I recently inherited a Pantech Duo from the wife. She got it for the keyboard, and found windows mobile more frustrating than hacking out words on a number pad. I’m still on the fence between the iPhone and my dreams of Google Android, so I thought I’d give windows mobile a whack. Honestly, after two days of messing with this thing, I’d rather have the old Razr back. I hated my Razr with a passion but it was a hell of a lot more usable.

Frankly, I don’t know how Microsoft will be able to compete with the next gen of phones. Sure, bullet point for bullet point windows mobile does a hell of a lot more than iPhone and Android. However all of those bullet points are in the least convenient place possible. I can’t put shortcuts on the home screen. I can’t easily re-map the keys on the phone, more on that in a minute. I can’t even send it a sound file and set as a ring tone without hooking up to the computer. Sure, I can hack it to do all of these things but I shouldn’t have to.

At the very least, I should be able to attach the voice memo app to the voice memo button on the side of the phone. Of course that button was dedicated to the voice commands app with no option except to turn off the voice commands app. It took me nearly FOUR HOURS of google searching and registry searching to figure out a workaround. There is no reason why there is not an option to assign apps to the various buttons around a phone. In the hopes that I might save someone else FOUR HOURS in the future, here’s how I did it.

How To Assign The Voice Note Application To The Record Button On A Pantech Duo

• First, turn off hte voice command app by going to Start->Applications->Voice Command and setting the “Voice Button” option to “None”.
• Connect your Duo to a windows computer using the included USB cable
• Find yourself a windows mobile registry editor. CeRegEditor worked fine for me.
• Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Rai\:MSVOICE
• Find the Key “1″ that is set to “hotvoice.exe”
• Change “hotvoice.exe” to “poutlook.exe notes”
• Restart your phone by turning it off and back on again.

Now if you hold the record button on the side it will start the voice memo app. Hold record again and it will begin recording. Hold record a third time to stop. Not nearly as simple as the Razr’s - hold to record let go to stop - but it gets the job done. I have a feeling I’m going to be complaining a lot with this phone. It does have a qwerty keyboard though, that’s one good thing.

Ever since I got my Palm Pilot back in 98, I’ve always had delusions of doing digital sketches on the go. Now with an amazing home-brew app for the Nintendo DS I finally have my digital sketch book. I came across Colors! from a Lifehacker article not too long ago. They link to a Wired article on how to get it set up. I’m guessing that Colors works with most DS home-brew cards, it loads on my M3 Lite without any special settings (aside from applying the obligatory DLDI patch).

Colors! has three different brush controls: Size, Transparency and of course Color. It may not seem like a lot, but we’re not retouching photos here and I found myself not needing anything else. The painting is very smooth and accurate. The colors mix well using the transparency feature. You can even use pressure sensitivity (a feature I didn’t know the DS had) to control width and/or transparency. The only thing that might be a nice addition is an undo button.

Painting alone is great, but the way Colors! manages your drawings is essential. All of your artwork is done native in png format. If you save a sketch and load your memory card into a computer you’ll have a png sitting right there. This pakes it perfect as the starting point for a drawing that will be later refined in Photoshop. Also, even though you’re painting on a 320×240 screen, your image is saved at 512×384 resolution. As icing on the cake, Colors has a built in email feature that lets you mail your image to yourself. However, I found this feature to be limiting due to the painfully slow data-rates theDS wifi is capable of.

One thing that really hit home while trying this software was that years of computer design and programming have really killed my freehand skills. Most of my drawings were not even close to some of the example’s I’ve seen out there. I did manage to pull off my trademark Green Zeta shown above. That image came directly from Colors!, click to see the full size version.

Well, the results are in. Driving an average of 7mph slower for an entire week did show and increase in fuel efficiency from 36.2 to 37.5 mpg. In fact in the year and a half I have tracked my car it has never reached 37 mpg. So what does that translate to in cents per gallon? My math may be a little rusty but I came to 13 cents. Not quite the 20 cents mentioned in the previous post but still not bad. 13 cents per gallon translates to 1/3 of a gallon less per week, or a dollar less per fill up. Put that way it doesn’t sound drastic, but I know people who will drive out of their way for a station that charges 2 cents a gallon less.

This experiment also taught me a few unexpected things about the mentality of drivers in my area. For one, a driver literally sandwiched his car between 2 semi-trailer trucks just to get around and exit exactly 20 feet in front of me. Another driver seemed to think that driving at the speed limit in the slow lane is inappropriate, and signaled me to move out of his way. Having grown up on Long Island I am used to such things, however I do tend to expect better from the semi-rural setting I live in now. I’ve heard rumors of a return to the federal speed maximum of 55 used during the 70’s gas crisis. This past week has made me doubt such a law is possible today.

I’m going to continue my hypermiling experiment. The next step is to shift into neutral when stopping or going down hill. That’s about the most I can do with an automatic transmission. They also say you should turn off your car if you will idle for more than 30 seconds, this includes going downhill. I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. However I have set a goal, to reach the 40 mpg advertised on the sticker when I bought my car. If that happens I will post it here.

I watched an episode of Systm the other day where the topic was hypermiling. Patric Norton, the host, said a line that really piqued my interest:

“Every 5 miles per hour you go over 60 is like paying an extra 20 cents per gallon.”

I’ve heard that driving faster reduces your miles per gallon but that sounded a bit extreme. So, being the nerd that I am, I decided to set up an experiment.

I have already tracked fuel efficiency over a year with MyMileMarker.com. My 2002 Civic has been averaging a solid 33.4 mpg over that entire time, fluctuating anywhere between 30 and 36 as the seasons change. Since last week was a pretty normal spring week, and prospects of this week being the same, I decided that now was as good a time as any to try my experiment.

The Control:

• Fuel Efficiency for the week of 5/12: 36.07 mpg

The Rules:

• At no time will I ever accelerate with the gas past 65mph, coasting over 65 is allowed.
• Keep the engine under 2000 rpms on the streets as much as possible.
• Use A/C as little as possible ( which I do normally )

It’s hard to tell looking at the gas guage but the needle does seem to be higher than normal. I will report back next week with the hard numbers.