Windows Mobile, maybe it doesn’t suck quite that much?

Controversial! I’ve had an ongoing conversation with Mike Love the proprieter of the finest Chinese language learning software known to mankind, Pleco. He’s a bit of a WM fanboy and as a developer it’s not hard to see why, it’s pretty hard to beat Microsoft’s dev environment. However as a user I’ve been pretty damn unhappy with WM. I’ve loved the hackability, the fact it’s a real computer OS rather than an Apple appliance, but sluggish, shit old UI, requirement for a stylus just to switch between applications etc etc. Nasty.

So an upgrade to an android handset is a foregone conclusion to me, hopefully shifting Pleco to running on my iPod when they release that later this year. With that sort of upgrade looming I felt I didn’t have anything to lose. So I upgraded my previously hacked HTC Touch HD rom to a few different cooked varieties including WM 6.5. Well 6.5 was a farce, it has a sort of finger-friendly front menu thing but it’s entirely based around Microsoft’s shit software (browser etc) and there’s no easy way to edit it yourself. It’s basically lightyears behind HTC’s TouchFlo 3D… and as for making it all more finger friendly, MS basically hacked some UI elements to be larger so now you’ve got frankenstein offspring of a 90s UI and some sort of weird special-needs ‘accessibility’ graft-on. It was deeply horrible.

Then I tried the latest and greatest 6.1 cooked ROM from a guy called Dutty who has been doing this stuff for quite some time. It’s got all the updated HTC stuff (amazing how much there is just to make WM usable) from unreleased HTC handset models, third party apps and lots of graphics, performance and other changes. Holy cow batman it’s really goddamn good. I mean it’s still WM so it still needs a fucking stylus just to view an SMS, but combined with the 4.0 release of TouchPal soft keyboard (coming to Android incidentally) and the latest version fo Pleco – it’s actually pretty damn cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissing off to Android as soon as a decent handset appears (with better than 320×480 resolution), but it’s amazing what can be done when you can bust your phone wide open and enthusiasts cook up their entire OS installations.