Catshanghai

I spend at least two hours a day in buses and taxis. Having an Ipod and a Windows Mobile PDA have kept me relatively sane through many hours of difficult Shanghai commuting. I have written about my PDA before. While it often crashes and has a clunky interface, I am happy that it allows me to keep in touch, stay organised and be amused. Here is my run down of the third party applications that allow me to pull this off.

Pocket Informant 2007 is a calendar and task manager that supports categories and is more flexible than the default personal information tool.
Download Link: http://www.pocketinformant.com/products_info.php?p_id=pi&dir=wm
Cost: $24.95

Resco Audio Recorder supports MP3 and WAV file formats in a variety of bitrates. It looks like Audacity and is good for recording interviews or spoken word podcasts.
Download Link: http://www.resco.net/pocketpc/audiorecorder/
Cost: Free to try or $24.95

Fring is a VOIP and IM client that allows you to stay in touch with anyone on GTalk, MSN, Skype, ICQ or Gizmo. You can write IM text chat or make cheap Internet calls over the VOIP network. The latter requires a decent 3G or wifi connection to get reasonable voice calls, which I have never pulled off. Stick to Fring for text chat and Skype for voice calls.
Download Link: http://www.fring.com

Skype is great for making VOIP calls as long as you have a decent high speed Internet connection and use a headset to minimise echo. It is presently much better than Fring for making voice calls in Shanghai.
Download Link:http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/download/skype/mobile/
Cost: Free, but remember you have to pay for Skypeout calls to landlines.

Documents To Go does not touch the bundled versions of Excel and Word Mobile, which are better than the spreadsheet and wordprocessor included in this suite. The slideshow creator and PDF creators are both excellent. PDF to Go wraps the text so it is comfortable to read on a small screen.
Download Link: http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/winmobile/index.html
Cost: $29.99

Audible Player allows you to enjoy audiobooks on your Windows Mobile PDA. Audible Air allows you to download them directly from the Internet.
Download Link: http://www.audible.com
Cost: Free download, but Audible has various payment plans to buy and download audiobooks

Opera Mobile Browser is the best web browser on the Windows Mobile platform. It does not offer the full browsing experience of Surfari, but pages render pretty well and is supports multiple tabs, which is useful for keeping up with Twitter while working through Google Reader feeds.
Download Link: http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/
Cost: Free trial or $24 to buy

Travelling Blogger lets you write, publish and update Wordpress blog posts (and MetaBlog supported blogs). It supports images and html tags, but not basic copy and paste.
Download Link: http://darrenjohnstone.com/travelling-blogger/
Click on the CAB download link to download the install file. Copy it to your handset and click to install as a CAB file
Your handset also needs the .NET Compact Framework to be able to install and run Travelling Blogger.
Cost:Free

Google Maps can be shown on your handset, but the satellite view of Shanghai offers much more detail than the map view and it will eat up bandwidth if you are on a monthly limit of 800 MB or 2GB.
Download Link: http://www.google.com/gmm/
Cost: Free

VoiceMinder captures audio memos, which are then sent to you as an Email so you don’t forget what you’ve been telling yourself to remember.
Download Link: http://www.pocketinformant.com/products_info.php?p_id=voiceminder&dir=wm
Cost: Free trial/ $9.95 to buy

Fontpatch is a utility that allows your Windows Mobile to show Chinese and Japanese characters, which is quite useful if you live in Shanghai and need to show local addresses to taxi drivers.
Download Link: www.trendsmobile.com/download/fontpatch.cab
Copy to your handset and click to install as a CAB file.
Cost: Free