Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

pocketnow.com - Media Player 10 for Windows Mobile Coming Soon

Looks like we can expect an updated version of Windows Media Player for Windows Mobile soon. It’s expected to enable syncing your Pocket PC or Smartphone to the recently released desktop version of Windows Media Player 10. Notable features in WMP 10 include the new MSN Music online store.

‘Info-Cop And Samsung i600 To Assist Law Enforcement Officers

I’m always looking for cool new applications for the Windows Mobile Smartphone platform, and this qualifies as one of them:

I know some law enforcement officers - I wonder if I could get them into the beta test for this?

12 posts in one evening is definitely a new record for me. But I got my Bloglines clippings folder cleared out, and covered the stuff that I wanted to post about.

Now, I just have to keep up.

PPCW.Net - PHOTOVIEW: 3rd generation Microsoft Smartphones

Arne Hess over at PPCW.Net has put up a photo comparison showing three of the 3rd generation Windows Mobile Smartphones - the Orange SPV C500, Sagem MyS-7, and the Motorola MPX220:

Of course, I’m just jealous of Arne for having all three of these phones in his hot little hands to be able to take comparison pictures.

Place Lab Software

GPS is great at locating you anywhere on the planet, to within ten feet or so. Problem is, it only works where the receiver’s antenna can see the sky. Indoors, it’s useless. Place Lab Software wants to change that:

Place Lab is a software base and a community-building activity that facilitates widespread adoption of low-cost, easy-to-use user positioning for location-enhanced computing applciations. Unlike existing indoor and outdoor user-positioning systems, Place Lab endeavors to provide planetary-scale and privacy observant user positioning by making use of existing infrastructure and offering a low barrier to participation. Furthermore, Place Lab allows clients to determine their location entirely privately without constant interaction with a central service.

The key motivation for Place Lab is the widespread proliferation of WiFi technology. Based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, WiFi hotspots are now mainstream — at homes, enterprises, university campuses, and in public spaces in many cities and towns around the world. Leveraging this ubiquitous deployment of WiFi access points, Place Lab provides a way for a WiFi-enabled client device to automatically determine its position. Place Lab exploits the fact that each WiFi access point has a globally unique MAC identifier that the access point periodically broadcasts as part of its management beacon. Combining these beacons with a service that maps MAC identifiers to (latitude, longitude) coordinates, Place Lab allows client devices to passively listen for nearby access points and triangulate their own position based on the positions of these access points.

Cool stuff, and you can download the free client for just about any platform from their site, including Pocket PC. The download is prety hefty at about 25 MB, though. Check it out.