Recently my once exciting M600 (HTC Prophet) has been giving me jip and the handicaps of Winblows Mobile 5 have been driving me insane, and so I decided to see what could be done. Of course, it turns out that there is an entire army of autistic geniuses out on the net tackling this problem for us. So, I’m now running a custom ROM, based on WM6, but with all of the irritations of the old ROM attenuated. And it looks nice too.

One of the most brain dead aspects of WM5 was the difficulty of listing and killing running programs. Microsoft clearly don’t want you stopping things once you’ve started them, otherwise they’d have provided something other than the memory app for performing this simple task. This means that after checking your email, phoning a few friends, sending a text, and generally using the phone as it’s supposed to be used, you’re out of memory and the bloody camera stops working. But now there’s an omnipresent widget that lists all running apps with a big red cross next to them. Wow, what a power-tool…

So now I have an unlocked phone which works, feels nice to use (even with the fingers), has a newly updated radio ROM and will placate me until I get an OpenMoko or an N800.

Thank you, army of autistic geniuses! You’re my hero!