For the Windows Mobile users out there, and there is still a surprising number, yesterday marked the end of a critical service – Windows My Phone.  For users of the service, if you have content still stored there it will begin migrating to Windows SkyDrive.  Video, Music, and Favorites will will not be moved.  Over the weekend, Microsoft sent a final warning, via email, to all users.  You can read the message in full at the end of this post.

While many customers have probably moved on to Windows Phone, or migrated to Android or iPhone, corporations are always slow to adopt and many still are using Windows Mobile devices.  Of course, many are still using Windows XP and IE 6 as well.  What evolved as Pocket PC 2000 and later became Windows CE 5.2 before settling on the Windows Mobile moniker may still hold as much as a 5% share of the worldwide market.  That’s sounds small, but it equates to millions of users.

Microsoft Email:

Dear Windows Mobile 6.x customer,

Microsoft will be discontinuing the My Phone service for Windows Mobile 6.x. Because you may be affected, please review the information below.

My Phone To Be Discontinued

On August 7, 2011, the My Phone service will stop saving content from phones to the My Phone service. If you use the My Phone service to back up the content on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone, you will be affected.

Starting on August 7, 2011, Microsoft will begin moving your My Phone content to Windows Live SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free online storage service that helps you access and share your files such as photos and Microsoft Office documents. Contacts, calendar entries, text messages and photos from your My Phone account will be moved to SkyDrive for you. Once moved, you will be able to access this content by logging into SkyDrive using the Windows Live ID that you used to register for the My Phone service.

Other content types, including videos, music, documents and favourites will not be moved from My Phone to SkyDrive for you. If you want this content, you must save it from the My Phone service to your local PC.

On October 6, 2011, the My Phone website at http://www.microsoft.com/myphone will no longer be available. On this date, you will no longer be able to log in to the My Phone service to access your content stored to the My Phone service. Microsoft will continue to store your My Phone content for one (1) year. A copy of your content can be shipped to you on a CD/DVD upon request until October 5, 2012.

Take Action

To learn more about the My Phone service shutdown, including information about your content moving to Windows Live SkyDrive and how to save other content to your local PC, please visit this web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2557520

Microsoft is committed to making this transition easy. In the meantime, we want to sincerely thank you for your use of Windows Mobile 6.x.

 -The Windows Phone Team

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

For those few users out there who are still clinging to their Windows Mobile devices the end is getting closer.  Microsoft is now sending out reminders that the their MyPhone service will be shutting down on August 7th, 2011.

For those still using the service to backup their phone’s data, this should be a wake-up call.  If you have data stored with the service then it will be moved to Microsoft SkyDrive.  You won’t lose data – you just won’t b able to back any more up.  You will still be able to access your previously store data, such as photos, Microsoft Office documents. Contacts, calendar entries, text messages and photos.

To get the exact information you can read the email (posted below) that Microsoft is sending out to users.

Dear Windows Mobile 6.x customer:

Microsoft will be discontinuing the My Phone service for Windows Mobile 6.x. Because you may be affected, please review the information below.

My Phone To Be Discontinued

On August 7, 2011 the My Phone service will stop saving content from phones to the My Phone service. If you rely on the My Phone service to back-up the content on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone, you will be affected.

Starting on August 7, 2011, Microsoft will begin moving your My Phone content to Windows Live SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free online storage service that helps you access and share your files such as photos and Microsoft Office documents. Contacts, calendar entries, text messages and photos will be moved to SkyDrive for you. Once moved, you will be able to access this content by logging into SkyDrive using the Windows Live ID that you used to register for the My Phone service.

Other content types, including videos, music, documents and favorites will not be moved from My Phone to SkyDrive for you. If you want this content, you must save it from the My Phone service to your local PC.

On October 6, 2011, the My Phone website at http://www.microsoft.com/myphone will no longer be available. On this date, you will no longer be able to log in to the My Phone service to access your content stored to the My Phone service. Microsoft will continue to store your My Phone content for one (1) year. A copy of your content can be shipped to you on a CD/DVD upon request until October 5, 2012.

Take Action

To learn more about the My Phone service shut-down, including information about your content moving to Windows Live SkyDrive and how to save other content to your local PC, please visit this web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2557520

Microsoft is committed to making this transition easy. In the meantime, we want to sincerely thank you for your use of Windows Mobile 6.x.

