• Browser upload. Pocket IE can’t do it¹, but Opera Mobile doesn’t have any trouble uploading to the Mobile Flickr website.
• Email. You can e-mail directly to Flickr, but I only use web-based e-mail so the benefit here is non-existent.
• Resco Photo Viewer 6.33. My favourite choice here, I’m happy to pay £10 for a decent Photo browsing application on my phone.

I’ve had Resco Photo Viewer for 2 weeks now on the trial, purchased today and very happy with what it can do.

¹ – Pocket IE could probably handle the browser upload if you changed the User Agent string (probably in registry?).

Attempt 1:

I go to the “Your Details” page, see a message telling me how to access my POP3 settings. Here’s the instructions:

To access your Orange email POP3 settings simply:

• Sign into your Email account
• Select ‘email’ on the left hand navigation
• Select ‘help’ on the left hand navigation
• Then choose “My Settings”

Unfortunately, “My Settings” doesn’t exist. No hope there then!

Attempt 2:

I’m now logged into my Orange email through their website (which uses your email address as your username). On the left is the “help” section, which has a nice FAQ which tells me the following:

How can I find out my email POP3 username and password?

1. [Visit the email homepage] and select change your details from the left menu.
2. Sign in to your Orange account and your details are displayed.
3. Scroll down to your Email/POP3 details to find out your email/POP3 username (a code that looks like: AB1CD2EF).

Again, this is nonsense and out of date as the “change your details” link doesn’t exist.

Attempt 3:

Sneaky Orange have a an empty link which opens up an extra section in the help page. At this point, I thought I’d finally found my answer.

email address : your mobile number@orange.net i.e. 07973100123@orange.net
email alias: this can be found by clicking here
email/POP3 username : your mobile number@orange.net i.e. 07973100123@orange.net
Password : your existing sign-in password
Mailbox type : POP3
Incoming (POP3) server : pop.orange.net
Outgoing (SMTP) server : smtp.orange.net

However, the email alias link takes you to a page simply listing your email addresses (e.g. 07973100123@orange.net), and the POP3 username still doesn’t work at all.

Is it time to give up and call Orange Customer Support?

Attempt 4:

Aha, Mr Customer Support had a look through it himself and remembered from his personal experience that there were in fact two different passwords for accessing your account! So not only do I have a password for accessing my mobile account, I then have a password for logging in to my email through the website and another password for accessing that same email account through any external clients.

This password can be changed in your in the “email account” section of that “options” screen – although I have no idea how I could then change my web-based e-mail login password. Is that stored on another page?

Conclusion

The end result is that you do use your mobile number @orange.net, but you must use a different password to the one you use to access your email online.

• SMS delivery reports: 1p – Bad
• SMS to Jaiku: 20p (International) – Bad
• SMS to Twitter: Free – Excellent
• MMS to Flickr: 25p – Good
• 10% Love Your Number discount – Nice
• Unexpected 10% staff discount – Awesome!

So I’m only paying £28 for a £35 contract (Dolphin 35). What the guys at the store also forgot to mention was that the Love Your Number discount slowly increases by 5% each year up to 25%.

Orange seem to have endless ways to make me happy!

Update: Here’s a couple of quotes regarding the Orange employee discount which I noticed while scanning their terms & conditions:

• The “pay monthly offer” is 10% discount on line rental for the life of the contract.
• Offer is limited to a maximum of 5 phones per employee.

Behind the scenes, it takes the BBC’s travel data and parses it with PHP into a minimal amount of HTML. I’ve also restricted it to only show information from the last 7 days to stop from showing all 25+ current traffic / roadworks incidents.

“More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base.” – New Scientist

On a much less epic scale, I’m concerned about my own knowledge of programming languages fading to nothing from lack of use. The best example for me is Perl.

Perl is the first server-side programming language I tried to learn to improve my websites. I made very basic guestbook scripts and that was about it, but I did (for a short time) know the syntax and some basic principles in the language. I’ve not used Perl for 5 years!

I started looking into PHP, and never looked back. So what do I remember of Perl now? Hardly anything at all.

With a few years of self-taught PHP under my belt, I’m now pushing slowly into ASP.NET. This time, I’m going to keep my PHP very much alive.

1. Enable bluetooth on your PC and Windows Mobile device
2. Create an incoming bluetooth COM port on your PC
3. Go to ActiveSync connection settings on your PC to enable COM port access
4. Create a bluetooth connection partnership (or refresh an existing one) to see the ActiveSync service on your device
5. Open up ActiveSync on your device, go to Menu, and choose “Connect via Bluetooth”

All that because I wanted to transfer a single file from my phone to my PC.

In fact, all I needed to do was use the “Beam file” functionality in File Explorer. I’m pretty sure this was limited in the past to use Infrared only. It now supports Bluetooth and it was possible for me to transfer the file.

It’s still not a perfect solution though. After choosing the “Beam file” option, I then have to wait 5 minutes while it looks through every nearby bluetooth device and tells me it’s name. A big shame it can’t instantly recognise that I’ve got my bluetooth dongle nearby and already paired up.

There’s one area where the WIDCOMM bluetooth driver is far superior to Microsoft’s – it has bluetooth FTP support.

• Unlimited texts? 3000.
• Unlimited evening and weekend browsing? 1000Mb.

Incidentally, last night I realised that when I connect to Orange World over GPRS it thinks my phone is PAYG, even though I switched to a nice contract about a month ago. I hope this doesn’t affect my first bill.

32831 people filled out the survey.
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So I downloaded it and gave it a go. At first, I was under the false impression that I had to drag every letter left or right to get the correct key. Later, by mistake, I found that it was far more intelligent / predictive. This was unintuitive for me personally as I use drag-left to delete and drag-right to add a space.

The CooTek TouchPal Keyboard is fast, and helps greatly when you are typing long paragraphs of text. What it lacks though is equally fast access to symbols. I type up to 50 text messages every day of the week, and I’m also a fan of smileys/emoticons to convey that a statement was meant in a joking way.

On the built in touch screen keyboard with small keys, I can access a large number of symbols quickly and easily. With TouchPal, I have to switch tabs up to 3 time, simply to write one smiley. “^_^” is an anime-style smiley that I’ll sometimes use in texts and is very annoying to type with this software.

I can see myself becoming very fast at typing long sections of text with this keyboard, but considerably slower if I was attempting to write a symbol-filled text message.

In essence, what I need is a more customisable version of this software that allows me to do the following:

• Fill one of the keyboard tabs with symbols (or sets of symbols) of my choice
• Let me modify the symbols below each letter on the main alphabet screen
• Somehow make the screen less distracting – too much happens at once when you press a key
• I want a Ctrl key! Without this I have no Undo, no Select All, etc.

I may keep the software installed and even try writing text messages with it. If it’s fast enough to be noticeable, I might even change my texting style to match. No more symbols!

Update: Another part that bugs me considerably is that if I finish a sentence with an exclamation mark and the word I just typed is not the one predictive texts chooses first, I have to: 1) choose the word, 2) remove the automatically created space, 3) put my punctuation in. That’s very disruptive for me.

Update: I’ve emailed the developers my opinions and uninstalled TouchPal to make more space.