Now that I’ve had my phone for a few weeks, I’ve found a few programs that I think are more or less indispensible for various reasons… I’ve also found a few more hacks worth posting. First off, the programs.
Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile 5 is currently in “beta” but I’ve been using it for a good while now and it absolutely blows Pocket IE out of the water. It supports multiple windows, full javascript support and actually does a pretty damn good job rendering fairly complex pages normally only accessible from a desktop. They give you a 45 day trial and after that it costs $29. Uninstalling and re-installing seems to reset your trial period, though.
SPB PocketPlus is probably one of the best “today” plugins I’ve found so far. First off, it doesn’t slow your screen switching to an absolute crawl so that’s a huge plus to start with. Second of all, the today plugin has customizable tabs so you can add all kinds of shortcuts to programs, functions, features and even memory and battery meters. Having a button on your today screen to soft reset your device is a heckuva plus too. I also like the battery meter it puts along the top edge of your screen. Out of the way, but easy to glance at to get a feel for battery life.
GSPlayer is by far one of the best media players for Windows Mobile. As far as I can tell, it works perfectly with WM5 seeing as how I haven’t run across any horrible bugs. It supports streaming mp3 & ogg/Vorbis via shoutcast, which is really nice if you have unlimited data. It also has a nifty function to turn off the screen and leave music playing since hitting the power button kills the music since that puts it in standby mode. It also has an equalizer if you feel like taking the time to tweak it (I didn’t… no presets loaded by default).
TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player) is a really awesome replacement for WindowsMedia 10. It supports actually making playlists on the device, unlike WMP10 and is just plain more customizable. Also, if you search hard enough you can find an AAC plugin for it that allows you to play/stream AAC audio, something that no other free media player for WM5 will do.
PHM Regedit is my personal favorite registry editor for PocketPC. Works great and takes up very little space.
Total Commander is an amazing file manager that includes zip support and works great for moving and copying files among many other features. Definitely worth a download.
PocketPutty is a really good freeware SSH client based on the desktop version of Putty. I used it once or twice just to test and it works great. I myself don’t have a whole LOT of use for it right now but if you need SSH access while on the go, this should do the trick.
Now for a couple more hacks worth noting. First off, IE’s cache is a ridiculous 12MB by default. I’m not really sure why you would want that much cache on a device with so little memory available. I have mine set @ 2MB (same as Opera’s) and it works fine. To do this, go to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\Cache\Content and change the “CacheLimit” entry to 2048 (2MB).
Increase your keyboard backlight timing by doing the following: Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Backlight and change the QKeyLedTimeout to something other than 10. Basically this is the same setting you can change in the control panel but doing it in the registry allows you to set it beyond 10 seconds (max the control panel allows).
Disable holding end key to enable Flight Mode: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\PhoneExtendFunction\CDMA and change FlightModeSwitchByPnHendKey to “0″.
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