Long time Windows Mobile developer WebIS have announced on their blog the forthcoming release of Pocket Informant 9, their brilliant PIM replacement product, cementing their commitment to the platform despite recent BlackBerry and iPhone releases.

The update, which can be downloaded in CAB form from the WebIS site as part of a 'soft launch', is 100% complete, awaiting supporting documentation and translations before making it's full debut.

Originally released in 2001, Pocket Informant consistently scoops up Windows Mobile software awards and is one of the best selling applications on the platform.

Version 9 adds features specifically tailored for Windows Mobile 6.5, as well as being backward compatible with previous Windows Mobile releases. New gesture support built into WM 6.5 enables swiping left and right in Day, Agenda, Month View, Week, Task View, and Date Picker to navigate between time periods and swiping left and right in editors to navigate between the tabs.

As well as the new gesture functionality, the new update adds new events and journal views, GTD support in tasks (Inbox, Context Groups, Project Groups, Next Actions), starred tasks, 'bounce scrolling', contact links directly in task / appointment subjects, a one month date picker based on the full month view, a month view free time finder, touch friendly editors, much improved touch support, full PNG support for icons and a free add-on pack of over 1200 icons.

Pocket Informant 9 is expected to receive a full release around 28th September, $10 cheaper than version 8 at $19.95, but if you'd like to try it out in the meantime, head on over to the Pocket Informant download server to grab a CAB format release.

ShopSavvy, the application which allows users to scan a barcode and find the best local and online prices, is coming to Windows Mobile.

Already available on Android and coming soon on iPhone, the free ShopSavvy application has proved incredibly popular - at the time of writing it is rated the 8th most popular download in the Android Market.

Images from the developers website show the application running on a Touch Diamond2 equipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 - the application will be one of those available immediately (again for free) from the 'Windows Marketplace for Mobile' when it launches in October.

Although initial availability will only be for Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, owners of 6.0 / 6.1 phones will be able to download the application at a later date.

Many of us change our phones regularly.

The phone world moves on quickly and with carrier subsidies, upgrading to a new device is often cheap or even free, particularly in Europe. While physically transferring your phone number to the new device is usually as simple as swapping in a new SIM card or getting the device activated by the carrier, migrating data can sometimes be a real chore - particularly if you're switching to a different type of phone.

With the arrival of Android in the Smartphone space and it's continuing growth, this is a pain point that is being felt by many users who are switching to Google's new baby from other Operating Systems such as Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Nokia's Symbian OS or RIM's Blackberry OS. Thankfully, there is a solution if you are in one of these camps!

Sprite Software, makers of 'Sprite Backup' have just released a Beta version of their 'Sprite Migrate' tool into the Android Market as a free download. Sprite have a very good reputation in the mobile space, and rightly so. Their products are relied on by millions of users worldwide, shipped by carriers on a number of devices and Sprite certainly have a glowing pedigree!

Sprite Software was founded in 2001 by two former employees of Binary Research, developers of the well known Ghost software that was sold to Symantec in 1998. Any computer technician that has been in the business a few years will tell you how vital Ghost was to their toolkit, and how infallible it was!

How well does it work? For me and my test device, it did exactly what it said it would... everything made it across intact!

Lucky Rob Kerr got a little face time with Windows Mobile 6.5 running on a HTC Touch Diamond2. During the demo you'll thrill to the very Zune-y interface, marvel at the nascent Market Place and plotz when you see the My Phone sync. Yep, My Phone backs up your phone's data to your Windows Live account. The iPhone can't do that, can it? More hot icon and web page rendering action over on the Inquirer.

While we're looking forward to 6.5, we hear WinMo 7's premium hotness will be all multi-touch-y feely and totally awesome. Either way, this whole "competition breeds innovation" thing seems to be working.

Need to sync files across machines? Need to access those files on your mobile devices? SugarSync to the rescue. There are currently SugarSync clients for WinMo, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mac and Windows, and starting today, Android phones (Android netbooks too, if they ever appear).

The apps are free, but you pay for storage, starting at $4.99 a month. You can try it free for 30 days, or keep it free with a mere 2GB of storage. You get 30GB for the $4.99 price. SugarSync hasn't yet replaced my current favorite, DropBox, but in light of Apple's iDisk app release, it seems there are more options for syncing files than ever. Here's to choice!

My primary phone is a BlackBerry, but I also own an iPhone with no service contract. Several weeks ago I had the lucky gig of compiling a few fart apps for TUAW, and I was less than impressed with the overall situation. In other words: most fart apps stink.

But let's face it, fart apps made a lot of noise for the iPhone, in no small part because Apple initially refused to "pull the finger," effectively blocking them from the App Store. Now the fart app floodgates are open, and the App Store is flush with flatulence. It was only a matter of time before other platforms took the bait and improved upon the iPhone apps in ways the iPhone simply won't allow. Sort of.

You can see a long, boring, detailed breakdown of features for BSFartApp ($1.99) by clicking the read more link, but here's the basic deal: BSFartApp is a complicated and powerful fart app for Windows Mobile. I have nothing against novelty apps. In fact, BSFartApp is superior to many iPhone fart apps in features, but it really falls down in terms of actual usability. Maybe WinMo users are conditioned to doing things in 3 clicks instead of one, but I am not.

As one example of terrible UI, in order to navigate down a menu, you must click AND swipe. Do what now? Why not just swipe? Or just click? The buttons have little arrows that would seem to indicate such functionality, so why not do as the user expects? Also, while there are plenty of use cases for timed or triggered farts (yes, the office clown, we love him, but will he make it to the corner office?), what about just letting one rip? Yeah, you're gonna be about 3 or 4 menus down to just let one go. Thank goodness our own bodily functions are less complicated. Things are bad when you start referring to generic soundboard apps on the iPhone as "elegant by comparison."

BSFartApp's real advantage over iPhone is the ability to send a fart via MMS. Plus, there's a pretty nifty "eavesdrop" feature that should have you getting sued and/or grounded in no time (there's a similar feature that returns the GPS coordinates for supported phones). I'm less impressed with the phone-as-web-server, since the iPhone will do that as well, but WinMo still has an advantage by allowing background processes to run. OK, so I guess it's good that WinMo is getting a little fart app action. Now if only it wasn't such a PITA to use them...

Live video streaming from your mobile phone is probably a mobile carrier worst nightmare simply because the amount of bandwidth video consumes. And leading that nightmare is Qik.

Simply put, Qik takes your mobile phone's built in video camera and transforms it into a webcam that connects to the Qik site where it will host live feeds of your video, as it happens. That's right, people can now watch you make a fool of yourself anywhere you go.

We were able to test the Qik service on our 3G connected Windows Mobile phone. The installation was quick and only required a few SMS messages be sent back and forth to authorize our account. Once configured just launch the application and your video will automatically appear on the Qik website. Video quality is acceptable and we only experienced slight delays due in part to our mobile connection and location.

Once you end your transmission the live video is then archived to the site for later viewing. Of course like any good site, they offer 2 different privacy settings for your feeds, public and private. At least this way not everyone in the world can see that you haven't cleaned up your room.

Currently in alpha, Qik supports a handful of Windows Mobile and Symbian phones with iPhone testing starting soon. We hope that future updates to the service will also include the ability to adjust video size and image quality. They do recommend an unlimited data plan and in the few days that we used the service we would also recommend it as well.

OpenTable is a great way to make a reservation at a restaurant without having to speak to anyone. Their website is easy to use thanks in part to the drop down menus. So when it was time for OpenTable to release their mobile site we're glad they kept to the same, easy to use interface.

We tested the mobile site on Pocket Internet Explorer, Skyfire and iPhone's Safari and had no problems using the site on any of these browsers.

The mobile version is very straight forward. Pick a city, a restaurant, a date and time to make your reservation. And while it's quick and to the point the mobile version lacks any type of reviews or recommendations if you need a little help choosing a place to eat.

What would make this service even better would be the integration with sites like Yelp. Read a review of a restaurant and if it interest you, click on an OpenTable link to make the reservation right on the spot.

Still, given the lack of any reviews or recommended of places to try, the site is still a fun way to make a reservation while on the go.

Sure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.

The download includes about 24,000 images and over 14 million words covering about 5,000 articles. Each one has been carefully hand-picked from Wikipedia's massive repository of community-assembled knowledge to avoid some of the more important omissions from Wikipedia's own Cd-Rom version Pocket Wikipedia is currently available for Windows, Linux, and PocketPC only.

Want it? Keep in mind the old adage "All good things come to those who wait." None of the mirrors we found were all that fast, but it's too good a download to ignore.

