If you send and receive a great deal of text messages throughout the day then you might get tired of going back to the inbox all the time. SMS Bubbles to the rescue! From the Today screen you can view the contents of your incoming text message and decide to Save as read, reply, delete and more options from the bubble. There are more settings available in the Programs list under the Start menu once you have it installed. Adding this to Extreme Text and you are practically in text message heaven. Of course it’s free and available for download right here. Enjoy!

In the past we’ve shown you ways to stream music and radio, make off with your favorite pod casts, sync with Windows Media Player and now we’d like to show you how you can take millions of songs and thousands of artists with you. Rhapsody To Go costs less than $15/month, allows you to download whatever you want, as much as you want and sync it to your Shadow and take it with you. Read on to see exactly how easy life is with Rhapsody To Go. Read Full Entry

I often use call history to find the number of someone that I’ve called in the past.  It’s also helpful to note the duration of each call, if you’re counting minutes.  By default, your phone only stores 100 entries.  With an easy registry hack, we can extend this value so that you can get call history for the last few weeks.

Using a registry editor:

Go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Phone
Change value “CallHistoryMax” from 100 to a higher number.

Dave sent this one in: While everyone is waiting for the promising SkyFire browser there is yet another mobile browser to check out. TeaShark operates a bit like Opera Mini. It runs through the Java Manager and has a good range of features including some promised yet not implemented yet.

Features:

• Full Web Page Browsing
• “Intelligent Mouse” for navigating
• Landscape Mode
• Multiple tabs
• History
• Bookmark management with color tagging (soon to be manageable via desktop browser as well)
• Click and Search
• Phone number recognition
• Smart web address entry
• Find text
• Built in web search
• RSS Reader
• In-line text editing
• 2 level zoom

While it seems to be a bit more responsive than Opera Mini there is an occasional error (just press No when you encounter them). Additionally when mousing over an image or link it disappears and is replaced by a gray box that makes browsing a bit tedious. To get hold of TeaShark just go to www.TeaShark.com or point your mobile browser to wap.teashark.com

Ah, I love free. TV Guide offers a free mobile application to get TV listings. To download, point your Shadow to tvguide.handmark.com and follow the instructions. You can install the program on your storage card, which is what I did, to save some space on main memory.

The program has snappy performance, and entries load speedily over EDGE, and certainly WiFi. It even lets you select a program, get a summary of it, and set a reminder for that particular episode, or the entire series. You’ll receive a reminder via SMS, though I wish the program would integrate itself with Outlook Mobile and set reminders that way.

TV Guide Mobile isn’t perfect, though. It only shows four entries at a time, has a big advertisement at the bottom of the screen, and is a bit ugly. But hey, it’s free.

I give it Three out of Five Shadows

That’s right. New York City is now enjoying Voice and Data on T-Mobile’s new 3G network. T-Mobile plans to accommodate most metropolitan areas by year’s end with the new network. Customers with compatible phones will enjoy faster download/upload speeds and better mobile data experience. No public calendar is available yet for the roll out of the network per city but be rest assured it is a welcome change.

Source: Matthew Miller at ZDNET

Remember The Milk is best described as a super Task/To-Do list organizer with many advanced features to help you stay on top of your important items. The only reason I am mentioning it here is that there is an application that will Sync your Remember The Milk lists with Windows Mobile. Specifically, there is a Smartphone version available and that means we can use it on the Shadow. Remember The Milk is a Web 2.0 service that is free to use for basic features but $25 dollars will grab you a year’s worth of Pro features including use of MilkSync. If you want to give it a try you can have a 15 day free trial of MilkSync to see if it fits the bill.

Some of the features of Remember The Milk (RTM) are:

• Be notified via Instant Messenger, Email, SMS and more.
• Use tags for as many lists as you want
• Locate on Google Maps locations for tasks
• Share, Send and Publish your lists
• Add tasks from anywhere (browser, via email, mobile browser)
• Synchronizes with Google Calendar and Gmail

MilkSync features:

• Synchronizes with Mobile Outlook Tasks application
• Two-way sync between Smartphone and RTM
• Cradle sync or Over The Air
• Scheduled Synchronization
• Specify which lists to sync or all of them

For anyone that uses RTM, we’d love to hear what you think about it in the comments.

Back in April, we posted about a really inexpensive rubberized case for the Shadow selling for $5.39. About a week later, Mike reviewed the case, and found it to be a fantastic value.

I just checked up on the case on Amazon.com, and found the price to decrease another 50% to $2.68! At this price, you could get 12 for $32 and have a fresh case for each month of the year =).

