To dial 1-800-FLOWERS you need to be able to remember what all the crazy mappings are or have one in front of you to cheat. Now in Windows Mobile 6.1 Microsoft has added “Vanity Dialing” Turn it on, and you can dial with actual letters from your QWERTY keyboard. Here’s how to enable it:

From your Home screen press Start > Then Settings.
Make your way to the Key Settings sub menu
Choose Vanity Dialing
Turn Vanity Dialing On and Press Done.
You’ll see a message about Rebooting your phone. Press OK and Go ahead and do it. Press the Power Button and choose Power off.
Power the phone on again.

Now press the Dial Key.
You should see 123# in the top right corner of your screen to let you know that Vanity Dialing is enabled.

To dial 1800-FLOWERS , press 1-800 as you normally would, then press the SHIFT key once. You should see the 123# change to ABC. Now type FLOWERS. Then press the dial button. The numbers should automagically be translated to the traditional letter mappings. If you need to switch back to numeric dialing, you can press SHIFT again to disable the feature.

Good luck, and happy dialing.

I was waiting for them to release a windows mobile compatible version of their software for my BlackJack II as they just released it for the iPhone recently. Sure enough, if you visit the Pandora site, they have indeed released a version for Windows Mobile devices. However, unless you have one of the few supported devices (Blackjack 2 is not), it won’t let you grab the software. Thankfully, the folks over at xda-developers and PPC-Geeks  have the .cab file posted on their forums.  Grab it from the links below and transfer it to your BlackJack II via ActiveSync. Then find it in file explorer on your device and click to install. Open the app up and enjoy free Pandora streaming on your BlackJackII. You’ll need to have an active account set up on their website before you can enjoy the streaming tunes action. Granted, the sound quality is not quite as good as the website streaming. It sounds about 64 Kb to me, but who caares? It’s certainly listenable, and I’m sure in the future they’ll bump up the bitrate (probably for a fee!). Ive got my BlackJack II hooked up for sound in my car, and it’s sweet to listen to Pandora while driving – no commercials! With the relatively low bitrate, I can keep a stream going through my whole commute even when I drop from 3G to Edge.

Here’s some links to the cab files so you can get your Pandora on. I haven’t noticed much difference between versions below, but there appear to be a few circulating.

1.1.10 – http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=23551&d=1234395930

1.1.4 and 1.0.25 http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=48458&highlight=pandora

Now I’m ready for a streaming Last.FM client for the BlackJack II. I know there’s one that will only scrobble. Anyone?

Google very recently released some nifty new mobile software. Google Latitude, once installed on your mobile device, allows you to see where your Google Contacts are in real time. I downloaded this onto my BlackJack II.

After opting in for Latitude and then getting your buddies to do the same, your contacts show up with their respective avatars on the familiar Google Map.

I think this is a nice idea. Not sure how it really would be of much use, but who knows.  It will fall back to the “My Location”-cell tower based positioning if necessary.

There are a bunch of apps available for the Iphone which perform similar functions.  However,  on WinMO and Android, you can have tasks running in the background.

Interesting Feature: When you exit Google Maps on WinMo after enabling Latitude, you’re prompted whether you want to continue to send your location data to Google or not.  On my phone, at least, it has continued to update my location, despite not having Google Maps running. It’s actually kind of weird. Not sure how often it polls the GPS if you leave it running in the background. Could kill the battery quick.

Kudos, though,  to Google for attempting to create a cross-platform location-based service.  I think its important with GPS’ radios making their way into everyone’s smartphones, that there be some services available across all platforms. Google and their maps suite is the only product I’m aware of available for all the popular mobile formats- Blackberry, IPhone, Windows Mobile, Android.

Try it out here for yourself…

Here’s a video of it running on Android: