I’ve now had my Windows Mobile phone (HTC TyTn on T-Mobile) for just over a year now and I still love it. Getting my emails done on the train in the morning, browsing the web with 3G and WIFI speed and getting in a quick game of solitaire all makes life worthwhile.
I’ve also been playing about for a little while with software to run on it and thought I’d blog about some of the better bits-n-peices I’ve tracked down.
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High quality video on the move
One of the first things I got setup was a high quality video player to go with my brand new 2GB micro-SD card. I tried a few applications and finally settled on TCPMP. Unfortunatley it looks like the open source project is discontinued with a soon-to-be-released commercial version but there’s still some download links on the project page (http://picard.exceed.hu/tcpmp/test/).
When setting up TCPMP it’s also worth installing some of the plugins - the one I went for primarily was for full frame MPEG support (FFMPEG Codec) and this gives some great results.
At this point you can just copy AVI files directly to your mobile and play them but you’ll start to notice some lagging and stuttering if your files are big. To solve this I pre-format all of my video files with the SOMPY converter. SOMPY also produce a mobile media player but I’ve not played with it even though it looks pretty good.
Building Rails sites with PUTTY mobile
At first, being able to sort out all of my work emails while commuting was great and was saving me about an hour a day when I got to the office but this all seemed a bit simple and I wanted to do more. At around the same time that I started looking into Rails development I stumbled on a mobile version of PUTTY (the SSH client) - http://www.pocketputty.net/.
This little app lets you connect to your Unix server using your data connection (or WIFI) and do everything you’d normally do with SSH!
Nostalgic game-play with a GameBoy emulator
One thing that did disapoint me with the Windows Mobile devices was the lack of games available and I was soon bored with Solitaire and Bubble-Breaker. This led me to my next discovery - PocketGNUBoy! This is a Windows Mobile GameBoy / GameBoy Color emulator that lets you play almost any ROMs right on your phone.
After a bit more digging I found versions (or similar emulators) that run on Symbian devices as well as emulators for a whole range of different “old school” consoles.
Now, there’s two problems with this approach to mobile gaming:
- A download for PocketGNUBoy is quite difficult to track down. I found that version 1.2.1 is the latest but incredibly difficult to find so I settled for version 1.2.0 and it seems to work fine.
- It’s illegal to share, download or distribute ROMs that are copyrighted or ESA protected - this means that you’ll have to limit your game playing to home-brew games unless you want to risk downloading other ROMs.
Getting that “iPhone” feeling
If, like me, you’ve had your phone for a while and you’re tied into an awful 18 month contract then you’ll probably be envious of all these folk getting kitted out with the new iPhones. Don’t let them win! You too can get your Windows Mobile device working like an iPhone.
iFonz is an application that simulates the main menus of the iPhone interface and and is fully customisable with skins, buttons, backgrounds and links. If your device is a little old you’ll notice iFonz being a bit of a memory hog but it works pretty well and has that visual wow-factor you’ll be after.
To complement your iPhone menu you’ll also want something to handle phone locking with that cool slide mechanism to unlock - this is where you want to try out S2U2 (Slide 2 unlock v2). This app, again with fully customisable options, works even better than iFonz and looks great while your phone is idle. There are, however, a couple of problems with S2U2:
- Answering a call with the slide mechanism is a nightmare and you’ll end up going insane and just calling people back yourself.
- There’s a tiny scrolling advert / credit at the bottom of the screen that you can’t remove.
Finally you’ll want something to handle your address book and contacts with the same iPhone look. This is where iContact comes in. It has the cool sliding motion (with tweens) and a great interactive keyboard that makes it an essential for an iPhone-wannabe Windows Mobile device.
Rockin’ out
Finally, we come to the recent discovery of Guitar Hero 3 for Mobile! I’ve only played the demo so far and love it - the graphics are great (and quick) and the audio is better than you’d expect. The free demo lets you play the first third of Black Magic Woman by Santana with 3 different difficulty levels. You can upgrade to the full version for $9.99 and this gets you 15 tracks and 3 new tracks every month.