Got a good story about how Windows Mobile made you look like a superhero?

Take a seat around the campfire, and tell us all your thrilling exploits of danger, derring-do and mobile solutions.

Here is my best Windows Mobile story that give me the title of superhero!!

July of 2007 my wife and I decided to make a little get-away and go down to Boca FL for 5 days just to send some time together and have some fun! Both of use work full-time jobs and have businesses also. So we pass each other coming and going.

So before I left I made a rule - No laptops! I allowed cell phones because of the kids. *and of course allowing room for my Pocket PC Phone also So we arrived in Boca and as we were checking into our hotel, I made conversation with two gentleman at the front desk and they inquired about the new Treo that had just come out. (I think it was the 755p at the time) anyway....after closing that deal on two upgrades and directing them to my company website I headed up to room to and was met at the door by my wife.

She had mentioned she needed to use a PC in the hotel to check on a house that a client of hers was closing on in a few days. So I smiled and said....why are you going down to the lobby? The room has free wifi ( which the desk clerk gave me a handful of access keys). Have a seat and let me show you something. I pulled out my Qtek 9000 which at the time was running WM 5 now it has 6.1. logged onto the wifi network in the hotel and showed her how to get to her hotmail account and do what she needed to do.

After a minute and standing there watching her maneuver on the Qtek 9000. She looked up at me and grinned and said I want one of these!! And I laughed and said oh you like that, she replied very much so!!! And she said you do sell these don't you. I replied yes I do. She said good! I want this one and you can go get yourself another one!

Well I didn't have the heart to tell her that the Qtek 9000 was no longer available and nor was I going to part with mine! But she finished her emails and did what she needed to do and and kissed me and said thank you and when you get home find me a pocket PC phone with a laptop style design.

FINALLY! she had seen the light and doesn't always need to drag her laptop around when doing her real estate. But some in site into my loving wife! she is not a tech-no- girl she just sees a gadget and wants it for the sake of wanting it!! So after showing her many many devices she has narrowed it down to the AT&T Tilt.....and the life of a superhero is great!!

Great thread Chris - thanks for starting it.

A friend of mine was struggling to show us her photos of her recent weekend on her tiny camera screen. This screen was about half-inch by half-inch. I had my 4700 in my purse with it's beautiful 3 x 2.5" vga screen. I asked for her SD card to transfer into my 4700. She didn't even know that she had a SD card. I opened her camera up, took out the SD card - much to her horror because she thought I was destroying her camera - put it in my 4700 and displayed her photos. Total amazement

 

 

I realize I've been bad about starting threads like this, but not offering my own examples. I actually have 2 that stick out in my mind, so here goes:

SUCCESS STORY #1 

One of my customers was going to Spain for a 3 week vaca with his wife, which had always been her dream trip.

This customer is co-owner of a small law firm and had an insanely important case going on then, which meant he had to remain available for certain things while travelling. We talked a bit about how best to use his WM device (an AT&T 8125 at the time) while travelling in a foreign country, wth an eye on minimizing roaming data charges.

After they got back, HIS WIFE sent me an e-mail thanking me for his WM device, because it had kept him in the vacation with her, and yet he had still been able to keep up with that important case, even editing Word docs received from his admin assistant and sending them back.

And this was a customer that had almost gone with a Blackberry nearly 6 months before. One of the primary features I emphasized was Office Mobile. And it sure paid off for him.

SUCCESS STORY #2

Earlier this year, I was the co-chair of the planning committee for our area's first-ever E-Cycling Day. Basically we gathered electronic equipment from the public here in the Tuscaloosa area for safe and responsible de-manufacturing and reclamation. Over the course of 14 hours, we gathered 170,000 pounds of equipment, keeping it out of landfills.

My company developed a system for quickly gathering visitor data from people bringing equipment. Hosted on SharePoint 2007, we used a pair of AT&T Tilt devices with data plans to actually enter and submit the data to the system. Thanks to the efficiency and performance of both our application (which was mobile-optimized) and the Tilt, a single device was able to keep up with our traffic (825 people over those 14 hours), and offered us the benefit of live stats. When the local media (television and newspaper) arrived to cover the event, we had real-time numbers available to give them, which we would have been tough with the paper tracking sheets.

Using this system automatically captured timestamps (which we would not have had using a paper system) for each entry, giving us the ability to see our busiest times, and plan accordingly for future events.

In fact, Alabama Public Television filmed a sequence coming through our event, including my taking their information using this system. Hopefully this footage will be included in their series on "green" initiatives in the state of Alabama due to air sometime this month.