Ok, so I know that the amount of information we have on the Shadow II is scant right now, but I thought this would be an interesting poll. If you haven’t read, this is what we know so far, and this is what it is going to look like. We’re getting trickles of information about a release time frame of the Shadow II and more concrete specifications details, and as soon as we’re confident enough to report something, you’ll be the first to know.

As of this morning the newer beta of SkyFire arrived with many enhancements:

• Multi-Line Text Entry (2,000 character limit) (Good!)
• Auto-complete text entry (YAY!)
• Paste into URL or search (Life has just gotten easier)
• Ability to delete bookmarks (Thank you)
• Multiple zoom modes for touch screen phones
• Double Tap to Zoom In and Zoom Out (not important to us Non-Touchscreeners)
• Support for custom virtual keyboards (again non touchscreen)
• Web Search Shortcut in softkey menu (Thank you again)
• Access to the Windows Mobile Taskbar in softkey menu (Easyiness)
• Persistent Settings for SMartfit, Mute and Zoom Size (Good!)
• Support for 12-key and 1/2 QWERTY devices
• Password Masking (for those curious eyes)
• Backlight usage based on system settings
• Ok button sends SkyFire to the Background (Great!)
• Additional sites listed on the Featured:Info and Media tabs

If you don’t know what SkyFire is check out our initial preview-review video or everything else we have on SkyFire.

For those of you with an existing beta copy it will stop working on May 7th.To update, simply fire up SkyFire > Click the Upgrade Now link and an SMS will be sent to your phone with a download link. You will need to use the original email you signed up with. If you aren’t on the beta, sorry. If you signed up already stay patient as they open up to more users all the time.

If you want to sign up for the SkyFire beta visit Skyfire.com. The download is 466KB and the installed size is 1385KB.

If you don’t like wasting time scrolling through hundreds of messages to find just one, or want to remember what someone said earlier than you are in luck. In case you haven’t noticed, the Inbox has a Smart Filter. When viewing any inbox screen on the Shadow just start typing a word and it will immediately begin searching through Recipients, Subjects and Text Bodies for your result. It’s quick and easy and will make your day easier.

There is no software to download, this is a tip about a feature that already exists in Windows Mobile

If you sit at a desk with a computer for a good portion of your day then you might like to know about Dashwire. Dashwire is a device to Web 2.0 application that enables you to manage your Windows Mobile phone from a web browser. Your photos, videos, contacts and more are uploaded to your Dashwire account where you can mess with them further. It even allows you to send SMS via your phone from the browser. Got Contacts? Got Skype? You can place Skype calls to your phone’s contacts from your PC. There are tons of options available as well as being able to create a Shared page on Dashwire where others can look at your photos or videos or both. When you first install Dashwire on your device you will want to be on a WiFi connection so when it synchronizes data it won’t take as long. Dashwire.com

Being a Web App that makes life a bit easier I give it 4.5 Shadows

Making your own Home Screens is now easier than ever thanks to HomeScreenBuilder. It’s free to use and supports nearly all of the Today screen plugins. It is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that enables you to customize the look and feel of your layout as well as enable or disable plugins as well as place them where you want. This is for the normal Windows Mobile Smartphone homescreen and won’t do anything for the NEO homescreen. If you want to give it a try head over to Madbeetle.com and get your copy. There are some advanced plugins available for some coin.

This gets 4/5 Shadows.

Two bits of forum news. To start, Mike made a poll to determine if there was a need for new forums. The answer was a big YES and so we’ve added one for Applications, and one for Themes.

Second, Mike and I are quite excited by the amount of growth we’ve seen in the forums over the last few months. We’ve decided to reward our top contributers. Each of the following will receive a gift certificate for the AllShadow store:

ShadowMike, $50
rob54, $30
jennyfur, $30
Bwana the Iguana, $30

And of course a big thanks to everyone else for contributing to the AllShadow community.

My Mobiler enables you to control your Shadow (or any Windows Mobile phone) from the desktop PC. You can cut/copy/paste between the desktop and phone as well as take screenshots and video. With a little advanced configuration of the Settings file you can even have it auto sort files that you drag and drop onto the phone. For example if your drag and drop a music file onto My mobile it will automatically place that file in the My Music folder on your phone. It works over USB, Bluetooth and Wifi blending the line of convergence. It is compatible with XP’s Activesync and Vista’s WMDC. The best part about My Mobiler is the price, Free. To get your mitts on My Mobiler simply go to Mtux.com.

Enjoy!