Follow Your Team Through the NCAA Tournament with MySI Mobile

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED DIGITAL and Action Engine Corporation announced the launch of MySI Mobile, the beta version of a subscription-free, downloadable mobile application that delivers personalized sports content from SI.com on Windows Mobile devices. MySI Mobile allows sports enthusiasts the ability to select and track the scores, schedules and standings for their favorite teams, view popular SI photos, read the latest sports news and set calendar alerts for upcoming games using their phone.

The features of MySI Mobile, as touted by Action Engine Corporation, are:

• Personalized Home Page – Personalize the application home screen by selecting your four favorite teams to track. Then access scores, schedules and standings for each team with just one click. Teams can be selected from: Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL), College Basketball (NCAA) and College Football (NCAA)
• News – Receive timely news feeds about anything and everyone in the world of sports.
• Calendar Alerts – Never forget game time again. MySI Mobile integrates with the calendar on your phone to make it easy to add game and sporting event reminders to your personal calendar.
• Photo Gallery – View the best photos of the week, from cheerleader photos to action shots from March Madness games, all chosen by the editors of SI.

The calendar alerts are the most intriguing feature to me. I will have to see how that works. So far I am unimpressed with the rest of this application. It seemed clunky and slow on my HTC S620, using both WiFi and EDGE. I maxed out my personalized home page without including all of the teams that I am interested in following. It may give faster and fuller access to information on the teams that I care about most, but I will need some convincing that I should fire up the MySI Mobile app rather than visit http://mobileapp.espn.go.com next time I want to know what is going on with "my" teams.

The MySI Mobile application is available as a free download here. If you are an i wireless customer, you will want to scroll down to the bottom of the page and use the appropriate generic CAB file for the version of Windows Mobile that you are running.

Free Tetris Clone as Addicting as the Original

Having tired of the Bubble Breaker and Solitaire games on my S620, I went looking for a new, fun, challenging free game a few months ago. I was pleased to find Kevtris. My college roommates hooked me on Tetris back in the day (on the original Nintendo game system, wasn't it?). Kevtris is a full-featured, fully developed, bug-free clone. It's been a while since I played Tetris, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I think it's even better than the original. In addition to three levels of difficulty, Kevtris 2.0 offers the following game variations:

• Classic (self-explanatory)
  
• Wacky Blocks ("non-traditional" Tetris shapes)
• Slider (when an arrow falls instead of a shape, it lets you "slide" blocks around)
• Wacky Slider (mix of Wacky Blocks and Slider)
• Custom Game (mix and match the other available options)

The game also tracks the untouchably high scores online if you allow it to. Perhaps one of the best features is the ability to pause your game, which allows you to play during any little bit of downtime that you have.

You can download Kevtris 2.0 to your computer at download.com or download the CAB file direct to your device here.

Handango Introduces "Free App Friday"

Beginning today, Handango is offering a free, premium mobile application every Friday (CST) on its website. Today's offering is mundu IM for Smartphone, which I reviewed in May of this year. Click here to get your free app.

More Free Games!

GameJump provides access to free, ad-supported mobile games and applications. My HTC S620 is not among the phone models supported, but there are plenty of other phone models sold by i wireless that are. Go to http://gjmp.tw from your mobile phone to start downloading games and having fun.

Listen to Streaming Music (Internet Radio) on Your i wireless Phone

This is my new favorite application! With Mundu Radio, you can listen to streaming music on your Symbian, Windows Mobile or Palm-based mobile device. According to Mundu, there are over 50,000 radio stations broadcasting on the internet. You can listen to any of these stations through Mundu Radio if they stream in MP3 format. I listened to a number of the 50 stations that come with Mundu Radio "out of the box" and soon discovered for myself what Mundu's FAQs would have told me: At GPRS speeds, you want to make sure that you are listening to stations streaming at 24 or 32 kbps or you will encounter breaks as the Mundu Radio client rebuffers the stream. Finding stations broadcasting at that bit-rate takes a bit of trial and error, but once you know which stations you have to choose from, listening to them is enjoyable enough. If you have a phone with Wi-Fi (like the HTC S620), you can listen to stations with higher bit-rates over a Wi-Fi connection. There were a few streams that I was unable to connect to, such as Sporting News Radio, but with over 50K stations to choose from, I can probably get my sports news elsewhere.

If you would like to try this application out for yourself, you can download it for free here.

Free Games

Hovr offers free ad-supported games for your phone. Unfortunately, my phone is unlisted, so I have not been able to try it out. If anyone has any reviews, please post here.

Freeware for the HTC S620

DashApps is a page that provides downloadable freeware for the Dash (S620). It is where I downloaded SKToolsLite from for my "phantom alarms" problem. I just downloaded SnoozeAlarm from there and will be trying it out next.

Google Maps Now Available for Windows Mobile Devices

Stop using that Java application on your Windows Mobile device. Google Maps is now available for Windows Mobile devices! Download it for free here (you have to download it to your computer first, then move the CAB file to your device.