Friday, May 11, 2007

Upgrading the Dash to Windows Mobile 6

I upgraded my Dash to Windows Mobile 6 earlier in the week. It's prettier, sounds better, and they've fixed a lot of little things to streamline messaging and calendaring, etc, reducing some nuisance. But by far the biggest "WOW factor" is the Voice Command application. I can ask my phone, "What is my calendar today?" and it will read it back to me. It will announce the name of incoming calls (over the speakerphone or bluetooth headset, configurable), read the header of an incoming message, I can ask it to dial a phone number, call a contact, play an artist or album in Media Player, read me the list of available artists, read me my missed calls, my battery level, my signal strength, start any program...to name a few features. All of this with no voice training; the speech to text is solid. It successfully knows that when I say (phonetically), "yahn why-check" that it should load "Jan Wasiek." Now, I admit this won't be a huge deal in my daily routine, but next time I'm driving and an email or text comes in, I won't take my eyes off the road to see what it is; my phone will whisper it into my ear.

2 comments:

Travis said...

[Imported comment* originally authored by Clintus.] I love WM6 but haven't tried this out yet. I was curious though about something else. In fact how I found your blog was trying to push gmail to the dash. I did everything you stated yet the messages still clear out my inbox every time I send/recieve. Any solutions for this? Any free solution for Gtalk? Thanks.
PS I would have shot you an email but I don't see it listed anywhere.

Travis said...

[Imported comment* originally authored by Travis.] You could email me over at http://www.pettijohn.com/contact/.
I don't know the answer to your question. I gave up with using TMobile as an intermediary and just poll Gmail every 15 minutes now. It works well enough. Try logging into gmail with your username as "recent:[email protected]". The recent: prefix tells the system to grab the last 30 days of email every time.
I haven't found a good gtalk solution. Let me know if you do!