My Life with Windows Mobile

By Kevin Pfister, Microsoft Student Representative

Like most students I crave the latest gadget, the definitive upgrade to which I can dedicate the next few months figuring out how to use. Well, after using a Windows Mobile 5 device now for a while I thought I should give a short ‘day in the life of.....’ to talk about how really amazing these devices are and how they aren’t just a fancy electronic diary but an integral part of anyone’s life who is fortunate to own one.

The day of course starts as most students wish to continue, asleep in bed. However I get woken up by the sound of ‘Sometimes I dream about cheese’; a witty game quote that’s now my ringtone and alarm. The initial thing I do is check my plan for the day using the calendar program, all lectures and appointments appear onscreen. I move onto checking my various email accounts using the built in Pocket Outlook; however usually by now I get an alarm kindly mentioning I have 15 minutes left to get to my lecture.

Going into my lectures I feel lighter; unlike the other students I don’t need any printed out slides, note paper or even pens. I just take out my Windows Mobile device, simply use the built in Wi-Fi combined with Pocket Internet Explorer to download the lecture slides and view them in Pocket PowerPoint. Taking notes is easy and I use Pocket Word for this task. No keyboard is required, although a virtual one can be displayed on screen; I just use the character recognition and write on the screen. This function is great at making others want their own Windows Mobile device!

A few lectures, phone calls and texts later I return home, plug it into my Windows Vista PC and use Windows Mobile Device Center to synchronise all my documents I edited throughout the day, meaning I never lose anything and they are always accessible to me and always up to date.

Now really this could just be called a glorified phone; however using Visual Studio 2005 you can extend its functions to anything you can think of by programming new features. I myself enjoy writing games but also mess around with applications to help streamline my life even more. If you can’t or don’t want to write programs yourself you can simply search around and there are 1000’s of free applications online to try.

If by now you’re as interested as I am, I suggest checking out the Windows Mobile website, you will be able to find out some really cool stuff and learn how you can get your very own Windows Mobile device.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2007
  Great review - you said everything I would have said.