On a sidenote, does anyone have any idea if I need a microphone preamp if I add a microphone connector to my AHD-200? Not replacing but rather overriding the internal microphone when plugged in. Please http://forums.chillat.net/topic/mic-preamp-in-dv-camera”>let me know before I accidentally break the poor thing :p

Warp over to the forum and take a look!

Fractus holds over 80 patents worldwide, including over 30 United States patents.  “We are grateful that Fractus has chosen us to represent them in enforcing these patents,” said Max Tribble of Susman Godfrey L.L.P., lead lawyer for Fractus.  “It is very brave of Fractus to fight against these cell phone companies, many of whom knew about Fractus and its technology yet still continued to infringe.  Fractus’s inventions have added tremendous value to both the cell phone user and manufacturer.”

Patents were intended to promote, not prevent. By patenting and disclosing your invention, it would be put to public use, but you would keep the title and credit as being the inventor. Today it’s used to make money by patenting chemical formulas and pushing the prices through the roof, like we just recently witnessed with the swine flu vaccine. It’s used to take care of the competition in IT, by stating “oops, it seems that your fancy little product there infringes on one of our patents. so you can either pay us $$$ or we will see you in court”. And the outcome is often the acquisition of the little company by the big one.

It’s amazing how stupid mankind is at times.

First of all, a few WTFs. It still doesn’t come with a proper MP3 player. Before you say “but it comes with Windows Media Player” I’m gonna state that that’s just the problem. I fired it up, hoping that it would have been upgraded/improved/fixed/left the beta phase, but no. I went ahead and updated my media library, so far so good. Then I went into the library, browsed to “My Music”, and found — besides my music — 30 ringtones and about 20 video clips. The first major WTF here is that my videos are listed in my music library. The second one is that the player still isn’t intelligent enough to filter out ringtones. It scans the music as it’s added, why can’t it just discard all the tracks that are below a certain bitrate? Or below 1 minute? It kinda sucks when every 2nd song played is a friggin ringtone!

Another WTF is regarding the default settings. Both the roms I tried came with “threaded SMS” enabled. What that means is basically that instead of viewing the actual text messages, you view the conversations. And if you’re looking for a message from 3 months ago, you better have the headlight and survival gear ready. Luckily it can be quickly fixed by not just editing but creating a new registry key. Needless to say, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a registry editor, but that’s a completely different story.An option to change to “normal” SMS mode? Guess Microsoft didn’t think that far…

Okay, a few good things are in there. First of all, it seems like Microsoft has finally realized that “Windows Mobile” is a) generally intended to run on mobile phones, and b) quite a few of those phones have a touch screen. Still, finger friendly hasn’t been on the resume — until now. The new today screen is excellent. And everything supports scrolling by sliding your finger over it. Or well, most of it does. Since most people also have their phones in their pockets, some sort of key lock is normally present in most phones. It took Microsoft 9 years to figure that one out.

Oh, by the way, if you decide to upgrade your phone as well, just keep in mind that Microsoft OneNote Mobile is quite different from the rest of the mobile Office applications. Not like the ugly duckling, but more like that weird cousin that you don’t want to be left alone with. As it turned out, my OneNote documents were never backed up, even though I copied the “My Documents” folder to the memory card before flashing. The reason? Well, when all the other documents go play in the My Documents folder, OneNote decides to hide your notes in the “Application Data” folder. Together with your Internet Explorer cache and all the other stuff that you normally don’t want to nor need to back up.

All in all they have actually done quite well with the new Windows Mobile. But still, get to work and make it so that my Music Player plays my music without interruptions to advertise the latest ringtones!

Gotta admit it looks kinda good tho :p You can read more at FastFingerKeyboards.com.

Pictures courtesy of Hak5 – Episode 420.