I’ve been a long time Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) user having had various iPAQs and mobile devices over the years. I recently treated myself to a new HP iPAQ 614c Business Navigator in doing so I wanted to load some software and games on the device. I’ve built up a nice little library of the best (in my opinion) software available for Window Mobile.

There is a LOT of freeware out there for Windows Mobile, however you could spent months trying stuff out, installing, un-installing etc. So what I’ve done is collated what I consider to be the best software, utilities and games available. I’ve kept the list all freeware and opensource, enjoy…

Essential Windows Mobile Freeware

Special mention needs to go to Pocket PC Freewares, which is my main source for software.

You may recall some time ago that the nice people at Logitech sent me a beta preview of their new Squeezebox remote control. I was so chuffed I blogged about it. But now they’ve gone one better, and sent me a new base station unit and another remote. Again these are beta/preview devices (but they work perfectly). This is the new model replacing the old Squeezebox 3 and is called the Squeezebox Duet. As you can see they’ve removed the screen from the base unit and put a colour screen into the controller. The base unit connects wirelessly (or through a CAT5 cable) to the network and has both digital & stereo phono outputs on the back. Set-up was a doddle and it was up and running in no time. They seemed to have ironed out the bugs on the controller and browsing through your music is easy and with all the album art displayed it looks good too. The server behind it all – now called SqueezeCenter is much improved over the old Slimserver, it’s still in beta phase but I’ve not found any problems with it all.

For now I’m going to use this new one in the office room and keep the old Squeezebox 3 in the living room, the old unit has a screen on it, so it acts most of the time (when not playing music!) as very expensive clock, date & weather display. The core functionality of the two models, apart from the screen seems identical – the sound quality remains as good as it ever was.

Again I’m bowled over at the generosity of Logitech for sending these out. Thanks guys!

I’ve been a long time user of TomTom Navigator on my PDA, but I’ve been using my PDA less and less, in the end the only thing I’ve been using it for is TomTom. So I’ve done the logical thing and bought myself a standalone TomTom Go 720 T. One of the things that attracted me to the 720 is some of the “value add” features, such as iPod integration, FM transmitter and Bluetooth hands-free for the phone, all of which meant I could get rid of some of the gadgets and cables that litter my car.

Well this is where it kind of falls down. Don’t get me wrong the “core” Sat-Nav features on TomTom are excellent; I’ve never had any issue with these. But sadly the extra features they tout are where it’s really lacking (yes this is yet another of my “unhappy gadget” posts!):

• iPod integration – Don’t think they’ve completly thought this one through. The iPod plugs into the same hole as the TMC aerial, which means you can’t get any traffic info whilst using the iPod, not good. Secondly the iPod doesn’t charge while attached to the TomTom, and lastly the screens to control the iPod are too hard to access meaning lots of screen tapping while driving just to do something simple like skip tracks
• FM Transmitter – Too quiet, simple as that. Combined with the above iPod integration I had hopes that I could do away with at least one gadget in my car (the Griffin iTrip) But it’s not going to happen.
• Phone integration – I have a Windows Mobile 6 device as my phone (HP iPAQ 514) sadly TomTom can not use this device for a GPRS connection as TomTom only supports the older Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Network) mode of connection instead of the newer PAN (Personal Area Network). To be fair the blame probably lays more at Microsoft’s door for removing a feature still in common use. The reading and sending of text messages also doesn’t work with my phone.
• Hands Free – The hands-free feature still works (thankfully) with my phone – I’ve only used it a few times but the volume is very low, at both ends of the call, and I’ve had calls cut out on me for no reason. I’m in two minds whether to go back to my old (but reliable) Bluetooth headset.

None of the issues are major problems – but when added together it really detracts from the appeal of the device. Verdict: it’s a nice sat-nav device but pretty poor at everything else.

When Logitech emailed me saying I was invited to try their new beta for the SqueezeBox, I thought it’d just be another software download, I was very pleasantly surprised to find a actual piece of hardware was shipped to me. It’s their new “Jive” platform, basically it’s a glorified remote for the SqueezeBox. Actually thats a little unfair it’s more like a mini PDA with a colour screen and wireless. The clever thing is you can write your own mini applications to run on the device, in fact along with the device Logitech shipped me a book “Programming in Lua” (Lua is the scripting language supported by the device) to get started with.