 -The Windows Phone Team

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

Windows Mobile had a nice long run, through 6.5 versions, but the release of Windows Phone 7 last year spelled the end for Mobile.  Now that inevitability has been given dates.  Both the Windows Mobile Marketplace and MyPhone service will be shut down over the next couple of months.  Microsoft is notifying users by email beginning today.

Here is part of the text, including dates, from the email users are receiving.

The Windows Marketplace for Mobile web site at http://marketplace.windowsphone.com will no longer be available starting on July 15, 2011. After July 15, 2011, you will no longer be able to browse, buy or download applications for Windows Mobile 6.x phones via the Windows Marketplace for Mobile web site.

The Windows Marketplace for Mobile service will continue to be available on your phone, however. You will continue to be able to browse, buy and download applications for Windows Mobile 6.x on your phone.

On August 7, 2011, the My Phone service will stop saving content from phones to the My Phone service. If you rely on the My Phone service to back-up the content on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone, you will be affected.

Starting on August 7, 2011, Microsoft will begin moving your My Phone content to Windows Live SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free online storage service that helps you access and share your files such as photos and Microsoft Office documents. Contacts, calendar entries, text messages and photos will be moved to SkyDrive for you. Once moved, you will be able to access this content by logging into SkyDrive using the Windows Live ID that you used to register for the My Phone service.

Other content types, including videos, music, documents and favorites will not be moved from My Phone to SkyDrive for you. If you want this content, you must save it from the My Phone service to your local PC.

On October 6, 2011, the My Phone web site at http://www.microsoft.com/myphone will no longer be available. On this date, you will no longer be able to log in to the My Phone service to access your content stored to the My Phone service. Microsoft will continue to store your My Phone content for one (1) year. Physical copies of your content can be shipped to you upon request until October 5, 2012.

To get additional information on the MyPhone service shutdown, Microsoft is directing customers to the Knowledge Base article 2557520.

We knew this day would eventually come, but I expected to be a bit further off.  Microsoft has a habit of supporting old technology long beyond what most people would consider reasonable.  And give the number of businesses on Windows Mobile a longer run would have seemed  to be a given.  That said, I can’t say that many people will be sad to see this mobile OS fade into the past.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

Today, with live events in New York and London, Microsoft officially launched Windows Phone 7, although you can’t actually buy one until November 8.  The Microsoft press release I received states:

The new Windows Phone 7 arrives in stores starting Monday, November 8. It’s a different kind of phone, designed to get to everything you love easier and faster. We’re giving our Windows Phone Insider subscribers direct access to the latest details.

The phones announced today included the Samsung Focus, LG Quantum, and HTC Surround for AT&T and the HTC HD 7 for T-Mobile, as well as the Dell Venue Pro.

Microsoft’s blog gave a short update on today’s NYC launch with Steve Ballmer:

Just a short while ago Steve Ballmer took the stage here in New York City to take the wraps of the Windows Phone 7 global portfolio, revealing nine new handsets from leading mobile operators in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and Australia. He talked about how Windows Phone was designed to help bring together the stuff you care about most to help you get things done faster, whether that is going through work email, updating your Facebook status, taking pictures of your night out or playing games, music and video.

Windows Phone is all about deep, integrated experiences and a unique, elegant design. These integrated experiences come from all across Microsoft including Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Office Mobile, Zune, Windows Live, Bing and more. But it is not just about Microsoft services, Windows Phone 7 is a powerful platform for third party developers as well, allowing them to build applications that are visually stunning and functionally unique. Only Windows Phone 7 has Live Tiles, that display real time updates like news, appointments or status updates. The Live Tiles and Start screen mean you can have a customizable and deeply personal experience with your phone. Like it should be! Our mobile phones are increasingly important to our lives, and they should be uniquely ours. I love that every time I unlock my Windows Phone my family and best friends are staring back at me on the Start screen, and I can get a quick read on what is happening in their lives.

That is my quick update from the press conference. I am going to scoot around the event this morning and post some more about gaming, music and video and of course some more shots of the cool new hardware from Dell, HTC Corp., LG and Samsung.

As for features, here’s what we know now:

• It will have email, calendar, and contacts syncing automatically from your Hotmail account, much the way Google integrates into Android phones.
• Social networks such as Facebook and MySpace also integrate themselves with Phone 7.
• Photos will sync with your SkyDrive account.
• OneNote will also sync with SkyDrive and also with Office 2010.
• Locate a lost phone via maps on http://windowsphone.live.com

Unlike the Phone, the Zune 4.7 software update is available today.  When I opened the Zune program on my PC I was immediately greeted with the news.

