Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

I used to use Google Send to Phone service and the FireFox plugin to send SMS. But today I found that free SMS service has been stopped by Google. I remember that Yahoo had a similar service before. It turns out Yahoo Web2SMS is not longer available either. I do not know when that happened.

Here are a list alternatives I know:

(1) Via Email

AT&T: number@txt.att.net
T-Mobile: number@tmomail.net
Sprint: number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: number@vtext.com
AllTel: number@message.alltel.com
Where number = your 10 digit phone number.

I did not use this method for quite a while, I hope those emails still work.

(2) Via carrier websites

They often provide simple web forms to send SMS. For example Sprint has messaging.sprintpcs.com, T-Mobile has t-mobile.com/MESSAGING.

(3) Gizmo SMS

GizmoSMS.com site allows you send SMS globally. You can pick the country name from a long list.

This is a great collection of tips to let your smartphone do more useful stuff for you:
101 Ways to Make Your Smartphone Smarter

It has links in the following categories:

• Communication
• Finance
• Travel
• Media & Entertainment
• Organization
• Information
• Utilities
• Utilities
• Convenience
• Hacks
• BlackBerry
• Windows Mobile
• Palm
• Symbian
• iPhone

TagsMe has a list of very impressive demo videos to show how easy it is to develop mobile applications using its GUI Editor and XML-based language. I am impressed not only by its mobile client, but also its Netbeans based IDE. Everything seems to be well polished.

Cascada Mobile takes a completely different approach. Instead of letting the developers deal with mobile geared markup languages, they can just use standard xHTML, CSS, and Javascript to write applications. Cascada Mobile provides tools to convert them automatically to mobile Java applications (MIDlets). Interesting enough, the development tool is an Eclipse plugin.

Back to the year of 2003, I read an article on MSDN, which was talking about why a startup company should avoid entering development tools (IDE specifically) market. I was kind of involved in mobile development tool at that time, so I remember that article very clearly. I could not find the original article now, but the main reasons are:
(1) IDE needs heavy investment and
(2) the customers for IDE are very picky, because they are developers themselves
With über IDEs and RCPs like Eclipse and Netbeans, the situation has been changed dramatically now days. The barriers to entry for development tools are much lower.

Short story:
Last weekend I moved the content of my old Java ME open source software site to a new Open Source Softwares for Mobile Phone blog. Initially it will be focused on Java (Java ME, Android), but will be extended to other major platforms like Symbian, Windows Mobile, even iPhone.

Long story:
I have been maintaining a collection of Java ME open source projects since 2004. That site contains simple HTML pages, which are cumbersome to update. I was thinking about overhauling it for quite a while. My first thought is to use a Digg like software, so everybody can register and submit project. I tried both Pligg and PHPDug. Pligg is feature-rich and powerful. But theme selection is still small. Customizing it by myself could be time-consuming (I am not a web design guy). PHPDug is small and simple. Theme customization should be doable. After I tried it, I found that its pages are heavily based on tables. It is still a little buggy and does not contain all the features I would like to have.

So now I am back to WordPress. Comparing to Pligg and PHPDug, the advantage is obvious. It has a large amount of free themes/plugins available. It has a large user community. It supports tag, category and search, which I need the most. And I used it for this blog since 2004. Thus I could focus on the content not the software configuration.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me about open source Java ME projects before. Without your help, I could not build this list myself. At this moment it has 156 (Java ME) projects and will keep growing!

Over the weekend I updated this blog to WordPress 2.5.1. I also picked a new theme! Believe it or not, last time I updated it was more than 3 years ago. And I broke my RSS feed during that update. Since then I hesitated to touch it. I could not believe it has been so long.

For the two people that are reading my blog, here is the new RSS:
http://wendong.ngphone.com/feed/

The old one might be still working, depending on when you added that.

This blog is not active as before for quite while. Now it will be back to normal. I will post more often.