Windows Mobile devices don’t offer a great range of power management options. If you should need to reset your device, sticking your stylus in the hole is often the only way to do it. What do you do if you want to turn off the screen? It is normally a case of working your way through the various menus and hopefully finding something that will do the job. It is much more of a challenge than it should be. 

An easier option is Pocket Power Manager. Upon launching, you will see a few new icons to the bottom right of your screen, otherwise known as the task tray. Each of them can be tapped to instantly perform a task. There are no extra bits and pieces thrown in.

The icons are:

• Screen off icon
• Reset Device icon
• Power off icon
• Rotate screen icon

I know that I will enjoy having the option to rotate the screen quickly. Pocket Power manager lets you hide and disable any of he icons you don’t want. If you want to use it for only one of the tasks, you will only see one icon. You can also setup Pocket Power Manager to launch at startup. It really is a nice “no nonsense” utility!

Available for free from www.pocketpowermanager.com [via FreewarePPC]

Most phone manufacturers brand their phones with a startup sound. This is often an annoying feature for those that have a phone which won’t let you disable it. Windows Mobile users are blessed as they don’t need to put up with this sound each time their device starts up. This is because Microsoft has not included a startup sound in their mobile operating system. Maybe just because there isn’t a startup sound, many people crave for it. Reverse psychology and all that.

Well now there is a way. AudioBoot is a Windows Mobile utility that will add a startup sound to your device. As your device boots up, while the boot screens are still on display, your startup sound will come alive through your devices speakers.

AudioBoot comically plays the Windows XP startup sound by default, but this can be changed by copying any MP3 to your root directory and renaming it startup.mp3. Most other platforms don’t allow you to change your startup sound. It’s not a reason to buy Windows Mobile, but it’s a nice touch.

Available for free via FreewarePPC.com. If you are not an XDA forums member, download Audioboot from the mirror.

Would you like to control your music player and powerpoint presentations from your phone? If you have a Sony or Nokia phone and a Bluetooth connection, you might be in luck.

JAM SE is a free mobile application for a range of Java enabled mobile phones that will allow you to control your music collection from your phone, using Bluetooth.

You can browse or search your music collection from your phone, as well as having control of the volume, play, skip, repeat and shuffle controls you would expect it to offer.

I use Winamp as my music player as I find it to be be quick and easy to use. This is fortunate as JAM SE currently only works with Winamp or XMMS.

Jam SE is skinnable so you can make it look just right to suit your needs. It runs on both Windows and Linux. It uses the Bemuser program as a backend. I couldn’t figure out what the difference between Bemuser and JAM SE is, but I found out about this via JAM SE, so they get the plug.

JAM SE is a bit of a hassle to install, though on their website there are videos and there is plenty of documentation that should help you through it. You will need to install components on your computer and on your phone and then configure the Bluetooth.

I have tested a number of programs that claim to do similar tasks, in the time of writing this website, but none have worked well enough for me to promote. JAM SE worked great for me straight up on a Nokia N70.

JAM SE is available for free from Sourceforge.

If your device spends a lot of its time docked, you may want to give this utility a go. Dockware is a calendar and digital photo frame all in one.

Dockware opens up automatically when your phone is docked or plugged in to charge. It will rotate the pictures roughly every 10 seconds.

There are various views which you can choose between, showing you month, today and long date views. There is nothing too fancy about this free version of Dockware, but it is a nice utility to have.

Dockware came preinstalled in my last Windows Mobile device. I got used to it always being there, but my current device did not include it.

Dockware comes with a few nice scenic shots, but if you would like to use your own pictures, simply drop them into the Dockware folder.

Dockware is available for free from Iliumsoft. There is also a pro version with all the features you could ever want.

Microsoft Exchange servers offer a lot of a features that regular POP3 and IMAP email servers do not. It was even a consideration when I was deciding which company I wanted to work for.

Exchange servers have a number of features such as Outlook Web Access and Push Email, that help us have greater access to our email. Push Email helps us get email to our devices as soon as it hits the server.

If you have access to both an Exchange server and a recent Windows Mobile device (post WM5), you can get email to and from your device better than what is possible with any other method.

This article will show you how to connect your Windows Mobile 5 device to an Exchange server. It is not very hard to get up and running, but there are a few terms which are a little confusing.

This article is written for Windows Mobile 5, but I hope it will assist people with Windows Mobile 6 devices also.

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