Expert: Mike Riley

As readers of my blog know, I have been a Windows Mobile user since the early days of Windows CE 1.0. As a result of that long history, I maintained a nervous habit on the platform until the release of Windows Mobile 5, that being playing whack-a-mole with my running applications. Due to an early Microsoft design decision, most Windows Mobile applications do not inherently have an exit application function. Microsoft's argument for this is to minimize the load time for applications as well as its faith in the Windows Mobile memory manager, which is supposed to be smart about when to shut down unused and/or memory constraining applications. Unfortunately, this memory manager never worked effectively enough for my power user demands and consequently, I would instinctively navigate to the Settings -> System -> Memory -> Running Programs tab and manually zap any unnecessary program (which typically meant all but the one I was working in) from the list. With the advent of WM5, the memory management was finally useful enough to allow managing memory. Still, I have an ongoing tendency to exit any program that offers that option in said application's menu.

In addition to memory, I have also been a heavy user of storage cards of all shapes and sizes. Regardless of its physical dimensions, the flash memory associated with these cards all work on the same principle and therefore can be managed the same way. The most important practice I keep with all my critical memory cards is to plug them into a USB card reader on my computer and perform a full backup of the card to my computer once a week. While I could certainly purchase a native Windows Mobile application that can perform such backups, I find the computer copy much faster over USB 2.0 card readers and more useful since no compression is applied. This makes finding files and navigating folders a breeze.

Lastly, I use a memory and storage gauge utility bundled with my favorite launch manager application, iLauncher, and place these on my main screen so I can see my memory and storage resources in the flick of an eye. And when all else fails, a warm reset often takes care of my most egregious resource consuming applications like big adventure games.

Features I would like to see added to Windows Mobile - It's Time for a Change!

Let me preface the following blog entry by saying I am not an embedded systems hardware designer. I occasionally write programs for the Windows Mobile platform, though mostly using high-level languages and frameworks. With that disclaimer out of the way, I can say with all honesty that I'm so glad the iPhone has been such a success for Apple. Microsoft badly needed serious competition to reset the playing field. Because the iPhone does so many things well on so many levels, it's obvious that Microsoft has to scrap their existing pre-iPhone era platform for something that is a lot thinner, feature-rich and considerably more stable than today's Windows Mobile platform. Here are a few targets that the next major release of the Windows Mobile OS and target devices need to achieve to remain relevant in the post-iPhone world:

1. Better interface - buried icons, nested menus and soft keyboards are so last decade. The time has come for a hardware accelerated, predictive, gesture-based user interface that knows exactly what its owner wants, even before the owner does.

2. Thin, lightweight design - anything thicker than 1.5 cm just won't be marketable to most mobile enthusiasts anymore. The next Windows Mobile platform has to be packaged in a device more powerful and even thinner than an iPhone.

3. Longer battery life - Strive for a mobile device that can sustain a full working day's worth of screen use without a recharge.

4. Built-in radios - the HTC Advantage provided a glimpse of what's possible with A2DP Bluetooth, SiRF3 GPS, 802.11 b/g WiFi and Quad-Band, 3G-ready mobile radios contained in the same device. The next step is to merge these radios into a single low-power chip that will easily cut the size and weight of the Advantage in half.

5. Adequate backward compatibility - with nearly a decade of software amassed for the Windows Mobile platform, software compatibility is obviously a requirement. However, given the power of today's mobile architectures, don't sacrifice serious forward propelling innovations for 100% compatibility. I would rather see Microsoft virtualize the existing Windows Mobile OS inside whatever replacement they need to conjure up rather than staying tied to the past.

The time has come for Microsoft to radically depart from its aging Windows CE roots, much the way Windows NT was the radical OS that broke the rules of DOS to form the basis of Microsoft's operating system platform for its server, XP and Vista line. The iPhone should provide Microsoft's engineers with rabid enthusiasm to outdo their competition. Let's get ready to rumble!

After prodding my iPAQ and HTC Advantage for a while, looking for one of the many tweaks I use every time I power on the screen, the answer stared me straight in the face. SBSH's iLauncher is one tweak/utility I simply can't live without. I've become so used to its flexible features that any other Windows Mobile device lacking this exquisite application simply feels naked and clunky, like sewing with chopsticks.

The feature that most enamors me about iLauncher is its ability to re-skin nearly every aspect of the Windows Mobile desktop, from the icon layout and styles to the way I prefer to organize my applications. About the only thing that iLauncher doesn't do (yet) is allow me to alter the Windows main menu, replacing the Windows Start menu logo/branding with an icon of my own. Nevertheless, the combination of iLauncher coupled with imaginative wallpapers can transform any Windows Mobile device into a brand new look that will have friends and co-workers wondering what new gadget you acquired.

