Samsung Instinct Phone by Sprint

I've taken to writing software for my new cell phone - the Samsung Instinct. This is the first full touchscreen phone I've ever had. Features include voice navigation, music player, web browser, TV, Live Search (a great feature) and news, weather, sports, among other things. Plus you get all the usual stuff - calendar, alarm, and text messaging. It also includes picture mail and voice messaging on the phone - you don't have to "call" yourself to get your messages, they are stored right there on your phone.

You can find lots of resources on the web about this phone. Here's a list of the places I frequent:

• BuzzAboutWireless.com - this is a Sprint site for all their phones, but has a nice area for the Instinct
• Instinct-Software.com - a software store for the Instinct
• My-Instinct-Was-Right.com - my blog site about the Instinct phone
• Instinct-Samsung.com - one of the largest forums dedicated to the Instinct

Instinct-Software.com

Instinct-Software.com is a collaboration of a group of developers for Instinct software. We started work on the Instinct-Software.com site on Oct 7, 2008 - by Oct 28, 2008, we took the site live and made announcements that it was ready for use. Since then it's just been a deluge of visitors, downloads, and continued development.

In the first two months we've had over 30,000 downloads of free and paid applications and site traffic has grown to over 1000 visits per day with an average number of pages viewed of 5.6 - and utilizing over 1GB of bandwidth per day. If you have a Samsung Instinct, you owe it to yourself to check out our site.

In a similar vein, there are many new touchscreen phones entering the market - the Samsung Behold from tMobile comes to mind. This phone looks very similar to the Instinct and I am looking for someone who owns one that would be interested in doing some testing of our apps - and you can keep a copy for free of course. If you have one of these phones and are interested in being a guinea pig, please contact me (link at bottom of page). If you live in the DFW area, that's even better.

Card Counters

Back about 9 years ago, I wrote a little program to emulate what I used to do while playing Spades on-line - that being to track the cards already played with a pencil and paper. But I got tired of having all those scraps of paper lying around - tired of finding a piece of paper big enough to write on - and tired of finding my pencil - so I wrote my first card counter program MCC (Mikro's Card Counter).

One day I got an e-mail from a guy asking if I had a Pinochle counter. I had heard of Pinochle, but had never attempted to play it, but with a little help from him to figure out what cards are used in Pinochle, then add in the differences of Single Deck and Double Deck Pinochle - and now we have two more counter programs available.

Recently, another contact asked for a double deck counter for use with Canasta, so I modified the program to handle that as well. You can read more about my card counters, see some screen shots, and find out how to buy them on my Card Counters page.