[via Best Freeware and Lifehacker]

iPhone, eat your heart out.

According to early news reports Monday, Microsoft has licensed Adobe Flash Lite for Windows Mobile devices. Essentially, Flash Lite will become a plug-in for Pocket IE, so that users can view embedded Flash content on their Windows Mobile devices. Adobe claims that up to 80% of Flash pages will work using the Flash Lite plugin and Pocket IE.

This also means that future Windows Mobile devices will support both Flash and Silverlight.

Flash, Silverlight: it's starting to sound like a group of superheroes around here.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't yet said when it plans to support Adobe Flash Lite on Windows Mobile devices, and it hasn't given out any dates regarding support for Silverlight either. But at least they stuck their neck out and said that they would support it; which means, eventually, they'll have to deliver on that promise.

[via AppScout]

Back in November, we posted about SyncMate, a freeware (for now) alternative for syncing Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices with a Mac, especially Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Well, the program looked promising, but proved to be buggy and difficult to adequately use.

However, SyncMate has continued to evolve over the last couple of months and Eltima software recently released a new release candidate build that is free to download and use. We very, very basically tested the program with a friend's T-Mobile Shadow (the HTC Juno) on our Mac running Leopard 10.5.2 and were successfully able to sync contacts and our iCal calendar. We didn't try to do anything with iTunes or iPhoto synching, nor did we play with any of the SMS management tools listed on the SyncMate feature list but synching our contacts and calendar was pretty straight forward.

For Mac users, finding consistent support for Windows Mobile devices remains problematic. While programs like Missing Sync and PocketMac have improved their Leopard support considerably, each new OS update brings its own set of problems (and that's without even discussing some of the Entourage 2008 issues that some Windows Mobile users, and Blackberry users, have been facing). Obviously native support would be the best solution (ha!), but until then, it is good to have different options.

SyncMate might not be perfect, but it continues to improve and the developers are actively seeking user feedback. And at least during the continued beta, and now release candidate phase, the program is free (we're not sure what the pricing situation will be once SyncMate gets its first full release). If you have a Windows Mobile 5 o 6 device and are running OS X 10.4 or higher, give SyncMate a shot.

[via MR MOBILE]

And the rumors keep rolling in on Google's phone development. This magical device that will be host to Google's powerful services like Gmail and Search while on the go. This time a person inside HTC has confirmed the development of the device.

The rumors specify that the Gphone will be shipping from Taiwan, and is scheduled to launch Q1 of 2008. The team at Google has been going over the current 20 HTC models on the market and finalizing its handset design. Gphone will have a specially built version of Google Maps, just as the iPhone does, with built in GPS compatibility. Previous reports stated that the device would not have GPS, and that it would support both 3G and EDGE platforms. Gmail and Calendar will be present, with Google Talk becoming part of the phone in a VoIP mode. As for the operating system on the Gphone, the insider said it would use Windows Mobile 6, however some think that a Linux OS would be more realistic. As for price, there have been buzzing's that the device would stay in the range of only $100. Will it be unlocked? We will have to wait and see, but chances of that are fairly slim.

Palm was once king of the mobile landscape. The Palm Pilot made reality what a decade of electronic organizers and ill-fated Apple Newtons never could; A practical handheld computer to store the junk from your head. Once Palm established the market Microsoft stepped in with Windows CE, early versions of which were laughable in comparison to the Palm. Three name changes, infinite version numbers and the integration of the mobile phone saw Windows CE grow up into Windows Mobile, and take the lead. It's an age old story of Microsoft takeover by market-share and, now Palm is only steps away from being swallowed whole bought outright by one of a host of other industry players.

John Dvorak explains that either Nokia or Motorola are likely to drop the hammer on a buyout of Palm sometime soon, and at a price of around $20 a share. eWeek reports their could be as many as 4 bidders fighting behind the scenes, although speculation runs wild as to who the two not named Nokia or Motorola may be.

Alien6 recently released a new RSS reader for Windows Mobile, and it looks like a great little news reader for people who prefer the look and feel of a newspaper to RSS feeds. But here at DownloadSquad, we're RSS junkies, and it's hard to beat a good RSS reader for sifting through piles of information every day.

And lucky for you, while there are some great commercial feed readers for Windows Mobile, including Alien's A6 Times and Illium Software's NewBreak, there are a number of free programs that perform almost as well.