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.

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.

Well not TV the device, TV the service. I have just made my last payment to the horrible bitch goddess that is subscription programming. I’m generally taken aback and amused by the reactions from people I talk to. The Gen X and Ys don’t care but the Boomers seem to think I’m some sort of social deviant. “You don’t want, ANY, tv? But you’re going to have an antenna, right?” Of course we will still have television shows, via iTunes and other <wink> thanks for the cash NBC </wink> downloads. This is kind of the point of my otherwise meaningless post. The digital download model just makes so much more sense. Why bother programming a DVR when I can subscribe? Why bother waiting for a rerun when I can just download from an archive? Why sit through commercials, aren’t you paying enough already? Sure, the television services offer “on demand” programming, but you have to pay for that on top of your monthly fee. But, most important, why pay $80 a month when you can get exactly what you want for $400 a year.

Over the past two years I’ve been making sporadic posts about my set top box. Now that the whole family is using it exclusively, I suspect I’ll have a lot more content to post about it as I tweak. The $80 a month that formerly went to DirecTV will now go toward iTunes subscriptions and enhancing my setup. Yes, I will be getting an antenna once I can afford the 40 foot ladder I need to install it. In the meantime, my first project will be to figure out how to integrate the television software with Front Row.

First entry of 2008! Last week I saw a crap load of technology predictions for 2008. Most just parroted the same wishful thinking we’ve been hearing all last year. In short, there’s a lot I disagree with. That inspired me to make my own list; things that we’re supposed to see but won’t. So, I give you Matt’s list of 2008 anti-predictions (in no particular order):

1. An end to the HD format wars.

Everyone loves a good conflict. And what better for tech geeks when all the big companies take sides in a war only customers will win. However, no one seems to acknowledge the third party in this conflict… BROADBAND!HD Discs will eventually suffer the same fate as their ancestor, the Laser Disc. Waiting for plastic to come in the mail (or worse, going to the store for it), may be acceptable to baby boomers and aging gen-x’ers who like to think they own something. But it just isn’t appealing to younger generations who gain more buying power every year.

2. Wii games for the “serious gamer”.

The “serious gaming” community just refuses to listen to Nintendo’s message, “YOU ARE NOT PROFITABLE”. When the Wii was announced Nintendo made a very important point, the “serious gamers” account for about 20% of the potential video game market. Let us not forget that in its heyday Atari was worth more than PS3 andXBox today, combined. The reason for this is that everyone could play an Atari game, the old arcades used to fill with guys in suits after work. It did not require hours of dedication or hundreds of dollars, and as a result people dedicated hours to it and spent hundreds of dollars. Nintendo understands this and is making a fortune by it.

3. Increased use of social networks.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that social networks are going to hit a brick wall. Not from lack of popularity, rather lack of time and desire to maintain them. The real problem is that all of these sites are run by for-profit companies. I have no problem with for-profit companies, however they have every financial incentive to lock in whatever data you give them and never let go. This means that my Facebook friends have no connection to my LinkedIn contacts and someone is always yelling at me for not checking my MySpace page. Maintaining Facebook alone can eat up hours a week. I call that work. Add several of those sites and I have a second job, for which I earn no money. I call that slavery. We are slaves to our social networks. I suspect that this year the novelty of these sites will drop off quite a bit, only to be replaced with real work as more and more core users graduate.

4. Explosion of ebooks.

The supposed high demand for the Amazon Kindle would sure lead one to think there will be an explosion of ebook sales in 2008. I’ve already expressed my skepticism toward the e-reader platform in more detail in a previous post. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the future of books is audio books. Products like the iPhone make it very easy to buy an audio book on the go without the need for an extra device. Theebooks however provide only a more expensive way to do something you’re doing quite effortlessly already.

5. Semantic search.

This is another case of wishful thinking. The kind of semantic search technology that would actually be useful simply doesn’t exist, nor will it this decade, maybe next decade. There simply is no advantage to writing “What is the date of the next concert for insertbandnamehere” over “insertbandnamehere concert schedule”. A useful semantic search would be something more like “what was on the small sign I saw on the side of the road while driving down rt. 1? It was red and white and had some sort of logo on the bottom that looked like a bird”. Oh, and speech recognition will have to be perfected as well because no one is going to type all of that. Context sensitive search may however see some growth. There is definitely some usefulness in being able to ask my phone where the best pizza is near me. The holy grail being that Joe’s Pizza can advertise for a small fee and that small fee gives me cheap-to-free phone service. However none of this will happen this year because the pda/gps phone is still too expensive to become ubiquitous.