Take your photo album with you

While it is true that most portable digital devices have ability to show photos on their screens - from mobile phones to music players like iPod, the abilities of Pocket PC in this area are usually unmatched. Specially if your Pocket PC has screen resolution of 600x480.

The first thing to think of is to compress images a bit. Remember, your images are usually in very high resolution if taken by digital camera, and you probably won't have any use of it even if you zoom just particular part of the image. And scaling down the image will save you storage, and speed up your browsing

My favorite software for scaling down images is Irfanview. After you start it, chose File/Batch Conversion/Rename. Add all the files you want to convert to the left pane. Then chose the output directory where smaller images would be saved (a good idea is to make a new folder on your desktop). Select batch conversion, and under advanced options chose resize/set new size/set both size to. There enter the height (in pixels) of your mobile device - usually 320 or 640 (if you think that you will use zoom multiply it with the zoom level you need) in both width and height fields.

With these settings, you will get the photos of the biggest possible size. On the other hand, you will have to rotate your device if the photo is horizontal, but then you do the same thing with the physical album, right?

Now, you need some software to view photos on Windows mobile. Generally speaking, you can use bare bone Windows mobile device to view images. Still, this will lead to several problems:

• no full screen mode (unless you have smartphone with custom prepacked software)
• no thumbnails to easy browse your collection
• no slideshow
• no easy way to switch from one photo to another (most image programs support browsing with scroll buttons

As always, I will propose the simplest solution - the one that clears all problems, but does nothing more - it is simple and easy to use, and very fast. Such program is Viewer, and is available for free.

Text input - it is never too fast

An important reason for using Windows mobile device with touch screen is to type text faster. And though you'll probably input text faster than with 12-button mobile phone, it will always seems too slow to you.

I suggest using Letter recognizer mode on Windows mobile. Transcriber is attractive, but it has more complex job to do (splitting your pen movements into letters) which eventually leads to more errors, and what is the worst in this mode it is harder to fix error than in Letter recognizer. Eventually, you will even have troubles that Transcribers activates when you try to click on something.

Third possible input method, virtual Keyboard, is not very efficient, and the only reason to use it is that you don't want to practice even a bit of time as it requires zero learning period. Though, it might be interesting in some situations - usual keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ctrl + A for selecting all text or files) work as it would on desktop.

To input text efficiently with Letter recognizer, try to follow these tips:

• write the widest possible letters, you will see that rate of recognition improves that way;
• remember some shortcuts: you don't have to put horizontal line on f;
• don't rush too much - every error is high penalty for your input speed, so don't write faster than your skill and device capabilities allow;
• don't let your batteries drain too much, it may affect rate of recognition;
• find optimal time to soft reset your device, recognition may get worse as you may accumulate a lot of junk that take of your device resources while it is turned on.

Also, consider Quikwrite. These method claims a significant speed improvement with a bit of practice, as it is not based on character recognition, but on gestures. I must say I failed to get used to this, but it is worth a try.

Finally, full-time mobile typists may consider to buy device with keyboard, or buy keyboard accessory for their device. Eventually, you will be even able to roll it up into your pocket.

Turn your agenda into dashboard

Built-in functions of Pocket Outlook lacks several things:

• it is hard to track tasks - though you can have start and end date for them, you have just plain list not related to calendar, so it all ends in reminders which might come too late;
• there is no common look on tasks and meetings, and as they are all time related stuff, managing your schedule is much harder;
• birthdays are not integrated well - again you have reminders, but not much more than that;
• today screen is a nice idea, but not very well implemented - it is not space efficient, and it doesn't show more than your today (or next day) meetings. It would be much better if it showed your next 10 meetings or so, no matter how far in the future they are.

To fix all these problems, there is simple solution - tAgenda. It is a free today screen plug-in that displays all information you might need, with advanced customization. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on Windows mobile 2003SE or Windows mobile 2005.

If you need solution for Windows mobile 2003SE or Windows mobile 2005, or if you feel that your schedule is quite busy, and that just a new view with tAgenda on it is not enough, you may chose more complex tools like Pocket Informant, or Agenda Fusion. They allow similar views to tAgenda, and also improve many other aspects of Pocket Outlook.