Windows Phone 8: Auto Reply Text to Caller

As of today, this is my new favorite feature. I’m on a call, or in the middle of something, and can’t take an incoming call. There is the ignore button that sends someone to voice mail, but then I have to check voice mail.

This feature let’s you Auto Reply to caller with a predetermined text message, or let’s you type something back. Nice if you’re on a conference call or something. Hopefully your text will get there before the caller leaves a voice mail 🙂 so you don’t have to also check that.

Enjoy the video!

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Windows Phone 8: Taking a Screen Shot

Just get a high score you want to save (for bragging rights)? Or you want to save that 4 Square Check in?

Here is my favorite? Screen shot the bar code on your boarding pass in the email app. Then when you get to the event or airport, the barcode or QRCode is already in your “screenshots”, which is much faster to navigate to.

This quick Windows Phone 8 screen cast, shows how to take a screen shot, shows you where it’s saved on your phone, and also shared the photo up to facebook.

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Windows Phone 8: Built in Screen Magnifier

If you have low vision, or find your self squinting to see really tiny, Windows Phone 8 has a really nice feature named “Screen Magnifier”. This could help if you’re in a dark area (like on a plane, or cab at night), so it’s a nice feature to learn and love.

It’s a little hard to get used to,m because of the two finger – double tap that needs to happen, but with a little practice it become second nature.

Enjoy!

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Windows Phone 8: IE10 Desktop or Mobile

Windows Phone 8 has a very nice version of Internet Explorer v10 built in, and does an amazing job with HTML5, video, pinch/zoom, tabs, pinned tiles, and a bunch of other great features. One nice feature is that under Settings, you can tell IE10 on Windows Phone 8, to pretend to be the full desktop version of IE10. This is done simply by switching a user agent for every request.

This video shows (using Fiddler as a reverse proxy) exactly what happens to the user agent when you switch between Mobile and Desktop mode.

Mobile User Agent: (Notice the IEMobile/10.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

Desktop: (Notice the WPDesktop)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0; ARM; Touch; WPDesktop)

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Mobile Text Reminder: Betwext in Action

Betwext is an online service that is all about SMS texting. Text your customers, group text each friends or family or colleagues. And it has this little hidden gem of a service named “REMIND”.

It does …. well …. exactly that. Reminds you. You send a text with a note to yourself, and the date and time you want it to remind you, and it’ll then send that note back to you on that date and time.

It’s a service that I use on a regular basis, and is the subject of today’s Windows Phone Screencast.

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