Panoramic Guitar Suite released for Windows Mobile Phones

Panoramic Software Inc has just released Guitar Suite for Windows Phones with touch screens.

Guitar Suite includes a comprehensive guitar chord look up engine capable of displaying over 25,000 chords in any of the included 20 tunings. Its also able to play any displayed chord.

It also includes a Play mode allowing you to tap on the screen and play any note at any onscreen fret. You also have the option to overlay 50 different scales in any of the included tunings.

Guitar Suite also helps you tune your guitar with a high accuracy digital tuner. And if you phone's microphone isn't sensitive enough for tuning, you can also tune by ear.

Finally, Guitar Suite wouldn't be complete without a precise Metronome with a range of 30 to 240 BPM.

For more information or to purchase go to:
http://www.panoramicsoft.com/mobileapps/guitarsuite/GuitarSuite.php

HTC Touch Diamond and its DDR Memory

Recently I was looking over the hardware specifications of the new HTC Touch Diamond and noticed that HTC is claiming the use of DDR memory.

Over the weekend I had a little free time so I created a Windows Mobile benchmark application so I could do some comparison testing. It just so happened that a colleague of mine had a Diamond on order.

I thought a fair comparison would be the Dell Axim x51v as its just about the only really usable VGA Windows Mobile device I've used.

I'll provide some benchmark numbers later this week but I'll let you know the summary now. Not surprisingly, the Dell x51v was a fair bit faster on integer and floating point calculations when compared to the HTC Touch Diamond. However, when testing memory performance the Diamond was almost twice as fast - so it appears that the HTC is making good use of the DDR memory. Now the big number - the HTC posted frame rates for normal drawing operations that were almost 3 times faster than the speedy Dell.

I should get a chance to put the Diamond through its paces but I think its fair to say it this is an excellent choice for gaming and multimedia.

Coming soon: benchmarks with the new Palm Treo Pro as well as several other windows mobile phones.

Experia, Touch HD, Diamond and Diamond Pro Video

I think the title says it all. I'm personally in the market for a new Windows Mobile phone and this video covered the four phones that I'm interested in.

The video is about 8 minutes long and gives you a pretty good feel for the sizes of the devices.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAfrsZ1INV8

All four phones are Windows Mobile Professional Devices and all four have high resolution screens. The Touch HD and the Experia have a screen resolution of 480x800, the Diamond and Diamond Pro have a resolution of 480x640.

If you're shopping for these phones you may want to keep in mind that there is better software support for VGA devices (480x640) than the WVGA devices.

Also a key feature (or lack of) on the HTC HD is the lack of a directional pad. This means you're going to be controlling everything using the screen, it also means many games will be unplayable. However for a device this cool you may be willing to overlook it.

I'm currently leaning towards the HTC Touch Diamond - I'm ready for a small and "cool" phone.

As always, if you're looking for software for any of these phones check out
http://www.wireless-gaming.com & http://www.wireless-apps.net in the Windows Mobile Touch section.

Panoramic Calc Pro 2.0.2 released today.

Calc Pro 2.0.2 contains a few minor bug fixes and improves compatibility with WVGA devices like the HTC Touch HD, Sony Experia and the Toshiba G900.

Grab it from the Panoramic Software Inc website here:
http://www.panoramicsoft.com/

This version is compatible with all Windows Mobile 5, 6 & 6.1 Professional and Classic devices (ie Pocket PC).

Cheap(ish) HTC Touch Diamond at NCIX

Just stumbled across this deal at NCIX. "Only" $689.99 for a brand new HTC Touch Diamond.

On sale at NCIX only until Nov 4, 2008
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=32364&vpn=DIAMOND%20QUAD&manufacture=HTC&promoid=1019

edit* - a friend of mine just informed me that you can get the same phone from PDA Plaza for $675 - www.pdaplaza.ca

And note - these are Canadian prices.