I recently found out, while browsing various mobile phone news web sites that there had been another maintenance release made for Windows Mobile on my phone. The timing was just about perfect because I’d been working on getting everything organized and cleaned up anyway, and I was also in the “I am looking at cooked ROMs” stage of owning my particular handset, in order to get a more exciting or potentially more useful experience out of it.
It’s my understanding, by the way, that there are a huge number of cooked roms available for most Windows Mobile handsets, which is both nice and terrifying. I was interested in getting one that has some of the features of their newer and more recently updated handsets from HTC, such as the Peep twitter client, and maybe even some of the other nice things from the HD2 such as the Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster clients being built in. The terrifying part about this is that there are dozens, if not hundreds of ROMs for the various releases of the TouchPro2. (Seriously, there’s the unlocked European TP2, the AT&T Tilt2, the T-Mobile TP2, and the Verizon/Sprint CDMA TP2s, all of which have their little differences.)
It was much to my pleasure when I learned then, that Verizon Wireless has actually released a recent update to the TouchPro2. All of the information about it on the Internet has been pretty vague as to what actually happens when you install the update. So, I made the decision to keep cleaning up and archiving things into the Microsoft My Phone service (which is fantastic, by the way) and then last night I finally did the upgrade.
There are a lot of fantastic differences in the new version. For example, the home screen now shows a launcher for three icons, expandable to a grid of 9. These icons can be applications on the device, web site bookmarks, or contacts. The contacts thing is pretty cool, and you can get it to bring up a specific communication method or you can get it to show you their contact card. The People tab has also been updated, showing a grid with up to fifteen spots for various people that, just like on the home tab, you can either select between contact cards or specific communication methods. This is great if I know, for example, that I will never contact my coworker Roger any way other than by sending an e-mail to his school or work email address. I wouldn’t have to bother with the extra click involved. Additionally, the Mail tab in the new version of Sense displays messages in a larger format, and is more responsive to flipping through a pile of messages. The music tab also got a bit of an upgrade, and there are also options all over the place to start up a distinct “Camcorder” app which may have been there before, but it is nice to reduce the amount of clicks and swipes you might have to make in an effort to record video. Other little improvements, or just things that I’m noticing for the first time, include animated backgrounds, a way to preview the weather animations, along with an improved (more consistent) locking screen and action.
After the addition of home screen launcher icons, my favorite part of the new ROM, hands down, would have to be HTC Peep Twitter client. There are quite a few Twitter clients on Windows Mobile, and the simple truth is that most of them are pretty terrible. I was getting by before with PockeTwit, mainly because it was free, and it did a basic set of tasks fairly well. With Peep, it’s right there in the Sense UI, which along with the other enhancements in Sense, are making me very much wanting to continue using it full-time, as compared with my previous habit of switching interfaces on a very regular basis, between Sense, WinMo 6.5 “Titanium” and the classic WinMo 6 home screen.
Other than that, the updated ROM had a few teething troubles as it was installed and then as I tried to do a few things with it for the first time, and there are a few features it has (such as animated backgrounds) that I think will ultimately cause more problems and slowdowns than it’s worth, so I have opted not to use any of those (Even though they are very pretty, and impressive.) However, once those particular issues were sorted out, it seems to be that the new ROM is an improvement in a lot of ways. For example, streaming media, especially with the Slacker Personal Radio application seems to work far better than it had in the past. With the old ROM, it was a pretty frequent occurrence that a station in Slacker would play two songs, come across an ad, and then just stop, until I either switched stations (so I could hear another two songs) or restarted the application. Hopefully it stays working that way.
And, the last difference is mainly that I haven’t put all of my stuff back in. Right now I just have my primary gmail account hooked to it, so I can get alerts/calendars/contacts and my work e-mail (it’s the school account) and I haven’t yet bothered to hook up any of my other email accounts. Whether or not I will is really up in the air, as there isn’t a legitimate reason why I’d need access to all of them on-the-go. They’re nice, but I’m at my computer all of the time anyway. One other thing I’ve noticed is that there must be a new build of Opera included, as now my mobile banking web site displays properly and readably from the get-go.
So far, I have no new plans for ROM flashing, as this new updated one has solved any of the complaints I was having before. Indeed, lame as it sounds to say this, does somewhat make me that much more happy with the TouchPro2 for that much longer. (Not that I’ve ever been unhappy with it, just that I’ve been a bit fidgety and interested in trying out some different mobile platforms.)