Phone Alarm: A must have application for every Pocket PC/Phone combo
Phone Alarm is a really great, full featured application for Pocket PCs, particularly for Pocket PCs that include a phone function (also known as converged devices). When installed, the application includes a today screen plug-in that displays information about missed calls, new emails, new text messages, and new voicemail messages. The plug-in also includes icons that turn Bluetooth and WIFI on and off, as well as change the Pocket PC's active profile that controls how rings and notifications are handled.
I've included a preview of a few of the settings I've configured for some of the profiles on my hw6925. You can see that when I am home, I've set the speakerphone to automatically turn on whenever I answer the phone. When I switch to the car profile, bluetooth is turned on, my GPS application is started and the speakerphone is automatically turned on whenever I answer the phone.
| PROFILE: | Home | Work | Meeting | Night | Car | Flight |
| System volume | 80% | 60% | 20% | 20% | 100% | 80% |
| Phone volume | 80% | 60% | 0% | 40% | 100% | n/a |
| Call volume | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | n/a |
| Notification volume | 80% | 80% | 20% | 40% | 80% | 80% |
| Speaker | On | Off | Off | Off | On | Off |
| Run Program | No | No | No | No | iNav | No |
| Bluetooth | On | Off | ||||
| Phone Radio | On | On | On | On | On | Off |
I have also established a schedule to automatically switch the profile on my phone to Night at 11:00 pm every day and to switch to my Home profile at 9:00 am on the days I am home. I've configured the schedule to switch to Car profile during the times I know I will be driving to and from work and to switch to Meeting profile on the days and times I am teaching.
Configuring Phone Alarm's Many Features
Phone Alarm's many features are configured through five tabbed screens: Display, Alarms, Advanced Settings, Profiles, Addon, and About:
- Display Settings allow you to:
- Select the today screen skin you wish to display on the start page of your Pocket PC. Phone Alarm comes with a few skins, but you can download free skins from Phone Alarm's website.
- Select the alarms you wish to sound for Voice mail, Reminders, Missed Calls, Email, SMS & MMS messages. If you choose to set alarms for Email but only wish the Pocket PC to sound alarms for certain (but not all) email messaging accounts you've setup on the Pocket PC, you can select the Setup button and choose the specific accounts for which you wish to receive alarms.
- Alarm Settings allow you to specify how you wish alarms to appear on your Pocket PC (repetition, frequency, recurrence)
- Advanced Settings allow you to
- Define and establish notification settings for poor signal reception and low battery
- Specify general settings regarding voice mail, SMS send and receive notifications, vibration mode, automatic pickup of incoming calls and some other miscellaneous settings
- Profiles tab takes you to a screen where you can establish up to 7 different profiles to handle a comprehensive array of settings. On this top of this screen you'll see four (4) icons that allow you access to screens where you can (1) establish a comprehensive time- and appointment-based schedule to automatically switch profiles; (2) edit profile names and hide specific profiles; (3) export, import, backup, restore or copy the profiles; and (4) view Help files about the Profiles option.
It is on the Profiles screen where you will customize each of the seven different profiles as desired:
- Volumes (alarm, system, phone, call, notification),
- Notification Settings for SMS, MMS, Email, Voice Mail, and Reminder alarms,
- Ring Settings (ring tone & type, auto answer, speaker phone (on/off), call forwarding, SMS forwarding)
- Radio Settings (enable phone radio, incoming Infrared interface, Bluetooth power status, activate Bluetooth headset, activate WLAN radio, cycle data (GPRS/UMTS) on/off,
- General Settings allow you to ,
- Establish backlight settings and device timeout when using battery or external power,
- Run & close programs (i.e., turn on GPS when changed to Car profile)
- Rotate screen
- Set ActiveSync auto-connect schedule
- Enable Push Email (only if push email is installed)
Tapping the round yellow icon at the top of the Profiles page allows you to establish a comprehensive schedule to automatically switch to specific profiles based on the time of day and day of the week or appointment status (as defined in Outlook).
- Addon Settings screen provides some features to allow you to manage:
-
Data Connection Settings. You can set this option up to:
- Add disconnect button to popup
- Add connected time to popup
- Don't start GPRS with radio
- Automatically disconnect after XX minutes
- Location Service: You can set this option up to determine location via:
- RIL
- WLAN
- Cell Broadcast
- SIM
- Wake up to check location (wake every xx minutes; for xx seconds, on specific schedule (input specific from and to times)
- Establish location groups
- One-click mute button
- There are five buttons that allow you to configure some specialized settings:
- Billing allows you to configure options to project your monthly call and data charges
- Scroller allows you to configure items that will scroll through the Today screen plugin, if applicable.
