Windows Mobile Phone Tweaking

A short but sweet post today....

In my last post I mentioned a new toy I got from my lovely wife for my 40'th birthday. The Cingular 8125 Cell Phone/Pda/Camera. This little gem runs Windows Mobile 5 as its base OS and sports a number of cool features that endear it to me greatly.

• Most notably being the side slide out thumb pad that is actually usable someone who has knuckles that scrape the ground (like myself). The display automatically flips from portrait to landscape mode when you slide the keypad out. The OS also support 4 other styles of writing recognition including something very close to my old Palm device.
  
• A Mini SD expansion slot on the top (I have a 1Gig memory card in mine). Certainly useful for MP3 music files.
  
• Bright full color screen (that I run at the second lowest brightness setting even outdoors) Like all of these devices the screen is touch enabled using the handy stylus that pops out of a hole in the bottom of the unit.
• Wifi/Infrared/USB20/Bluetooth connectivity options as well as the gambit of cellular connections
• 1.3 MP camera (useful but not of the highest quality) In fact it will often enough get your phone confiscated is various government places that I often visit as my job requires that I go to these places.
  

In accordance with my usual pattern I have most, if not all, of the options on this device active and this extends to the plan itself. I have the unlimited connectivity option on the account and use it all the time to check email when I am out and about. (In fact at a family funeral a couple of weeks back I was reading and responding to some rather important messages during one of the, ahem, dead moments...). The one thing that I found is that Cingulars service is SLOW. In fact painfully so, I actually found myself hankering for the days of yore when modems where the norm and speeds where a speedy 9600 bps by comparison. At these rates my IMAP in box on taisoftware.com takes forever to update.

Then, as I was browsing some posts on the subject, I hit upon a fellow who noted that it appeared that the cingular DNS servers were woefully underpowered. At that moment I had an epiphany, "Why not set it up to use OPENDNS..." http://www.opendns.com/

Basically this means bypassing the Windows Mobile 5 dns settings of ( let my server tell me what dns to use) and configure it manually to use opendns's own dns servers. So i pointed the dns settings at

208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Edit - 11-23-2006 A note about OpenDNS:
The service offered by openDNS is a good one. They provide DNS lookup with some protections against common fat fingering of URLS that leads to known phising sites. This alone is a good reason to use them in a comprehensive program of good web practices (To paraphrase my Toothpaste tube)

(complete instructions on how to configure various devices to use open dns can be found at the opendns website)

I can now say that the phone works a hell of a lot faster using opendns rather than the cingular dns servers. definitely worth the minimal effort...