Windows Mobile

I recently received my new HTC Touch Pro smartphone, which is by far the best phone I ever owned so far – it has all that I need to complete my daily tasks. Over the years I had a few phones, of course the latest one has nearly almost been the best for me at that time. I decided to take a look down the memory lane and see what phones I have owned and used for daily usage. There are some in between that I used for shorter periods, but these are the major milestones in my mobile-life.

Wow, two heavy-weight Windows Mobile phones; Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and HTC Touch Pro. In a few months I am ready to get me a new phone. I currently use the HTC TyTN, which has been a very pleasant ride (except for the glitching screen right now, to many drops…). When Sony Ericsson announced XPERIA X1 in march I got so excited and decided to get me one as soon as it hits the stores. Today HTC announced that they will continue their Touch series with the HTC Touch Pro, another sweet dream! So which one will be mine?

Certificate problems with Windows Mobile and Active Sync seems to be a pretty common cause of not being able to synchronize you mobile phone with Microsoft Exchange, but despite the number of web pages and posts found around the net there are no simple solutions or shortcuts. I previously had some problems installing my certificate on to my Windows Mobile 5 phone, but now it’s upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, which has support for handling certificates. Today I had to update the certificate on our Exchange server since it was not valid anymore and after that my WM6 phone stopped syncing and giving me this error: The security certificate on the server has expired. Check that the date and time on your device are correct and the error code 0x80072f05. The Microsoft KB article 927465 did not help but led me to look for a utility called SslChainSaver which I found on the Windows Mobile Team Blog. The SslChainSaver utility traces all certificates to your server and saves them as files on your machine. It also produces an XML file which you can turn into a CAB file (instructions here) to install them on your Windows Mobile phone.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

DataViz have released a new version of DocumentsToGo for Windows Mobile with support for viewing Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc). This is great, I have not used DocumentsToGo since my Sony-Ericsson p910i days but instead relied on the Office Mobile suite embedded in Windows Moblie 5. The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

I have been trying to setup my HTC TyTN to get the synchronization to work over the air using 3G or Wifi so I’m really connected to work 24/7 :-) After setting up the Exchange 2003 servers using the excellent step-by-step guide on TechNet for this purpose I was ready to test it all. But I ran into trouble directly and the ActiveSync reported an error: 0x80072F0D - invalid certificate. No problem, just install it to the trusted certificate store on the Windows Mobile phone…I thought. But the problem is that it’s not that easy done. After some googling I ran into Ant Drewery’s entry Windows Mobile 5.0 & ActiveSync which discussed this problem. I used his method to install the certificate into the Windows Mobile phone and it worked fine, after some initial trouble. I made the mistake first and tried to install the certificate that you get from the padlock icon, which will not work. You have to get it from the Trusted Root Certificate Store or from your administrator (which should have a backup of the original certificate installed on the OWA IIS).

Yesterday I abandoned my streak of Sony-Ericsson mobile phones which started many years ago. In fact it started when I was studying and working for the summer at one of Ericssons mobile phone assembly lines with the GH-688. Since 1996 I have been using them, except for a short period when my employer forced me to use a Nokia. I was choosing between upgrading my Sony-Ericsson P910i to a Sony-Ericsson P990 or the HTC TyTN. After some consideration I went to the mobile phone store and made a deal with the salesman.