- Forward Calls allows you to configure phones numbers that can be used for forwarding calls and SMS messages:
- Network snapshot:
- V Command allows you to specify how Voice Command is used in each profile, if you have this software installed on the Pocket PC
-
- About page includes two icons:
- Phone & exclamation mark icon
- Basic Logging
- Detailed
- Signal
- Hammer & wrench icon allows access to power-user custom settings that include
- Vibrate controller
- Missed call filter
- Profile change notification
- On signal/memory pop-up
- On scroller/signal pop-up
- Samsung i730 LED support
- WLAN driver direct access
- Automatic entry of SIM code
- Trinity WLAN hack
- Vibrate on connect
- Use alternative speaker-phone
- Activate alarm every time an alarm even occurs
- Force email alerts to be recognized as MMS
- Phone & exclamation mark icon
Phone Alarm is compatible with windows mobile 2003, 2003se, WM5.0 and WM6.0. There is also a Smartphone version for non-touch screen devices and a Lite version that includes a subset of the features described in this article. Some of the features discussed in this article are not available for every operating system or for every device. For instance, the screen rotation option did not work on my hw6925.
Links in this article:
- Phone Alarm software
- Phone Alarm Smartphone version
- Free user skins can be downloaded here:
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Ok, based on your enthusiasm, I (re) downloaded the trial and set it up. I hate to be a Puddleglum about it, but so far it is underwhelming. My company uses Afaria to remotely manage our hw6925s so possibly there is some interference. The only thing I can see it doing is 1) slowing down the whole PPC; and 2) REALLY slowing down (and sometimes disabling) the OK key.
I will read back through the instructions and see if I made an obvious mistake. Wouldn't be the first time!
Rick
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I have not noticed that Phone Alarm has slowed anything down on my Pocket PC. I've been using it now for a couple of months and I'm very pleased with it. I especially like having the speakerphone set to automatically turn on when I answer the phone and I really like being able to set up a schedule to automatically change profiles. I don't have to worry about my phone ringing during the middle of one of my lectures!
Let me know if you run into problems.
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Ok, I give up. The screens you showed are interesting. I set up some profiles with schedules, but the scheduled time came and went and nothing happened - it did not change my profile to vibrate. In fact, none of the things I set work. I alarms to repeat on email, VM, missed calls and none of that happens. Is there some MASTER ENABLE checkbox I missed? Do you think Afaria (used by my company to manage the phone) could be interfering with PA?
Rick
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Rick, I'm sorry you've had problems with this software. Everything works flawlessly on my hw6925. There are so many options, but I didn't really mess with a lot of the options - I justed accepted the default settings. I spent some time setting up my profiles and schedule and I've been pretty satisfied. I suppose your problems could be caused by Afaria, but I am not familiar with that software, so I really can't say for sure. Can you disable that application temporarily to see if it makes a difference?
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Also - the PhoneAlarm Today Plug-In does not show up. Only a blank band where it should be. When I go to Today Settings, highlight PhoneAlarm and tap Options, nothing happens. This is the trial version. Maybe I should reinstall?
BTW, what are the other Today Plug-Ins you have? They look cool.
Rick
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I'd expect the trial version to be fully functionaly, so perhaps reinstalling the software might fix the problem. I'm using the vistamedia skin that I downloaded from PhoneAlarm's website. It was a little tricky getting the skin to display, but if you've got the plugin turned on, you should at least see something on your today screen.
I use SpbTime and cLaunch. I wrote up details of how I've set up cLaunch in my article, " An almost stylus free experience"
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Ok, I went to reinstall and noted that I had installed on my storage card. So maybe that was it. Where did you install it?
When I tried to reinstall on the device, I ran into the dreaded "Out of memory"! So I need to move/remove/reinstall some things. Know any utility that lets you MOVE an app from the device to the storage card?
Rick
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Rick, I installed Phone Alarm to main memory. I don't usually move applications around. Instead I uninstall and reinstall them since this is the only way I can be sure all registry items are changed to point to the application's new location.
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Ok, reinstalled phoneAlarm to device instead of storage card. Works! I'll send them an email. (I think the problem was that it didn't find the skins before.)
Rick
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Rick, glad to hear you finally got the software working. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Let me know what you think after you've had a chance to try it out a little.
