I just installed SkyFire for my cell phone 15 minutes ago - unbelievable!
Just when they said that Windows Mobile is dead.
SkyFire will play Flash media on Windows Mobile, Android, pretty much anything. I was able to view Flash banners, YouTube (which is flash), even Flash games.
Adobe themselves won't give you flash for your cell phone.
If your phone has arrow keys, up-down-left-right, clicking on any arrow key will produce a mouse pointer - just like Opera mobile browser.
SkyFire not only lets you watch embeded youtube videos, it lets you watch streaming media. For example, the browser's default homepage has a link to live TV so you can watch for example CNN, Fox, NBC and CSPAN or live radio.
SkyFire loads faster than Opera mobile. But I think Opera is a fuller over-all browser. Whereas SkyFire concentrates on media such as flash and streaming media.
What do they get for giving you a free browser full of goodies?
After you've installed and launched the browser, there's an optional login link. Note: I said optional and that its a link. So I guess they make money by collecting your personal information - optionally for now anyway. And as of now, there's no advertising.
All this from a 15 minute observation -- and I've never heard of this before.
'Dear Uncle Adolf': documentary details fan letters sent to Hitler
...tens of thousands of surviving fan letters Hitler received while in power which were seized by the Soviets when they conquered Berlin in 1945.
For years these love notes, advice letters, gifts and health-tips lay undiscovered in Russian archives. Discovered in 2007, they formed the basis of a German book called 'Letters to Hitler'. Last night the Svengali-like grip that the Austrian-born Hitler exerted over Germany was unveiled as actors read out the letters that would fill a truck.
They were letters that often accompanied gifts, in the case of Margarethe Wagner, a pair of socks sent in 1938 after Hitler occupied the Czech Sudetenland border region.
"I knitted these for you as you freed us," she wrote.
Frau Troeltzsch of Berlin sent Hitler three silk handkerchiefs with pictures of Hitler sewn into them...
A very good explanation of Unicode -- UTF-8 vs ISO 8859-x
This solves a lot of problems I've had with web pages that are not of character set ISO 8859-1 western.
Some GUI web page generators now produce HTML files that are ment for UTF-8. These don't display well on a web server that is set to default character set ISO 8859.
The whole page may come up on a web browser such as firefox (not Internet Explorer) with just these three characters:

UTF-8 is newer and it may be a good idea to default to that.
An elderly Polish beekeeper had a shock after passing out after being stung - and waking up inside a coffin.
Doctors believed that Jozef Guzy, 76, from Katowice in southern Poland had suffered a heart attack after he was stung and he was declared dead.
His wife Ludmila said: "I could not believe it when they said he was dead and the doctor put a white sheet over him and three hours later local undertakers pulled up and put him in a coffin and closed the lid."
The coffin was then driven to the undertakers and put in a storeroom, but the mistake was discovered when Guzy woke up and started to shout for help.
Undertaker Darius Charon said: "He was shouting and banging on the coffin - he made enough noise to raise the dead so we couldn't miss him."
These body scanners for use in air ports captures a full body image of a person including genitals. The image is delivered in the form of a negative like that of film in old cameras. When inverted on a computer using common photo software, a full color image of the person is revealed.
I just tried the Opera 10 beta for my Windows Mobile 6 PDA. This browser really amazed me. It makes some of desktop browser features available for phones. Immediately, I noticed that full page web pages appear almost as they do on my desktop. Menus work, links highlight, and google maps almost work. One thing really nice I discovered when I pressed the up-down-left-right directional keypad is that a mouse pointer appears. It hovers over links making them highlight. It activates popup menus. And when I moved the pointer all the way down, it scrolls the page.
Then theres tabs. In a previous version, it supported three tabs. This beta version supports more than three. I haven't tested what the limit is. There's a "tabs" button that brings up a toolbox with thumbnails of open pages. Each thumbnail shows a preview of the page in that tab.
The same goes with the "start page". This opens up with nine boxes. Occupied boxes show a thumbnail preview of the page bookmarked. Although there's room for improvement here. What it shows on my unit is the upper left corner of the page linked.
The browser does seem to crash on some websites. For example LINK
There are some things I wish for. There aren't a lot of things you can configure here. Then there's this feature that I'm used to when I close my desktop browser, it save currently opened tabs and reopens them next time. The Opera mobile does not save any pages.
