Did you just get to work, only to remember that you had forgotten to turn on BitTorrent before you left? Do you face an evening without your daily fix of pirated blockbusters perfectly legal public domain movies?
This nightmare scenario could be avoided if only there was some way to turn it on again without going home…
PCMobilizr is a remote desktop app that runs on Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices, and lets you operate your desktop PC remotely using your phone’s internet connection.
Your PC’s desktop is scaled down to fit on your phone screen, where it can be operated using the touchscreen or keypad. Response time depends on the speed of your connection, but the app uses some nifty compression tricks to only send the minimum amount of data.
Although there are a few other, free, apps (e.g. VNC) that do the same sort of job, PCMobilizr’s biggest advantage is the ease of setup and the fact that it uses HTTPS to communicate - making it compatible with most corporate and home firewalls, and secure to boot.
PCMobilzr is a 30-day trial download, price TBA.
Sheath the Lightsabre, tell Activity Monitor to take a walk. The real future of phone-waggling applications is here - a motion sensitive controller for a radio controlled car.
ShakerRacer claims to make use of the natural instinct to ‘lean into the turn’ that you get when you play a driving game or use an RC car. In practice it looks like playing one of the several driving/skating games available for the Nintendo Wii - you use the phone as if it were the steering wheel and tilt it in the direction you want to go.
Ok, its not an actual product that you can buy or even download (yet) and you do need a specially-modded car with a Bluetooth adaptor attached to the RC unit but just watch the video below and then say that it doesn’t look like great fun.
Seriously, Nokia are missing a trick if they don’t bring out their own range of branded cars…
A common complaint about Windows Mobile is that, while it gives you a reasonably powerful SmartPhone OS and has much of the functionality of a small laptop, it can be a pain to actually use that functionality via a combination of tiny keypad and stylus unless you have the dainty hands of a preschool child or an elf.
My Mobiler might be the answer. Hook your Windows Mobile (2003, 5 or 6) up to a PC, install the app and you can start manipulating the phone using your full-sized keyboard and mouse and your big sausage fingers.
If you need to cut and paste SMS or contact data or drag ‘n’ drop files between folders on your phone this is a lot more intuitive than using the ActiveSync suite and you might find yourself wishing you could lug the keyboard around with you in your coat pocket.
