Windows Mobile software & hacking news (11/17/2007) & tips

Menneisyys · 11-18-07, 11:22 AM

1. There is a brand new HTC CAB (program) collection HERE. It’s, to my knowledge, the largest and most up-to-date collection of HTC’s own programs, ready to be installed on any WM5+ phone. It’s really worth reading the descriptions of the CAB’s to quickly find out what these small utilities really do. It’s REALLY worth – some of these apps are excellent; for example, HTC Equalizer reviewed HERE and HTC Streaming Media reviewed HERE. There are tons of other, useful utilities in there – do check them out!

2. There is a new music player at works, Lumen. Also see THIS MoDaCo thread.

It, right now, is totally useless and nothing really more than some screenshots - it's unable to play anything, as can also be seen HERE.

As the player is written using the, for multimedia / gaming, sloooooooow Compact Framework 2 (CF2), I don’t think you can expect it to be fast at playing back anything, unless it calls native code. All in all, I don’t think you should bother.

3. There are several threads on adding SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) support for models that, officially (not even via official ROM upgrades), don’t support this technology. The latest of them is HERE. Note that there are a LOT of (sometimes contradicting) reports of it NOT working on some models – that is, you WILL want to backup your device before installing the patch. I’ll also report more on it as soon as I receive my brand new 6 GB microSDHC card.

4. Several people use the built-in Pictures & Videos program (note that its previous, pre-WM5, as can also be seen in THIS pretty much important article, name was Pictures) to quickly watch their pictures. (Not that it is of any good – there are MUCH faster, MUCH better image viewer apps out there; the brand new PQV 4.0, Resco and Spb Imageer are the three most important & recommended ones, as has also been explained in the Image Viewer & Editor Bible. Note that Glass Lantern has just gone out of business; therefore, I no longer recommend their PocketLoupe any more, no matter how excellent it was. RIP Glass Lantern, yours was a great product!

Now, MoDaCo forum member mandt has published a quick tip on how you can make Pictures & Videos use a default directory different from \My Documents. If you use these LNK files (you can safely edit them to point to any directory), you can greatly speed up the startup and the initial directory lookup of your pictures.

5. Fring, the most revolutionary, multiplatform, real VoIP client (see THIS article for more info), didn’t use to work on the Qualcomm-based HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt), the current flagship model of HTC – the speech became complete garbage, independent of the transfer speed (not that Fring were as dependent on the speed as Skype – actually, it’s perfectly usable over EDGE connections and, if only one party speaks, even over GPRS). The current version, however, fixes this problem. That is, you can safely download the new version into the Kaiser. To do this, the easiest is navigating to fring mobile voip - make free mobile calls and IM to other fringsters, Skype, Google Talk, MSN, SIP & Twitter contacts from your handset and just click the download link.