Real World Computing

Where the Orange system does come into its own, though, is when it's integrated into a business automation suite. For example, to complement its navigation product, Orange also offers excellent tools for mobile forms and job automation, and all these systems have published APIs, which make it possible for enterprise developers to create what we'd once have called an "integrated system" but is now more fashionably known as a "mash-up". A heating engineer, for example, might look on his TyTN II to find his next job location and have it automatically generate a route to get there, then once he arrives presents him with the job description and a completion ticket to fill in - joined-up mobile applications like this are the way of the future.

So Orange's version of the TyTN II differs significantly from the original product, but the company decided to abandon its usual practice of naming the device in its own SVP series and instead is sticking to the original HTC name of TyTN II. I think that's a bit confusing, like buying your Fruit 'n' Fibre in Waitrose, but discovering that the supermarket had customised it by removing the sultanas.

One last fact about the TyTN II (all versions): you can give the power button a quick press to put it on standby, but when you slide the keyboard slightly it will wake up again. That's fine if you keep the phone in a holster, but if like me you tend to keep phones directly in your pocket you'll soon discover that it's far too easy to accidentally slide the two halves apart enough to wake it up, and before you know it you're making silent calls or sending strange texts to your last communicant. There is a solution, although it isn't something for the nervous to attempt. You'll need to install a Registry editing tool to do it, and my own favourite is PHM's Registry Editor, which you can download from www.phm.lu/products/PocketPC/RegEdit, although there are plenty available.

Once you've installed an editor, navigate your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HARDWARE, DEVICEMAP, KEYBD, where you'll need to create a new DWORD entry called SlideWakeup and set its value to zero (and please don't ask me whether that's zero hex or zero decimal, as someone recently did). That done, quit RegEdit and reset the phone by giving it a quick prod up the reset hole with the stylus. Once it's rebooted, you'll find that the phone no longer wakes up from standby when its keyboard slides, which I find vastly preferable, but if you don't, and you wish to revert to the previous setting, either set SlideWakeup to one or simply delete it (again resetting to make the change take effect).

Look to the skies

I get quite a lot of emails from readers about GPS, one of the most common questions being whether it's better to go for a device with a built-in GPS receiver or to use a standalone Bluetooth GPS puck. I actually think this question will become redundant within a year or so, as it seems that more and more phones now ship with a built-in GPS receiver. A while ago, I'd have always advised that a standalone puck was the better option, but I'm starting to change my mind because the reason a puck used to be better was mainly for driving - it allowed you to Velcro the phone to the dashboard and position the GPS receiver right at the base of the windscreen so that it saw as much sky as possible, and thus had a view of the greatest number of GPS satellites. The reason I'm slowly changing my mind is that recent phones have more sensitive GPS receivers (often based on the SiRF star III chipset) that aren't so fussy about a direct line of sight to the satellites, and will usually work fine wherever they're positioned inside a car.

Continued....