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Ok. I'm a convert. But I can't decide on the skin. Vistamedia that you have doesn't do it for me. Too small and misses some features. Diamond is very nice - but too BIG! Anybody else try one they liked?
Is the 6925 screen considered QVGA resolution even though it is 240X240?
One other thing. My wife asks that I PLEASE figure out how to silence all notifications at night. I keep the phone in the bedroom in case someone calls, but want all other noises OFF. Even though I selected what I think are the right options, I still get vibate on email. What does that option "...Respct vibrate..." mean?
Thanks,
Rick
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I bought and used PA for 5 months on my HP 6925 but finally removed it because it was just slowing down the phone something fierce. It would beep incessantly after reboots at times even though there did not seem to be any alarms. Reading your other post about SKTOOLS and the notification queue, I looked in vain all through SKTOOLS but could not for the life of me find where to view and/or delete notifications. Can you give me a hint on where it is?
Additionally, I was never real happy with the skin for PA. I tried several but never found one I really liked.
I do miss some things - scheduling profile changes and easy BT & WiFi on/off
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Rick, I've been really pleased with Phone Alarm and would really miss it. I don't know why you've had such a time with it on your 6925. Perhaps it's interacting with some other application you've got installed to your pocket pc (that I don't have on mine).
You can check your notification queue in SKTOOLs by opening up SKTOOLS and then looking for the "Notification Queue" option. If you select the Maintenance View, it will be easier to find this option (tap View > Maintenance).
There are some other Phone applications you might like - none as feature rich as Phone Alarm. Phone Weaver is one that I reviewed and liked quite a bit. PocketZenPhone is another one that works pretty well.
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Julie,
Ok, I found the notifications queue tools in SKTOOLS. I had A LOT of them! Is it ok to delete all the dupes? What about just deleting them all? I'd just lose my notifications from calendar items which I don't really pay attn to anyway. Is there anything critical I DON'T want to delete?
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Don't delete your entire notification queue or else you will delete some important notifications that your pocket pc needs to operate properly and sync with your computer. You can safely delete any Calendar notifications and any other notifications that you recognize, but if you don't know what a notifications is for, don't delete it. If you delete important notifications you'll have to perform a factory reset to get your pocket pc working properly again.
In SKTOOLS you'll see X s in checkboxes, you can delete those and probably won't have any issues. Of course, it's always a good idea to backup your pocket pc before messing around with the notification queue. Then if you delete too many, you can always restore from your backup file.
Right now, the notification queue on my hw6925 is pretty clean, and there are 35 items there. I do not use notifications in my appointments or tasks, so these are not Calendar notifications.
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Well, I got stuck in constant wireless Activesync synchronization error so I called HP support. After logging into my laptop to see for himself, he pronounced:
1) You need to downrev Activesync from 4.5 to 4.2 because of problems with 4.5.
2) You need to master rest and reload.
I hung up and tried your trick of deleting PIM.vol, but that didn't work, so I restored to a past Sprite backup (great program) and I'm back in business. I had 500 emails in my inbox and think it was just running low on memory.
Anyway...I looked at my notification queue after the restore and it is down from 170 (with 63 timechange and 63 timezone?) to about 100 total. 44 are timechange and 43 are timezone and 30 are old calendar. So can I delete the timezone and timechange? You mentioned I could delete the ones SKTOOLS had checked. None of mine are checked - they are all unchecked boxes.
Thanks for your continuing help,
Rick
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Rick,
I haven't deleted the timezone or time change notifications unless they were designated as duplicates, so I'm not really sure what will happen if you delete them. But it seems like you have quite a few of them. You could use Sprite to backup your pocket pc, delete them and see if you have any issues. If you do, you can always restore from your backup file. I'd be interested to hear how it works out.
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Well, thanks for the encouragement to do this. I backed it up with Sprite, cleaned out all the timechange and timezone notifications except one each, pared down my files not on the storage card and it seems to be working fine. I now have:
2 SCRIPTS
5 TIMECHANGE
5 TIMEZONE
1 XeClient (from Afaria remote mgr)
1 calupd.exe
1 paWakeup.exe (yup, I'm trying phoneAlarm again!)
4 goofy {9B904401-A867-4042-976B-4063F62B2EE5}
24 CALENDAR.EXE
1 CALNOT.EXE
2 calnot.exe
3 clocknot.exe
4 repplog.exe
1 TASKS.EXE
===
49 total
Anyone with any ideas on the non-obvious ones, I'd love to hear them.
The phone seems much more responsive.
Thanks,
Rick
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