Once I’ve had more of chance to play around with it I will do a writeup on the features and changes.  Although, I do not yet have a review phone to try it out with so for right now I can only look at the Zune features.  I’ll leave you with this sneak peek.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

There’s been a spate of recent news rolling out of Redmond.  Here’s a roundup.

Windows Phone 7

This was recently announced on the Windows Team Blog.

Windows Phone Press Event on October 11th

Today I’m happy to share that invites have been distributed for a press conference with Steve Ballmer and Ralph de la Vega of AT&T that will happen October 11th in New York City.  It will be an exciting day, and while we won’t yet have phones available for all to buy, that time is nearing!  The day will include remarks from Steve Ballmer and Ralph de la Vega, a demonstration of the new Windows Phone 7 capabilities and a preview of several apps, as well as hands on time with the devices for attending media.  Later in the day we will showcase all our consumer offerings at the Microsoft Open House press event that immediately follows the Windows Phone 7 press conference.  Windows Phone 7 is nearly here!

Windows Family Pack

Windows 7 Family Pack mad a comeback this week.  It’s $149.99 for three (3) licenses of Windows 7 Home Premium.  There’s an article explaining it at

It’s back! Microsoft offers discount on Windows 7 Family Pack Upgrade

Windows Photo Contest

With last weeks release of Windows Live Essentials 2011 a contest has been announced.  Here’s the details from Microsoft:

Windows Live + Bing Photo Contest

Last week, we announced the release of the new Windows Live Essentials 2011 for everyone to download which includes Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mesh and Family Safety. To celebrate the release of Windows Live Essentials, the best way to connect your PC to the cloud helping you to share and communicate for free, we are doing a contest with our friends from Bing to highlight Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Photo Gallery is the best place on your PC to organize, edit and share your photos and videos with friends and family and social networks in the cloud. With that in mind, we’re looking for some breathtaking and stunning photos of clouds! We are looking for photos of clouds that somehow illustrate and show how Windows Live connects your PC to the cloud – but in a creative way of course! We then want to put one lucky winner’s photo of clouds on the homepage of Bing for the day! So send in your photos of clouds or anything that relates to clouds – rainbows, thunderclouds, airplanes, orographic clouds, etc. You can take pictures of landscapes, cities, objects, and just about anything so long as clouds are the primary focus of the image.

When taking your photo, you should think about how the photo can draw people in as a starting place for exploring Bing. It should strive for subtlety and poetry. For example, if the photo was taken on a day of celebration, you shouldn’t have to know that it’s Halloween, Columbus Day, or Mother’s Day to enjoy the photo.

Here are the requirements for your photo submissions (5 entries per person):

• No recognizable people.
• No 3rd party trademarks or logos (such as distinctive packaging or building exteriors / interiors) owned by others.
• No objectionable content, such as alcohol, smoking, guns, violence, or nudity.
• No content that is defamatory to any group or individual and/or violates any law.
• JPEG format only.
• Minimum photo dimensions 970px width by 528px height.
• We prefer to have the image submitted in its original size and aspect ratio, which will allow us the most flexibility when sizing and cropping to meet the needs of the homepage.
• Horizontal orientation.
• At least 1MB in size.
• No watermark, signature or photographer name can be included in the image file. The photographer credit for the winner will be added to the page separately.

To enter the contest, send your submissions to WLcontest@hotmail.com by Friday October 22nd, 2010. Your email should include your image(s), image title, short description of the image(s), your first/last name, and a contact email address.

A panel of judges will review all eligible photographs and select winners. 10 winners will be selected to have their photo featured in a Windows 7 Theme Pack to be featured in the Personalization Gallery. The grand prize will be selected that will have their photo featured on the Bing homepage US-English homepage on November 8th, 2010. The winning photographer will be given credit for the photo.

I strongly suggest reading over the complete contest rules and guidelines here before submitting your photos.

Have fun!

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

First the disclaimer: This isn’t necessarily something your mobile service wants you doing…and it may actually violate their terms of service.  So, of course, I am speaking hypothetically about what I have heard…from a friend…

If you aren’t familiar with the term “tethering” then let me give a brief explanation.  Tethering is simply plugging your cell phone into your laptop and using the cellular data network to access the internet on the laptop.

So let’s get started with PdaNet.

