Top 10 tweaks and apps for Windows Mobile

This piece of freeware is an absolute must-have if you use your Windows Mobile 6 device for listening music. A common problem of ear plugs and built-in speakers is that they can't manage to produce the full audio spectrum which results in the 'shouldn't there be a bass line in this song'-syndrome. The SRS WOW HD software enhances your audio to make it sound best through the speaker or ear plugs. It doesn't magically give you a full and rich bass but it does make sure you can actually hear it. You can slide some faders to set it up for your personal needs. Trial and error, but it really makes a hell of a difference!

For watching movies, clips or recorded TV on your Windows Mobile phone TCPMP is the best video player out there. With a range of downloadable codecs (DivX, XviD, MPEG2) and smart technologies it gives you the best and smoothest video playback. Even with all the fury about the HTC video drivers (or the absence of them) you can easily watch a full movie without any frame skips. 

The browser war continues. Only on a different battle ground: the mobile phone. Microsoft will update their Pocket Internet Explorer this year with IE6 technology and mobile surfers can't wait for the Skyfire browser to be released. But till then Opera Mobile 9.5 is the most suitable mobile browser for Windows Mobile. Though still in Beta release, it offers a great internet experience with easy tap-to-zoom functions, Javascript and embedded Flash support. You can find a copy of the Beta on the XDA developers forum. The video below gives a quick tour through the browser.

A lot of the time you might have your Windows Mobile phone connected to your PC over the USB sync cable or have it docked in a cradle to charge and synchronise. MyMobiler is an application that needs to be installed on both your computer and your phone and lets you control your phone from your computer. As soon as you connect your phone you get a live screenshot of your phone on you computer display. You can use your computer mouse (both buttons and even the scroll wheel) and your computer keyboard to control your phone in this live screenshot. You can even setup MyMobiler to use your phone as a secondary display, so that if you move your mouse cursor to the border of your computer display the cursor continues to move over the screen of your phone. This way you can actually move a cursor on your smartphone with your computer mouse! It certainly makes sending a quick text message a lot faster.

Text input is quite important on a mobile phone and if you own an all-touchscreen phone a good on-screen keyboard is no luxury. The PCM keyboard is very customizable with skin and layout files. The most popular skin is the iPhone look-a-like skin that shows a zoom of the letter you're pressing just above your fingertip while pressing it. Don't be afraid to open the .layout file in a text editor. You can play around with it to give the keyboard the best layout for your personal use. If you have trouble selecting the PCM keyboard as your default keyboard, use SIPChange to make it your default SIP (Soft Input Panel).

It's every traveler's nightmare: having your foreign trip only to come home to a gigantic phone bill because your smartphone connects to the internet every 5 minutes to check for mail, RSS news items or weather updates. And data connections in an other country than your own can be pretty expensive. MoDaCo NoData lets you disable all data traffic without disabling the phone functions in a single tap.

Some people you just text (too) often. Going to your inbox, opening a text message and hitting 'reply' is one way to make your love felt in 160 characters or less but there's also a way to make it a single tap event. All you need to do is make a shortcut to Windows/tmail.exe. You will need an advanced file explorer like Resco Explorer to do this because you want to add some parameters to this shortcut. You can do this by editing the properties of the shortcut. If you make a shortcut to "Windowstmail.exe" -service "SMS" -to "1234567" it will open an empty text message to the phone number 1234567. If you leave the phone number and keep the quotes empty it will just open a new text message. You can even predefine a text for your message. Get yourself in trouble too often? "Windowstmail.exe" -service "SMS" -to "1234567" -body "I'm sorry... x" will open a text message to 1234567 with "I'm sorry... x" as a text for some immediate damage control. These shortcuts are especially handy if you use a home screen plugin that is able to put shortcuts on your phone desktop. Otherwise you can put these shortcuts in your Windows/Startmenu folder to put them in your start menu. On more example? "Windowstmail.exe" -service "SMS" -to "" -body "I'll call you back in 5 minutes." will open a text message with the text "I'll call you back in 5 minutes." with no predefined number specified. 

CicleBT is an application that toggles your Bluetooth connection on or off. It's very practical if you use Bluetooth in your car or somewhere else, but don't want Bluetooth to be switched on all the time (for battery life of privacy reasons). You don't have to dig deep into your phone to go to the connection manager, with a single run of this application and a notification alert of the current status it's all done. With some smart tricks you can even use this application to let Bluetooth switch on when you enter an other application and switch off when you exit it.

It's probably useless to explain how extremely useful this application is. That's why it's on number 9 in our list. Google Maps for Windows Mobile can show the unbelievable possibilities of the combination of integrated GPS and an internet connection on you cell phone. Not just for finding directions but mainly for Google's enormous database of address information. No matter where you are, type in 'pizza', or anything you feel like having, in the search box in Google Maps. You get an instant satellite/street image of your location and pin points of nearby search results. Several options? Tap on one of the pin points for more details and tap on the website link to see if you like the menu and the images of the interior. Good enough? Directly tap on the phone number in your Google Maps pin point to make a reservation and then let Google Maps calculate the fastest route to it. Even if you don't have integrated GPS in your phone, it can still use a (much less accurate, +/- 1000 m) positioning by using relative distance to mobile towers. Google Maps Mobile is an absolute must-have and real example of technology in it's most useful way.

Many mobile operators provide the service of an SMS delivery notification. You can enable these notifications in the settings of Messages to exactly know when an SMS message was delivered. This notification is sent as an SMS message and contains the phone number of the recipient, not the name. SMSDRFix is a small application that replaces phone numbers in delivery notifications to known names from your contacts. It also makes a separate item in the sound settings to change the notification sound to a custom sound so you don't think you've gotten a new text message when in fact it was just a delivery notification.