technologies on the web or your desktop by now – Vista Sidebar, Windows Sideshow, Google, Yahoo and Microsofts web and desktop offerings as well as a collection of Web 2.0 offerings that it’s pointless to try and enumerate because it would already be out of date.

Well, they continue to spread and Access (the folks behind the NetFront browser which has been doing a great job on Palm and Windows Mobile for several years) have brought a gadget runtime framework to Windows Mobile Professional (aka Touch or PocketPC) devices that they call Netfront Browser Widgets.

Installation and setup on my HTC Diamond was quick and simple. You need to register at the Netfront Browser Widgets site and from there download the installer to your phone (though you can do it over the air I found it easier via the desktop browser)

The installer comes with a couple of widgets (World Clock and Weather) pre-installed, but there are several others (such as the Twitter one above) that you can download and install.

The widgets themselves seem to have a very similar philosophy to their desktop and web counterparts – development will be using standard HTML and Javascript (a subset of the W3C Widgets 1.0 specification) with some javascript extensions to access hardware specific things such as location, power and wireless status.

Unlike many development environments / tools, widgets are fairly straightforward to develop for (thanks to the HTML and Javascript basis) and are also safe – because they operate in your default browsers sandbox they’re not going to get uncontrolled access to your device or data so they’re safe to experiment with.

At the moment although there are some widgets created by Access themselves to get you started the developer information isn’t available, but I imagine it won’t be too long before we see that released and folks start to get creative…

Lifecasting is a big thing at the moment. One step beyond blogging and tweeting is the ability to record and broadcast live video from a cellphone to share what you’re doing – and engage with your audience.

Qik is probably the best known of these, and is slowly rolling out an early beta service for Windows Mobile users. But Qik are not the only game in town – there are a couple of existing solutions that have great support for Windows Mobile users.

LiveCast provide a live video streaming platform for Windows Mobile and laptop or UMPC users. The video is synchronized with GPS position data so your viewers can see where you are when you’re broadcasting (or when they review archived footage where you were).

While the video quality on LiveCast is pretty good for high end phones the client is not the most intuitive (so expect to spend some time figuring it it), and the web site is a bit clunky.

LiveMedia from IncaX provides very similar capabilities – private or public broadcasting from either PC or Mobile device, though as well as streaming video it allows you to insert other media from your device to enhance the presentation.

The LiveMedia GPS mobile client (currently in beta) adds GPS location data to the broadcast from your phone, and also allows you to record a broadcast to local storage for later upload. This feature is particularly useful as it allows you to keep a record of a trip without having to worry about connectivity.

Although feature-for-feature these two solutions are fairly similar my preference is for LiveMedia. The video quality is slightly less fluid and there is no audio in the current beta version but the interface is significantly easier to work with and there are more options to share your broadcasts.

The great thing is that both of these products are at fairly early stages and are evolving quite quickly, as are the capabilities of the phones they run on. Missing features and complicated user interfaces will quickly give way to slick controls and, especially as bandwith increases, high quality video and audio.

I’m never organized enough to clip coupons (or even remember to collect them from the supermarket) so Cellfire seems like an ideal solution.

It’s a small application that runs on your Windows Mobile phone (or can be accessed via a web browser interface) which downloads available local offers (you tell it your postcode) and you can search and redeem them in stores.

The offers range from half price coffee to free slices of pizza, video rental or music downloads and many others, frequently updated and offered at no cost to you (beyond data costs if you download updates over the air)

I love the idea, but I think there are some ways it could improve to make it a much more useful.