Opera's website has a "mini" and a "mobile". The difference is that one is bigger. The "mobile" is good if you have a fast PDA phone/smart phone. If you find your device to be slow to begin with, you'd probably want to try the "mini".
The latest slider phone from Motorola has some very good features, but it is a bit buggy and getting to some features is illogical.
The phone has a slide-out phone keypad. When closed there are six unprocted buttons. Two of which are soft buttons. The left soft button is menu on the home screen and the right one launches the browser. Between the three left buttons and the three right buttons is a ring for left-right-up-down and a single center button.
The buttons on the face and on the hidden keypad feel very cheap. It's a thick sticker on top of membrane buttons so be careful. You don't always know if a button has been pressed because you don't really hear or feel a click. Now, I don't expect the phone to fall apart during normal use. I just don't see that happening.
It has a surprising nice camera. 1.3 mega pixel. No zoom or focus. The length of the tiny camera is less than 1/4 of an inch. There's no video with this camera. Its also very slow, but for the price... You can choose to store photos on a micro SD card protected by the back cover inside. Max 2GB. The charger/data port is standard mini-USB. Just plug it in and you get a drive letter on your computer. You probably want to let the camera format the card first.
The whole camera just feels cheap.
The soft button for the browser cannot be disabled. Each time you press it, a minute is deducted.
There's two speakers. One is the ear piece. The other one is for the speaker-phone and to play music. The speaker is behind the circle directional button under a mesh.
Theres an mp3 player and FM radio built in. The mp3 player plays through the speaker or through the headphone jack. The FM radio only plays when there earphones are plugged in. The FM radio also plays through the speaker but only when earphones are plugged in and you have to choose from the Options menu. Note that the earphone jack cannot be plugged into an amplifier or your car stereo. Nothing line-level will work. There needs to be a load. I've never seen this behaviour. There is a work-around but its cumbersome. You would need a splitter. From the phone you would plug in a Y-splitter with one end to earphones and the other to your car stereo. The signal would be very weak of course.
I already found some bugs. When I looked at the call logs, I got an error. But after making and receiving some calls it finally shows calls missed, placed etc... Surprisingly there's no "all calls" log. Another bug I found is when I first switched the camera from the default VGA 640x480 to 1.3 MP, the camera would just idle. After I took the battery out and put it back in and turned on the phone and tried to access the camera, I got a camera saying its not ready. After a while I accidentally got it to work at 1.3MP.
Another oddity is that they put the phone ring volume and ring tone under Ring Styles. And to confuse things further there are profiles for loud, soft, vibrating, vibe and ring, and silent. Each profile has ring volume, ring tone, and settings for button tones and various other tones. So when you adjust the loudness using the two buttons on the side of the phone you may get a different ring tone and an unexpected loudness. For example, I had it on the "Loud" profile. I didn't realise that in the "Loud" profile I had the ring volume set low. So I set the volume to the max and when the phone rang, I didn't hear it. Luckly, when you set the phone to silent, it's silent.
This guy is the latest from Samsung. It's not a touch-phone nor is it a smart-phone.
It has a slide out keyboard. It is a full keyboard. The phone keypad feels solid, but it's one large piece not individual numbers. But for the price, its a great phone
It has an annoying browser soft button from the home screen. It cannot be disabled. There's no way to mechanically remove the button just to disable the browser. It's one of two soft buttons, so you lose other functionalities if you remove the button.
It's got a surprisingly good camera for the price. 1.3 mega pixel. No zoom or focus of course. But the images came out pretty good. Though not a replacement for a camera. It also takes short videos. Both photos and videos can be stored on the a micro SD card. The only problem is that it has a cable that is not easy to find. So you probably want to put the card in a card-reader to get the pictures.
There's a micro SD card protected by the back cover inside.
Samsung has not produce a downloadable manual yet. A similar model is the T459 Gravity.
The LG 600G is a very small and thin flip phone. There's no antenna sticking out - it's built in. The whole phone is about 3.5 inches long. I have the phone on net10.com.
The only complaint is that annoying browser button. If you accidentally press it, you get charged 1 minute. So, I'm going to remove the membrane under the button. There's no way to disable it.
The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one
wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering
if something could have materialized -- and never knowing.
-- David Viscott