Here's a post about E-Cycling Day 2008 for anyone who's interested: http://www.chrisrue.com/funcave/2008/01/e-cycling-day-2008-in-pictures.html

ok, well me and a friend were at borders bookstore one day. he saw two books he needed to do a project for a class. we are in college, by the way. there were two books, which one book had a lot of info on his topic and and the other had other info (but no as much) on other stuff he needed pertaining to his topic. so i whip out my pocket pc phone, an ETEN G500, and he wrote down notes using word mobile. so then i sent that to him and he was able to pull it up on his laptop. so in the end, both books would have totalled to about $50, so in just buying one, he only spent $20. he saved $30. it isnt much but to college kids, it a lot of hard-earned money. it made me feel good that it became avaiable in a situaiton like that.

Welcome JJCT2001 - good story - and I totally appreciate that $30 is a lot to a college student. My son is currently in college and tries hard to keep the costs down.

So, mine's not that impressive, but my mobile phone bailed me out a few days ago.

My husband recently got hit by another driver which totalled out our car. Everyone was okay, but the following week was very hectic.

We were purchasing a new car by the end of the week (it's hard to fit a family of four in a small rental!) Unfortunately, in all the chaos, we forgot our proof of insurance.

I was able to use my phone to go to our insurance agent's website, access all of our policy information, and get the dealership the information they needed to let us drive away with our car.

 Yay! :)

 -Andrea

My wife doesn't use the computer, she said "I can live without...', she uses a mobile phone, mainly for family business.

She needs to communicate with relatives, other mothers and firiends to organize the boys an our's life, and SMS aren't "smart" enought and a voice call is "too much"   . She has things and tasks to remember too.

She had a Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericcson and I never succeeded in enabling the e-mail and agenda use. I've bought a WM6 Pro MWG ATOM LIFE, installed SPB mobile shell 2 as control interface, one our teaching,  and she is using e-mail and calendar as common tools ! (and is proudly showing around the phone)

She can receive and read MSoffice documents now (is a common format in consumer word, "office" is an OOOLLLD concept), send pictures, google sometimes...

I had  business success stories but this is "the" success story, both from personal  and for lessons learned to be tranferred in business

A friend of my is a manager at a chain of student hostels. He has a team of inspectors who, up to recently, would write all their inspection reports on paper, snail mail them, then they would be manually entered into Excel on a desktop computer.

I helped him deploy HTC Advantage X7501 units (you know, the super sized Windows Mobile 6.0 devices that look nearly like a UMPC) so that his inspectors use Excel Mobile to fill out the report, then e-mail out those sheets via the Wi-Fi Hotspot at each hostel. Besides speeding up the data collection process (i.e. no hand input into Excel, no snail mail) the inspectors can also take pictures, using the HTC Advantage's built-in camera, of issues noticed with quality in the rooms (if any). The very large screen of the HTC Advantage also allows the inspectors to scribe a signature on the screen, and makes navigating the Excel Mobile screen reasonable.

This project is on-going, still in the early stages, but it looks like a good effort so far. I've been helping my friend in my spare time, so it's a good feeling working with a deployment more directly than my usual behind the scenes role as technical writer for Windows Mobile issues. 

  

Welcome Andre - good story. Perfect application for Windows Mobile.

Two stories come to mind:

1) After a long meeting a white board is full of notes and ideas.  Rather than transcribe it to paper, I took a picture and emailed it to everyone in the meeting

2) At a tradeshow, I needed to find the nearest FEDEX office to mail some stuff.  A Blackberry user, a Palm user and I all pull out our devices (mine a Blackjack Mk I, WinMo 6.0) and try to find one.  Google Maps locates me, lists nearby FEDEX locations with contact details, and provides directions to the one we pick to visit.

Another capability I love is listening to music streaming in stereo via the internet to my Bluetooth headphones, and then receiving a phone call seemlessly. 

A thief broke into our house two years ago and stole my wife's Smartphone, a Sagem MyS7 with WM 2003, and some money. I reported the theft to the police and I was told that it would be hard, if not nearly impossible, to find out the identity of the thief since there were no fingerprints. This was until I told them that I had Eye on Thief installed on the Smartphone. All we had to do is just to wait for the thief to replace the sim card and turn on the phone. Which is what he did three days later. I started getting a bunch of sms from the phone with the new sim card phone number and without the thief even knowing that the software was running in the background. I started my own private investigation and with help from my friends, we were able to attach a name to the thief’s phone number which I remitted to the police. The guy was known to them for being a recidivist. They mounted a swift operation to apprehend the guy at his house and seized an impressive amount of stolen stuff including my wife's Smartphone. This guy will be out of business for a very long time thanks to the genius of a programmer and Windows Mobile. The police was simply amazed by the capability of my Smartphone, especially when I made a demo on my Pocket PC. I love Windows Mobile…and Eye on thief.

I think we have to declare Linley the winner so far

Linley - that's an amazing story.

That is unbelievably cool!

I should get that app. :)

-Andrea

Thank you Laura

Coincidentally enough, I got a phone call from the police yesterday afternoon telling me that I have to be in the courtroom in June as witness.

 

Andrea: This is a must have software. Being able to remotely wipe your device is great, getting it back is so much better.