SBSH features several of their own theme creations on their site, and numerous individuals have concocted convincing imitations of other platforms, from iPhone skins to TRS-80 homages. I created my own Fedora 7 iLauncher theme to impress my Linux pals, several of which replied in amazement when they first saw it, asking how I was able to install a popular desktop Linux distribution onto my iPaq.

It wasn't until they saw the Windows logo give away the illusion that they realized the facade. iLauncher allows me to swap between look and feel layouts depending on my application orientation. If I'm in a gaming mood, I flash the desktop with a first person shooter theme peppered with all my favorite Windows Mobile game icons for quick access. Getting down to work, I re-flash a programmer theme replete with code sprawl in the background. All told, the iLauncher is such an integral part of my mobile experience that its literally the first utility/tweak I install on any new Windows Mobile device I acquire.

I have been a Windows Mobile user since the days of Windows CE 1.0 and have used WinCE-based devices too numerous to list. I have eagerly anticipated the release of each successive version of the operating system, seeing it evolve from a mere Palm knock-off with a confusing Windows-like GUI tacked on to a refined always-on Internet-connected mobile business organizer and occasional recreational device that the Windows Mobile 6 has become.

As a consequence of this evolution, I believe I currently own the most advanced Windows Mobile device that has culminated in this trajectory. The HTC Advantage, aka HTC 7500+, aka Athena, represents the best Windows Mobile 6 Professional hardware platform on the market today, though not without its problems.

The HTC 'Advantage'
The advantages of this device are numerous. The first and most striking feature anyone who sees it notices the large, bright, high-resolution screen, typically attached to the removable magnetic keyboard that also serves as the screen's cover when not in use. The many I/O ports for USB and even external monitor output are rare to see on a Windows Mobile device. The built-in GPS is a cool hidden feature that works with the majority of GPS-enabled Windows Mobile applications, including Windows Live Search and Google Maps. The copious system RAM and 8GB storage drive offer plenty of space for applications, music, videos, photos and the like. The high resolution camera captures both still and moving pictures.

The HTC 'Disadvantage'
While the device sports the very latest in mobile technology, it comes at a cost both in terms of fiscal expense and annoying shortcomings. One could successfully argue that a price conscious mobile enthusiast could buy 2 Asus eee PC's for the price of a single HTC. The Advantage is also bulky, negating any possibility of calling it a 'pocket' PC. Using all the bells and whistle 3G, WiFi and GPS radios dramatcially reduce the device's already weak battery life due to the juice required to simply keep the screen on and bright enough to see in daylight. But perhaps the most annoying problem I've encountered are the frequent lock-ups. Granted, I'm a Windows Mobile power user and I've taken advantage of the gobs of memory and storage the Advantage has to offer, but even before loading up these applications, the device occasionally locks up during synchronizations, network file transfers and worst of all, incoming phone calls. I've been waiting for a while for a ROM update to fix these numerous problems plaguing the device with little hope that they'll come soon, if at all.

The Final Word
Even with the host of negative issues, the HTC is still my top Windows Mobile device of choice and its the leading example of cutting edge mobile technology available today. If the talented engineers at HTC can take the size, battery life and sexy design of the Apple iPhone and retain all the high-end features at a reasonable price that the Advantage currently delivers, HTC will have a killer product that will appeal to mobile enthusiasts beyond those wealthy (or rabid) enough to afford one today.

I didn't have to think very long and hard about which applications are the coolest ones available on the Windows Mobile platform today. There's no question in my mind that The Core Portable Media Player, known as TCPMP for short, is the coolest must-have Windows Mobile application available today. This free media player gem is capable of playing back media formats that even commercial WM players cannot, most notable Flash video (.flv) files which are so heavily promoted these days, especially on video aggregation sites like YouTube. I use TCPMP as my primary Windows Mobile media player, and use it every day. One really great time saving feature I've employed with TCPMP is its ability to playback audio at faster rates. This comes in handy when trying to catch up on a backlog of podcasts. Unfortunately, the pitch is affected with this speed increase but I've acclimated to the chipmunk audio and have even trained my ears to discern spoken words sped up to 200% the original playback speed.

The second half of this cool application scenario is an RSS reader called NewsBreak that also supports efficient download of RSS enclosures, predominantly for podcast audio and video files. While NewsBreak does a fine job of retrieving RSS feeds and their attachments, I do wish I could instruct NewsBreak to automatically move downloaded files from its own file store to preferred folders depending on the podcast name. Instead, I currently must manually 'Save As...' for each downloaded file, then remember to delete the original copy lest I run out of storage space. I then have to manually reconstruct a new playlist to incorporate the newly moved files. It's a pain, but worth the strain compared to the old way of manually copying files from a RSS reader on my PC and reconstructing playlists.

Combined, these two programs have literally kept me entertained and informed for weeks thereby not only qualifying as two of the coolest and useful Windows Mobile applications but also two of the most used as well.