• Searching and filtering offers is a bit rudimentary, I’d like to see more granularity so I can quickly see if there’s something relevant to my current needs, but at the same time it’s important for their business model to have the serendipity of discovering new stores so a general browse mode is still needed. I’d like to be able to specify things I’m not interested in (diapers or all-you-can-eat Seafood Diners for instance) and raise the priorities of things I am (eg non-chain coffee shops, organic produce, independent music stores).
• Location appropriate offers. I’m not going to drive 20 miles for a half price latte so it’s not worth showing those to me when I look for coffeeshops, but by talking to the GPS on my phone (or maybe integrating with something like Navizon for users without GPS) the offers can be much better targeted to where I am right now. A neat, but slightly freaky, extension would be to look ahead in my calendar to see what locations I’ve entered and find offers in those areas as well.
• Smart sorting. Similar to the location appropriate offers it makes sense to show me the closest offers first as I’m more likely to use them, but it would be good to have options to also sort based on other factors such as value of offer or loyalty to a specific store.
• Mapping integration. Don’t just give me the address give me a hot link to Windows Live Search for Mobile or (if not available) to Live Maps so I can get directions. Also with map integration you could plot offers and let me optimize my shopping trips ;)

The other thing I’d like to see is better integration with supermarket coupons – I’d be willing to pair my QFC Club Card to my Cellfire account in order to have relevant offers/coupons made available electronically (and it would be great if I could scan them at the quick checkout and not need to queue at the counter – similar to what we showed at Advance08). It would greatly enhance the value of the application and make more more likely to take advantage of some of the promotions offered. In fact if managed well it could be a real loyalty bonus as you’d have a constant reminder of the value of your continued patronage.

One new feature Cellfire could accommodate would be Club Card membership. Rather than me need to carry around the barcodes for QFC, Blockbuster and Borders I could enter the information (either in the app or via their website) and have the card image delivered to my phone so I can scan that and dump the plastic chits. It’s a much simpler solution and even more practical than some other solutions I’ve seen.

One of the biggest problems with using the Internet for crucial day-to-day applications is when you can’t get connected. On a plane, at a WiFi hotspot you don’t really trust, or even in a building with poor data network reception for your phone.

For most desktop applications the answer is simple… your data lives locally and you work with it there not rely on connectivity, and then sync what you need to. At MIX this year for instance we demonstrated a prototype of a Cirque du Soleil application that demonstrated exactly that.

For web applications it’s a little harder as they run inside the browser sandbox, and for mobile web applications… well, logic dictates that should be even harder.

Well… turns out it’s not that hard for developers to build an off-line version of their site that’s able to cache data locally and the really interesting thing for me was discovering how well it works on Windows Mobile. That solution is Google Gears.

I use Buxfer to try and make sense of my personal finances (a pretty major challenge). The reason I’m leaning more to this solution rather than, say, Mint (an otherwise excellent solution) is that they let me take my data offline and access it on my Windows Mobile phone.

Now they could have developed a native Windows Mobile application to do this, which would have given them a rich UI and dynamic synchronization and probably a whole load of other goodness, but they reasoned that they’re web developers, they don’t really “get” mobile app development and there’s probably a dozen different platforms they’ll want to support so… why not let someone else do the heavy lifting (and that someone is Google with their Gears API and javascript extensions) – all they have to do is develop the application using the Gears API and they get, for very little additional development overhead, a portable offline solution that runs anywhere Gears does (Windows Mobile, OSX, Windows XP/Vista and various flavors of Linux)

I think it’s pretty impressive that Windows Mobile is the first supported phone platform and a testament to how popular it is as a data access device.

Gears is only a 0.2 release so there’s probably lots of things that will be added over time. My wishlist for those additions is pretty simple:

• Ability to synchronize changes back to the web (MS SQL Sync Framework supports this
• Ability to auto synchronize – as a user I have to manually choose to go “offline”… if I don’t do that before disconnecting then I don’t have the latest copy of the data. It would be great if a Gears enabled app could detect it was running on an authorized device and in the background update me and then if I try to return to the site in (say) Flight mode it automatically switches to offline mode.

Native apps will always have a richer interface and more powerful capabilities because they operate outside the browser sandbox, they have access to the hardware (eg camera) and features like the network stack directly so they are ideal for more sophisticated users. But for simple look-up applications like mobile versions of Buxfer or Zoho this is a great solution

If you’ve never seen Windows Sideshow in operation you’re in for a treat. Sideshow is a function in Windows Vista which allows small hardware gadgets to access data and control the host device.