I have to say how cool it is to receive something like this for free!

So the iPod Classic, I’ve had it a few weeks now and I can tell you; it’s far from “Classic”. Unless classic means a massive step backwards. Basically it’s riddled with bugs, so far I have found:

• Menu randomly resets to the system defaults, hmmm annoying as the defaults suck.
• Doesn’t sync playcounts back to iTunes, meaning I can’t submit what I’ve listened to, to last.fm. If it does sync, it gets it horribly wrong and thinks I’ve listened to one song 47 times or some similar crazyness.
• Can’t hide compilation artists from the main Artists list or the cover flow, a clear 100% regression from the previous generation of iPods, which all had this feature. God only knows why Apple removed this incredibly useful feature.
• Horrible screen saver that kicks in after a minute, which means you can’t take your iPod of your pocket to see what you listening too, without pressing a button (not good when driving)
• Cover flow sorts by artist not album, yeah that makes sense… at least give me the option.
• The menus are sluggish, and performance isn’t great moving around the user interface.

So all in all it’s a bit of stinker, I’m not the only one that’s unhappy, the Apple and iLounge forums are awash with complaints and bug reports (I’ve not even suffered the random crashes that many have had).

There is nothing here that couldn’t be fixed in a firmware update, Apple have released one already (1.0.0 -> 1.0.1) which was rushed out to fix the random crashes, I’m really hoping for another update and soon.

If I had know all of this before I impulsively bought the thing, it would have been a different matter. At least it looks nice…

The Freecom DVB-T is the worst gadget I’ve bought in a long time. It’s a USB Digital TV tuner, so you can watch Freeview etc. on your laptop. That sounds handy. No it’s arse. because it doesn’t work.

With the supplied aerial I get zero signal and a channel scan predictably resulted in no channels found. This surprised me as I live in an area with very good digital TV reception. I plugged it into the main rooftop aerial (not exactly “portable” but it was a test), re-scanned; this time it found some channels but couldn’t display any picture and all I got was some stuttering audio.
If this doesn’t work even through a rooftop aerial then what soddin’ good is it?? – None. Avoid this like the plague, this is toy product that basically doesn’t work, I’ve seen better engineering fall out of a Christmas cracker.

iTunes 7, not sure why I upgraded, nothing that exciting apart from the album art fetching feature.
Now I really wish I hadn’t – it crashed on me and I lost my entire library, got that back from a backup (once bitten, twice shy). Now it starts up, spends about 1 hour doing the gapless playback analysis bollocks again then crashes in a heap when I shut it down, meaning it goes through gapless shite again on next start and so on, ad infinitum. Don’t bother with version 7, at least 6 worked.

Update – luckily I backed up my iTunes library files prior to the upgrade; I’ve uninstalled 7 put 6.0.4 back on and copied over my backed up DB. It’s all working like a charm.

iTunes 7 is out and it supports gapless playback. The bad news is this only works on 5th generation iPods (see this Apple support article). Boooo, the chances of this being rolled out to older iPods, somewhere around zero I’d guess.

I never found an elegant solution for getting last.fm submissions from the iPod, but jscrob2 seems perfect. It’s a plugin for iTunes that submits anything you listen to in iTunes but also submits anything you played on the iPod when you sync it up.

Click here for the jscrob2 website

Update [14th June] – the above link is dead, but I found another site with the plugin download

SMS Toolkit is a Java based GUI for interacting with mobile phones. It’s main purpose is to send, receive and read SMS messages. It uses the SMSLib API so is compatible with most phones available assuming there is a means to connect them to the PC (Cable, Bluetooth, IrDA), but see this post at the SMSLib forums for details of tested phones. Summary of Features:

• View the status and information about your phone/device.
• Compose and send SMS messages
• Reading, deleting, forwarding and replying to SMS messages
• Command console for interacting with the phone directly via AT commands

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