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You can use this freeware tool, there are a few other freeware tools, or use SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 - a REALLY great UI, easy, big buttons, and slick enough it makes my iPhone toting friends go "whoa". HIGHLY recommended. I plan on getting the new HTC Touch Pro 2 (my i760 has a LOT of battle scars), and TF3D will be gone - it will be Mobile Shell 3.5 instead.

You jest, but it's a big issue. It's got no lock-in like Android and iPhone UI, MS don't gimp your phone if you try and unlock it (and nor do the carriers) and there are plenty of useful (read: Not involving boobs, fart noises, or hideous bright colours) and mature applications for the platform from several websites listed on Google search.

The UI reponse and stability issues are really all that anyone who owned a WinMobile phone after version 5 complained about.

I call bullshit. The so-called "sad dearth" of free software on the Pocket PC includes a vast amount of free software than will never run on the iPhone. And there's an enormous market of commercial software for the Pocket PC. The iPhone doesn't even have a GPS, so it's useless for running apps like TomTom Navigator (which is the reason I got my iPAQ phone), even if it was theoretically possible for TomTom to support Apple's closed platform.

-Don

Some free software on the PocketPC: apache, vim, X11 server, kaffe, gcc, openssh http://www.wince-devel.org/ http://ppc.palmopensource.com/ http://www.freewareppc.com/ http://lifehacker.com/software/pocket-pc/11-killer-freebies-for-your-pocket-pc-209413.php http://www.tuxtops.com/?q=node/188

Except without the tactile feedback buttons!

Really, PocketNES can bind to hardware buttons... and it was released in 2002
http://www.freewareppc.com/utilities/pocketnes.sht ml

You should check again, specifically for the "thriving" part.

commercial software: Handago Smartphone.net
free software: FreewarePPC Freeware Palm

There are thousands of third-party downloadable applications for PPCs, Smartphones, Palm OS devices, Series 60 devices, etc., etc. Anyone can download an SDK and make their own apps with access to a suite of communication, sound, storage, and animation APIs.
Number of third-party downloadable applications for the iPhone that aren't web applications: zero.

Phone apps look like 1992's ass.

Most phone application developers do not consider "look pretty" a huge priority.

Usually the phones are crippled in some way, so that is not true.

What the fuck are you talking about? My Samsung Blackjack runs any application I throw at it. The default WM Smartphone configuration only runs signed programs: to fix this problem you can either add your own certificate (a matter of going to a URL with the certificate and answering Yes to a few promprts) or plugging in the device and running a program that disables all application locks.
Pocket PC and Palm OS devices do not have signature requirements that I'm aware of.

The iPhone does not have the ability to run arbitrary programs natively at all. Just web apps.

Can I run a real Web browser? No.

Series 60 phones often ship with Opera. Opera & a port of Mozilla called Minimo is available for Windows Mobile.

The phones you're talking about are pocket calculators with phones in them

Every smartphone I have ever used has used some sort of ARM CPU, recent ones often around 400MHz. Compare this to the 620MHz iPhone ARM CPU (WebKit needs all that power to render HTML...)

The iPhone is an iPod with a phone AND a Web 2.0 browser in it. People really like it.

I'm sure people really like it if they want to use Web 2.0 applications and listen to music. But what if they want to do something that isn't possible with the included software and isn't implementable in the iPhone's JavaScript environment?
Last I checked, there were no APIs acessible from JavaScript on the iPhone that allowed access to just about anything. No Bluetooth (so no GPS), no sound, no fancy graphics, no file access -- nothing interesting.

There are other phones that play music and do a better job of surfing the internet for cheaper: often cheap enough that you could still buy an iPod nano if you wanted.

The apps that regular people run are MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, and they want to run the whole app, not just see some snippets of text out of each page with no formatting. So for most users the iPhone is a better application platform than other phones.

Those applications run just as well on other mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile, for those who like to use the full version. Have you not used mobile applications recently? WEP is dead and pages are now written with XHTML. In fact, with stylesheets, the same HTML can be designed for mobile and normal-sized devices.... and even after the iPhone's widely touted support for full-sized webpages, there are lots of people talking about how they can adapt their app to use the iPhone. Hmm....

For those who don't have the luxury of being in an iPhone-friendly wifi environment, not loading advertisements and (relatively) high-res GUI elements and logos can shave a noticeable amount of time off the loading time: on my 3G device, PayPal's mobile site takes 2 seconds to load. The full site takes almost 10 and uses 122k.

Without downloadable app support, you can't download games for your phone -- you're stuck with web apps. A

http://www.freewareppc.com/games/nethack.shtml

You could provide a PDA with an iPod-like interface.

I concede that this is a more bloated solution, and likely more unstable than the streamlined iPod. But I'd expect the interface could be fine-tuned even more conveniently than the iPod's click wheel.

Well, the best use (or at least the one I enjoy most) I've found for my iPaq is to load it up w/a couple of emulators for games :)

You definately want to grab pocketnester. Then you can play any NES game that you want :)

Also, check out MAME CE3. Unfortunately it was written w/an older version of MAME, so a lot of the ROMs I have tried didn't work :( But you can play Galaga all day to your heart's content :)

No matter where I went in Tokyo, I knew that if I could find a subway station I could find my way back to Nishi-Magome station, which was walking distance from where I was staying.

Check out Metro. There's also a Pocket PC Version.

- Find/Remove bad uninstall info
- Find/Remove not valid shortcuts
- Find/Remove temporary and junk files
- Find/Remove PocketIE cache files
- Registry clean

(Shudders) Yeah, registry - now that's innovation!

Why buy an iPod when you can buy a PocketPC, equip it with as much memory as you want (it's cheap these days), and do infinitely more things with it beyond just listening to mp3's, such as watch movies or play games?