The team have just released a runtime to enable you to turn any Windows Mobile device (touchscreen or smartphone, as long as both it and your PC supports Bluetooth) into a Sideshow device and host gadgets. You can find out more details and download it from their blog.

Examples of Sideshow in action include remote controls and external screens on laptops, Fridge magnets and messenger bags. Gadgets can be simple RSS readers, weather alerts or remote control for your Windows Media Player. You can get more detail at WindowsSideshow.com and SideShowDevices.com and find gadgets at the Windows Live Gallery.

The neat thing for developers is that the team have also just released a new SDK to allow development using Managed Code (C# rather than C++) which makes it easier to develop gadgets that can run on any Sideshow equipped devices.

I’ve been playing with it over the weekend and love being able to use my phone to control Windows Media from across the room. More practical uses include controlling a PowerPoint presentation or getting weather at a glance on both your Vista sidebar as well as a device you take everywhere with you.

Do you care about Windows Mobile? Do you use a Windows Mobile powered Smartphone or PocketPC? Do you have any feedback or comments on how Microsoft could make it better?

By all means leave a comment here, but the best place to get your voice heard (and let others contribute refinements to your ideas) is over at the Windows Mobile Connect site.

You don’t need to sign up in order to view existing feedback but if you want to comment or submit a new item you will need a LiveID to log in.

If you’re a developer you should also check out the Windows Mobile Developer Forums for more in-depth nut-and-bolts type discussions.

One of the problems with using most smartphones or UMPCs is that while the form factor is ideally suited to portability they are not exactly the best form factor for composing an essay on.

A while ago I ordered a USB roll up keyboard for the Q1U but it was too big and the keypad layout was weird (and the action was terrible). The backlight was the coolest thing about it (but it made a buzzing noise). Needless to say it wasn’t a hit (and as the Q1U only has 2 USB sockets it was a bit of a nuisance).

I’d asked around a bit and folks said great things about the iGo Stowaway keyboard but sadly while it is still available it’s been discontinued – mainly because developing new drivers wasn’t cost effective for iGo. While that meant I could get one today and it would probably work with any of my phones and my Vista / WinXP machines there was no guarantee it would stay current as new devices and operating systems appeared on the horizon.

So I went hunting again and found a great little bluetooth keyboard from Freedom (the same folks who make my current GPS dongle). It supports both HID and SPP profiles which means it can be paired with Windows PCs, Windows Mobile smartphones and professional (touch) devices as well as Blackberry, Nokia and Palm phones.

Installation on the PC was easy – like pairing with any other device (though typing in the pass key “blind” was funny!). Pairing on the phone was a little harder as it requires downloading a driver and then generating an unlock key (I understand that they do that to ensure people only use their drivers with keyboards from Freedom but the process wasn’t fool-proof for me… I’d like the driver to include the smarts to negotiate the connection and guide me through verification) – but it works perfectly.

The keyboard, although folding, has a great layout (apart from the /? key being to the right of the shift, and the spacebar being in two parts), great action on the keys but having 5 rows (including a full number row), Windows key, function key (Fn+number) and a physical on/off switch (toggles on, HID or SPP profiles) makes this a great option for both UMPC or smartphone users fed up with cramped (or missing) keyboards.

It’s not tiny. Folded it’s about the size of two SGH-i780s side by side (see here for comparisons) but it’s lightweight, and takes standard AA batteries. Unfolded and locked it’s stable and feels solid. It even includes an integrated stand for your phone – can double as a notes holder.

The only thing I’d like to see is a pointing-stick style mouse to avoid reaching for the stylus or having to tap the screen on the Q1U but even that omission doesn’t distract from using this (as any bluetooth mouse could also be paired to complement the setup)

And yes. I wrote this review on my UMPC using the Freedom keyboard. I would have used my i780 but I don’t have a blogging app on there that I really like.