It has been a little over a month since I flashed Windows Mobile 6.5 on my HTC Diamond. I tought it would be a nice idea to review how it has been since then.

Why do it?

Anyone who had another Windows Mobile device before will know how much bloated and unstable the Diamond’s original ROM is. Of course, TouchFlo is great and the applications HTC included are incredibly nice, but it’s no excuse for the horribly slow interface (even the Programs menu!) and the terrible stability. Let’s face it: the Diamond’s original ROM sucks, big time.

Then came along a pretty interesting replacement: Windows Mobile 6.5. Of course, it’s not the official version, but the cooks prepared us pretty awesome ROMs to put in our Diamonds. For those whose carriers never publish the ROM upgrades everyone else already released (ahem, Rogers), these homebrew upgrades are more than welcome.

Initial impressions

Past the initial glee I had with the slightly revamped interface, I was originally deceived by 6.5. To me, it was only Windows Mobile 6.1 with TouchFlo and a totally impractical honeycomb menu. There is honestly nothing new besides the looks and the scrolling and I was honestly disappointed. The honeycomb Start menu is a great idea that has been botched by the developers. They still didn’t add any form of icon management. This means you still have to resort to using the stupid File Explorer to categorize your applications. On top of that, icons aren’t even sorted by name anymore and there is absolutely no “Sort” option except for the cheesy “Bring to top” option when you press-and-hold an icon. C’mon Microsoft!

And finally

After a month, however, I would never go back to a stock ROM. Stability is impressive compared to what I had and the finger scrolling of Windows Mobile 6.5 is much better than HTC’s TouchFlo. The device is much more responsive and doesn’t hang for no reason (at least not often, but hey! it’s WinMo!) which is a really good thing since rebooting it is slower than with Windows Vista.

I would recommend BsB 6.5 to anyone wishing to get rid of the stock ROM. This is the one I flashed and I absolutely love it! Thumbs up to its developers!

A little annoying feature of Opera Mobile for devices equiped with a G-Sensor is the automatic rotation. For those who love to lie and browse, here is a small fix from XDA-Developers that will disable that feature.

Download (.cab file)

I finally got tired enough of the shitty Diamond ROM to flash it as someone suggested in the comments of my strong-worded article about why I hate Windows Mobile. Keeping in mind Rogers will never ever bother releasing a ROM upgrade, I decided to head back to XDA-Developers and find a 6.5 ROM that suits me.

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It has truely been a while since I last posted an update on GetGecko.org. Actually, there is work being done on the project, but I must admit I’m a very busy guy, so you should not expect a lot of movement from my part. Wanna know why? Keep reading.

• I gotta get a job, seriously. I devote a lot of my time to my resume and webpage in order to present an overkill resume to my future employer. I know what I want, and I’m gonna get it. In that fashion, a new webpage will be at Nicolasbouliane.com with, in summary, everything that would make a potential new boss go “woah”. It’s a lot of work and most of it is being done on Linux, which means I’m often too lazy to reboot to Vista when I’m done.
• I’m back to Linux. I’d say this one is the main reason for the lack of effort towards Gecko. As much as I love to work on it and code all night long, I just can’t live with Windows when a better, faster and more stable Linux install is available. I just love Ubuntu and all my music, bookmarks and pictures are stored on my ext3 partition and it will stay this way.
• I got tons of stuff to try! Working on Gecko is fun, but I also love to try new things in my free time. When I’m not learning a new programming language, I’m flashing my Diamond’s ROM. The list of stuff to do is getting longer and longer. I gotta install a Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM on my phone, rebuild a new website, sort my photo collection, sort my music, setup this and that and keep up with my Google Reader feeds.
• Aside from tech-related pastimes, I also have a life. I have a wonderful girlfriend, the best friends in the world, a family and pets to live with and I only turn my computer on when I don’t have anything else to do. I don’t spend all that much time home, and it’s perfect this way.

I’m really sorry if Gecko is not getting as much attention as it should and I honestly want this project to prevail, but I got a lot of stuff to do in real life and Gecko cannot always get the priority. Thanks for your comprehension!

I know this is not the kind of article that should come from a Windows Mobile developer, but today I’m writing about something that I’m constantly angry about: Windows Mobile.

I’ve been using Windows Mobile for two years now. I’ve had three different devices, one of them I absolutely hate, developed applications with each of them and I now work on a software repository project for the platform. In other words: I know what I’m dealing with.

The main reason why I hate Windows Mobile is because it just doesn’t work. I used to say Windows Mobile allows you to do about everything from browsing the web to editing pictures with something close to a mobile Photoshop, but when you look at it, it does nothing right. Calendar, contacts and tasks applications are a pain in the ass to use as their tiny controls make on-the-fly appointment or contact creation nearly impossible. Windows Media has a mediocre support for common formats and often stops seeing the storage card. Text messaging support is just as bad. Internet Explorer mobile is slow and outdated when you compare it with the competition. Thankfully, HTC started to include Opera as an alternative on their devices, but the software hardly launches in under a minute and is riddled with bugs. On top of that, many of these applications have the tendency to bug at random especially on HTC’s most recent devices. So far my Diamond crashed while adding a contact, calling someone, browsing the web and many, many more reasons. Sure, it does cool things, but nothing other smartphones can’t do

Using Windows Mobile on the go is rarely a fun thing. Turning off Wi-Fi or bluetooth, surprisingly enough, cannot be done by clicking the respective icons in the notification area. Scanning for a wireless network requires a trip to the settings panel and even then the list of available networks will not refresh itself. Things as simple as changing the ringtone or adding new applications are overly complicated and require way too many steps. Such things as the latest .Net Compact Framework should not even be required in the first place. Mobile phones should not require such things to be installed to run applications developed with official tools. For some reason there is a Windows Update tool there, but I’ve never seen it in action, no matter how useful it would have been in some situations.

Many people cope with these problems because they want to be able to multitask on their devices. Microsoft had a huge opportunity to absolutely nail this feature, but they botched it and left it unchanged since then. The X button only minimizes applications, but there is no way to switch between those applications like on desktop operating systems (or like with the Pre’s brilliant cards system). How can a beginner figure out he has to go in Start>Settings>System>Memory>Running applications to free up some memory? I can only wonder why this kind of thing made it to 2009.

What you have left is customization. Windows Mobile is a really good platform for those who enjoy hacking their devices. Everything can be customized with some knowledge and that must be the only reason I’m still using it. After so many years, all you can say about Windows Mobile is “well… I can customize it. It crashes when I add a contact, but I can customize it”.

[UPDATE 07/01/2009: Windows Mobile 6.5, while being a really small update to 6.1, added finger scrolling, which is a nice addition, while not bringing anything noticeable otherwise.]

I stopped coding for good.