1. First, make sure you have ActiveSync installed on your laptop.  If you don’t, then you can download it HERE.

2. Download PdaNet to your laptop (PdaNet works, not just with Windows Mobile, but also with Android, PalmOS, Blackberry and iPhone)

3. At the end of the installation you will be prompted to plug your phone into the laptop.

4. Once installed, there is not ore setup necessary (although you can make changes if you want).  Now just plug in your phone wherever you are and right-click on PdaNet tray icon and choose Connect.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

A while back Microsoft released My Phone to relatively little attention.  I installed it as soon as I saw it and then I too payed little attention to it.  Oh, I made sure it worked correctly – it did, but beyond that I really never thought about it.

Then I needed it.  Somehow (and I still don’t know how it happened) I lost all of my contacts on my phone.  Suddenly My Phone became a lifeline.  I went to the web site and made sure my contacts were still there.  They were.  Then I set it to reinstall on the next sync.  I pulled out my phone and did a manual My Phone sync and all of my contacts reappeared!

It’s simple to install from the Marketplace.  And, once installed, it sets itself to run automatically every day at 3am.  You can change this by going to Menu => Sync Schedule. It backs up:

• Current Location
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Tasks
• Text Massages
• Browser Favorites
• Photos
• Videos
• Music
• Documents
• Storage Cards

All of this information can be viewed, restored and browsed on the My Phone website.

You can pick and choose which of these you want to back up by going to Menu => Sync Options.

Want to automatically share your photos on a social network?  Go to  Menu => Share Photos => Social Networks and you can choose from:

• Windows Live
• Flickr
• Facebook
• My Space

And that brings me to one of the drawbacka I have found.  I use Twikini as my phone’s Twitter client, which shows TwitPic photos inline.  These and various program icons are backed up and appear on the website under My Photos.  I can go to the site and delete them and tell it to delete them from my phone upon next sync, but I shouldn’t have to.

The other drawback is the lack of support in the Social Networks for both Picasa and, ironically, Microsoft’s own Skydrive.  These drawbacks are all simple fixes and, hopefully, will be taken care of in a future update.

Those last items aside, I can’t help but be grateful for the restoration of my Contacts, which alone is reason enough to use this program on your Windows Phone.  A couple of kinks are not exactly out of the ordinary in any program, and the good here far outweighs the bad.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

From Engadget:

Netflix prototyped for Windows Phone 7 Series

We just got a quick at Netflix for Windows Phone 7 Series, one of the third-party apps Microsoft’s showing off here at MIX10, and it looks… well, very Netflixy — it’s red to the bone. Unlike other mobile Netflix apps, this one’s got Watch Instantly support and it looks great — a real testament to the capabilities Microsoft’s bringing to the table with it Silverlight-based dev platform.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

If you are new to this, let me first give a brief explanation of tethering.  Tethering is the use of a mobile phone to provide internet access to a PC.  Basically, it means you plug your phone into your laptop (generally via USB) and use the phone’s data connection as a modem for internet access on the laptop.  While WiFi has become more and more readily available, it is still not everywhere.  And, since surfing on your laptop is much easier than on your phone, logic dictates using that data plan you pay for to surf on the laptop.  Here are 3 programs you can use to tether your Windows Mobile phone.

1. PdaNet

This is the one I use.  It’s $34 to buy, but they provide a free 7 day trial of the full version.  It works with Windows Mobile 5 and newer.  It’s easy to install – download the file to your PC and begin the installation and then you will be prompted to plug in your phone to finish.  It does require that you have  Windows Mobile Device Center already installed (if you are using Vista or 7).  Once installed, you can go to the network connection icon in you system tray and select the PdaNet connection.

2. WMWifiRouter

This one will run you $$29.99.  It works with Windows Mobile 5 and 6.  This does not require your phone to be plugged into the PC, but your phone does have to have WiFi.  Once it’s set up, you can broadcast your phones data connection through WiFi and then log on to that network from your PC, just like any other wireless network.

3. USB Modem

This works with Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0 and 6.1.  There is no mention on the web site of 6.5 or Windows 7.  I would assume, if it works with Vista (and it does) that it will work with 7.  The advantage here is the price – $19.95.  The caution, coming directly from their web site, is “for more reliable work with Sprint or Verizon carriers you may need to purchase their tethering plan”.  If you want to purchase the service from your carrier then you might as well use their software instead of buying a third-party program.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

You can download an updated version of Google Maps for Windows Mobiles that includes a Buzz layer.  You can download it here or send the link to you phone via text (the easier way in my opinion).  The best part is that you lose none of your previous map data or layers.  Alas, still to Turn-By-Turn for Windows Mobile…

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts