It's vacation season- make your mobile devices more mobile!

One of the challenges when traveling with our mobile devices, is that while the devices themselves get smaller and lighter, their accessories don't! AC chargers, car DC chargers, sync/charge cables, batteries, headphones, BT earpices, BT GPS "pucks" etc. take up more room in our luggage than the devices themselves. One of my fellow Mobile Devices MVPs jokes that his friends rib him for traveling with 75-pounds of electronics all in one-ounce pieces!

There are a few fairly obvious, but still worth mentioning, tricks to lighten the load. First, is to try and "standardize" your equipment as much as possible. The ubiquity of mini-USB charge ports had made this easier than ever. For example, while it's not my "usual" BT earpiece, I bought a cheap Motorola HS350 on sale for $10 just to take on vacation. At $10, if I lose it I could care less, but more importantly, it charges via a mini-USB connector, so I can charge it with my WinMo phone charger, meaning one less charge "brick" to lug around. When I used to use a BT GPS "puck" (before using my current phone which has built-in GPS) I made sure to buy one with a mini-USB charge port as well- that was three devices sharing a charger. (well, two chargers- one AC, one 12V DC for the rental car.)

Another trick is to stop bringing dedicated chargers at all! Using generic AC and DC chargers with a USB socket for output instead of a device-specific cable, and then just bringing sync/charge cables for all of your devices that plug into the generic "bricks," rather than their dedicated chargers really reduces the amount of gear to lug around. This is also helpful for the equipment with proprietary charge ports like iPods and Zunes that refuse to share your mini-USB charger. A single AC and DC charger and a half-dozen sync/charge cables takes up a fraction of the space of a half-dozen dedicated charger bricks would! If you also bring a notebook or netbook PC with you on your travels, even the charger brick becomes optional- you can charge your equipment off of the PC's USB ports, so the only charger you need is the laptop's, (which you have to bring anyway!) (Of course, I rarely travel with a notebook or netbook- that's what my Windows Mobile device is for, so that option is out for me!)

My AC charger brick of choice is the very useful and affordable (~$20 US at Amazon.com) MusicPower Encore- it's an AC charger with two USB outputs to charge two devices at a time, plus an internal 2200mAH Li-Ion battery pack that charges whenever the Encore is plugged in and allows you to use the brick as a portable battery pack when not plugged in to AC to keep your devices charged on long flights or anywhere AC or DC power isn't readily available.
You might be surprized at how many portable devices have USB charge cables available, even if the device didn't include one- "dumbphones", BT headsets, even many digital cameras; almost any portable device that uses 5V or less for power often has an OEM or third-party USB charge cable available.

Happy traveling!

Life Without Activesync, Part II

While I'm still using Funambol as my primary PIM sync system, I thought I'd point out yet another alternative that might be of particular interest to Google Mail and Calendar users.

Google has licensed EAS (Exchange Activesync) from Microsoft, and implemented it as part of their Google Sync service. This means Windows Mobile, iPhone, and some Nokia Symbian users can sync with their Google contacts and Calendar without the need for any additional software- the phones' native included sync applications will sync directly with Google. For Windows Mobile users, this means the Activesync app built into the device.

The instructions are here: http://www.google.com/mobile/winmo/sync.html.

In addition to being able to sync in the "clouds" via Google, adding an Outlook plug-in that supports syncing with Google, like Google's own Calendar (only) sync tool: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955, or a third-party product like OggSync, http://oggsync.com/ that syncs both GMail Contacts and Calendar with Outlook, will give you another free over-the-air PIM-sync alternative to Hosted Exchange.

Why Am I Late? Time Zones and Windows Mobile...

I've been kicking around the Microsoft support newsgroups for Windows Mobile for a number of years, and one topic that pops up from time to time that really seems to confuse users is Outlook's and Window Mobile's handling of time zones, specifically the automatic (and unstoppable!) shifting of appointment start/end times when you change time zones on the device.

For those who don't travel often, let me explain the feature. If you live in, say, Los Angeles, you have your mobile device set for the Pacific Time Zone or "GMT-8 Pacific US" (the Time Zone at 8 hours before Greenwich Mean Time, the world's agreed upon "official" time.) Interestingly, Outlook (and your Windows Mobile device) stores the date and time of the current time and all appointments in GMT, and uses the Time Zone settings to subtract or add the appropriate number of hours to the all of the entries on the device to calculate the local time. So, our Los Angeles based user above, for example, who schedules a 2PM appointment on her device, has really, unknowingly, entered a "10PM" appointment in Greenwich time, which the device displays as "2PM." So, when you fly to New York, and reset the device for "GMT-5 Eastern", in addition to resetting the device clock, it automagically "moves" all of your appointments 3 hours ahead. (In reality, however- neither the clock or the appointments have actually changed at all- they are still stored internally in GMT, but all the information on the device is now displayed in GMT-5 instead of GMT-8.)

This often drives travelers crazy. Say our LA user has a meeting at her company's New York office next Thursday at 10AM. She dutifully enters "Appointment with the Suits" in her calendar and sets the appointment time for 10AM. Next Wednesday night she hops a plane to the Big Apple, resets her device for GMT-5 Eastern US upon landing (or, more likely in this day and age, her phone does it automatically based on data from her mobile operator), checks into the hotel, checks her device for tomorrow's schedule, and decides to sleep in, because her device informs her that her meeting is at 1PM! After being fired for missing the meeting, our hypothetical user stomps on her Windows Mobile device, and vows to only use cheap Nokias from now on.

What happened, why it happened, what should've happened, and how can you save your job in that situation is the focus of this diatribe!

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit I'm one of apparently seven people on the entire planet who think the feature works just like it should. The vast majority of comments in the support newsgroups are firmly anti-appointment shifting, even after understanding how (and why) it works. I'll try and convince you why it's a Good Thing, (or at least let you learn to live with it since you aren't going to convince Microsoft to change it!)

First the why- Outlook is designed to be collaborative, allowing others to send you meeting invitations, etc. If the "Suits" in the New York office had sent our poor hypothetical victim above an meeting invite to the big 10AM Thursday meeting instead of her keying the appointment in herself, it would've automatically created the appointment on her LA-based Outlook calendar at 7AM, since on both computers- the one in NY and hers in LA, the appointment would really be stored, invisibly to anyone, as "3PM GMT," and both PCs would simply subtract the appropriate local offset (5 hours in NY, 8 in LA) to display the appointment in local time. The 7AM meeting would also have synced to our victim's LA-zoned Windows Mobile device at 7AM, and upon landing in NY, would've displayed as 10AM, and she would still be employed today.

"Sure," you're thinking, "but if Outlook didn't move stuff around, everything would've stayed at 10AM anyway, and not need shifting back and forth to work!" While that's true in this case, real world examples can often get more complicated, particularly for companies that have employees distributed through several time zones. What if, as a last-minute cost-cutting measure, our hypothetical company canceled the flight and directed our user to attend the meeting via conference call instead of in person? Then she'll still be 3 hours late, since the meeting isn't at "10AM" in LA, but at 10AM in NY, which is 7AM in LA. Her Outlook calendar and mobile device SHOULD have the appointment scheduled at 7AM Pacific rather than "10AM" because 7AM Pacific, 10AM Eastern, (and 3PM GMT) is the ACTUAL moment in time the meeting takes place.
The power of the automatic appointment shifting makes scheduling for large companies much easier. Let's say our NY home office is scheduling a conference call or Live Meeting for all management worldwide at 2PM Eastern- one mass meeting invite can be sent to every office or employee worldwide, and automatically schedule every employee's Outlook calendar at the correct local time regardless of wherever they are, (or, more importantly, wherever they'll be on the date of the call/meeting- a boon for oft-traveling mobile employees!)

Ok, I can see you still aren't convinced. No problem. I'll fall back on the 800-pound Gorilla argument: that's the way Outlook works, you're stuck with it, so how can you best deal with it?

First you need to decide if you'll ever need the appointment shifting feature. If you ever get meeting invites from other time zones, yes, you'll probably need it. If you don't collaborate with other Outlook users, you probably don't, and can decide of the shifting feature is right for you or not. If it isn't, regardless of the fact that the appointment shift feature can't be turned off, you can "disable" the shifting appointments feature in a very, VERY, low tech way: DON'T EVER CHANGE TIME ZONES!

I call this "solution" the "Digital Watch Paradigm." Think about this for a moment- when you travel to a different time zone, say from LA to NY, do you "shift time zones" on your digital wristwatch? Of course not- you simply advance the time three hours. If you treat the WinMo device just like a wristwatch, and rather than change time zones when traveling, you simply reset the device's clock to local time, all of your appointments will stay put. If it offends your sensibilities to walk around London or Tokyo with a device set to "Eastern US," try to keep in mind the time zone-based clock on the Windows Mobile device is primarily there to support the Calendar's automatic time zone shift feature. If that feature didn't exist, the device wouldn't need to be "time zone-aware" any more than your watch is- it'd just need a clock. For this to work as I describe, however, it is VITAL that you defeat the automatic time zone/clock setting feature most WinMo phones have preset that allows the mobile operator to set the clock and zone. On touchscreen devices, it's usually found in Start/Settings/Phone/Time Zone. Untick the "automatically set time..." box.

Now, if, like myself, you accept that the time-zone handling of Outlook is a powerful tool, how do we use it without being confused? First, I tend to include the actual time of appointments that take place outside my local time zone in the appointment name or location itself. I.e. in our example above, I'd have entered the appointment as "Appointment with the Suits: 10AM ET" and set it for 7AM local Pacific time. This helps confirming everything is correct at the appropriate time. If our hypothetical victim had seen "Appointment with the Suits: 10AM" scheduled for "1PM," on her device's today screen in the hotel Wednesday night, it would've told her something was awry, and made it obvious that she had a time zone problem.

Those who travel often or deal with an office in another zone tend to add/subtract time zones automatically in our head, so adjusting 10AM or 1PM Eastern to 7AM or 10AM Pacific is no biggie, but what if the meeting or 10AM conference call is with a supplier in Tokyo? I don't know THAT offset off the top of my head. In that case, we zip over to the device's time zone screen, set "GMT+9, Tokyo" as the visiting time and select it. Our device jumps to GMT+9, taking all of our appointments with it. Now we schedule our call at 10AM Thursday "local" Tokyo time, then reset the time zone on our device to our home time "GMT-8, Pacific US", the appointment moves to the correct time in LA: 5PM Wednesday. And, again, the beauty is that you'll always be notified of the correct time for the call regardless of where you are- if you stay in LA, it'll remind you before 5PM, if you fly to Tokyo, it'll remind you before 10AM, or, if your flight to Tokyo has problems and grounds you in Honolulu, you'll be warned before the 3PM meeting start, and be able to call in your apologies, etc.

Outlook 2007 added a neat feature to aid with appointments scheduled for different time zones. In the past, you either had to do time zone math in your head, or, just like on the mobile devices, temporarily shift the PC's time zone to where the appointment was to take place, enter the appointment, and shift everything back. With Outlook 2007, you can now click "Time Zones" in the appointment editing screen and set the time zone for the appointment start and/or end time- the start and end times can even have different zones- a neat feature for entering flights, where take offs and landings are always expressed in local time on the itineraries.
Hopefully this overview has helped you learn to love (or at least live with!) the time zone handling of Outlook and Windows Mobile, and provide a little insight to why it works like it works, which might seem counter-intuitive, at least at first-glance, to anyone who doesn't rely on it's power and flexibility.