So I was looking for an upgrade in late January, and I found that Sprint was sending HTC Touch Pros (PPC 6850) aka the HTC Raphael as replacements when you utilize their self service phone replacement program, because they were low on PPC 6800 stock. The only stipulation is that if you don’t have their TEP replacement program (with monthly fee), you’d have to pay the $55 replacement charge. This was not a problem for me, I bought the phone refurbished on eBay anyway a few months back. So I initiated the replacement order.

I received the phone on January 21st, surprised to find out this thing came with a crapload of accessories. My Mogul came with literally just the unit, battery and stylus. The device is VERY sleek, and the best part is that it hasn’t yet crashed after being on for 5 weeks now. The technical specs of this device are quite impressive, I can see why it goes for $300+ with two year contract. The 640×480 pixel screen is probably the most impressive feature; you just don’t see that kind of resolution on such a small device very often. I use this phone a lot now, way more than I did the Mogul.

Here are some of my favorite apps:

• Real Dice Poker for Texas Hold’em. Good when you’re bored.
• Pocket Scrobbler for listening to streaming music on the go or while working out (and it even Scrobbles to my last.fm profile).
• Dashwire, still a very amazing synchronization tool for Windows Mobile phones. It made my transition from the Mogul very convenient — less than 5 minutes.
• ShoZu, FINALLY a way to geotag photos and auto-upload to Flickr.
• NuevaSync, FINALLY a way to 2-way synchronize my Google calendar and phone on demand. It uses the exchange protocol and syncs instantly. Very impressive.

Honorable mentions:

• MusicID, play audio into the microphone and it will tell you what song it is. Seems to be about 75% accurate for radio songs, pretty impressive.
• Google Maps mobile, once upon a time this would have been my #1 app, but it seems to be lacking in functionality these days. While it is apparently the best freeware GPS manager out there, it has some non intuitive controls and actions making it pretty frustrating overall.
• Pocket Youtube looks amazing on this device, although somewhat laggy. I’m not sure if it’s because of the video processing required, or the network latency. Probably a combination.
• Teeter, a G(ravity)-Sensor utilizing app. The only decent G-Sensor app out there for Windows Mobile tat this point, while the Apple store is full of them. I suspect as Windows Mobile phones start to have G-Sensors standard that these apps will become more common. Definitely a fun game.

Here are some pics, click to go to the set:

Overall, I am very impressed with this unit.
Rating: 9.8/10 at the price I received it.
At retail price, it is much less appealing. Suffice it to say I would not have purchased this device if it cost me over $300, but I think that speaks more of me than the phone .

Eventually the device came to crash once a day or more. Then the phonepocalypse happened, while I was on a road trip with some buddies, the phone decided to not turn on at all. Soft reset after soft reset, it would get to the BIOS screen, then never proceed to the WM6.1 loading screen. I really thought that the device was fried. Fortunately, I hard reset the device (meaning erase all data and restore to factory defaults, and it was able to boot again. All was not lost. (All data especially wasn’t lost thanks to dashwire, man that app is rad for Windows Mobile devices.)

So I decided to give DCD’s trimmed mogul ROM a try. Following the instructions the entire install took less than an hour. All of the files that were required for the install are available from his repository of files, of course. From a software fully updated (from HTC.com) factory reset device, I installed NueSPL 3.47 by putting it on my MicroSD card and running it. I then ran “dcd_titan_3.3.4.exe” from my computer with Mogul attached via USB. It took care of the rest. Once the install process finished, I installed “dcd Sprint Carrier 20081020.cab” from my MicroSD card by putting it on there, installing it, then going to Settings => Connections => Update PRI on the phone, which allowed it to provision the device to be on the Sprint network.

All is now well, it has been about a week without needing to do a software reset, and without crashing. I have been avoiding some obvious culprits as I previously noted:
* too much ram utilized (The trimmed rom really helps here.)
* not using the slide out keyboard (I found that this was causing the crash many times. No idea why.)
* letting the battery get too low (A fresh install really helps here.)

I noticed that the wifi still doesn’t work, so that is definitely a defect with this particular phone, not the model as a whole.

So in summary, for the low amount of RAM on the HTC Mogul, a slimmed down custom ROM is absolutely the way to go to make it stable.

So I received my new phone about 3 weeks ago now, the Sprint HTC Mogul, AKA the HTC Titan, AKA the HTC PPC-6800. I was excited by the fact that it had Windows Mobile 6.1 and built-in GPS, which is why I sprung for it as soon as I found a deal.

As soon as I received the phone, I updated it to the latest firmware from Sprint, which added GPS support and updated it to Windows Mobile 6.1.

Since I’ve had the phone, I’ve found there is a LOT of information on it, a lot of people ‘hacking’ this phone; even reports of the Titan running Android, (Google’s Linux OS) which is pretty neat. Considering I rely on the phone to make calls and be reachable (especially for work), I don’t know if I’d be willing to suffer the potential downtime of being unreachable while the phone is offline. Even so, there are a large number of apps and support around the standard ROMs that make this phone pretty cool.

Through “normal” use for me — daily amounts of which include about 30 minutes of talking, 10 text messages, checking emails every 30 minutes, alerts every 4 hours or so, and about 1 hour of casual use — this phone appears to last about 36 hours from full to empty battery. I’m very pleased with the battery life of this phone.

Phone Technical Specs

Display: 65K color transflective TFT color LCD. Screen size diagonally: 2.8″. Resolution: 240 x 320, supports both portrait and landscape modes.

Battery: Lithium Ion rechargeable. Battery is user replaceable. 1500 mA. 2100 mA extended battery available for purchase. 4 hours claimed talk time on standard battery.

Performance: Qualcomm MSM7500 400 MHz processor (dual core 400MHz ARM11 application processor and 133MHz ARM9). 64 MB built-in RAM (55 megs available). 256 MB Flash ROM with 155 megs available. 64 megs RAM with 26 free at boot.

Size: 4.33″ x 2.32″ x 0.73″. Weight: 5.8 ounces.

Phone: CDMA dual band digital 800/1900MHz. Data: EVDO rev 0, upgradable later this year to rev A.

Camera: 2.0MP

Audio: Built in speaker, mic and HTC ExtUSB stereo headphone jack. Stereo headset included. Voice Recorder and Windows Pocket Media Player 10 included for your MP3 pleasure.

Networking: Integrated WiFi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0.

Software: Windows Mobile 6.0 Profession Edition operating system. Microsoft Mobile Office suite including Mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint (view only), Internet Explorer, and Outlook. Also included: Esmertec Java VM, Cyberon Voice Dialing, Pictures and Videos, MSN Instant Messenger, Windows Live, Windows Media Player 10, Solitaire, Bubble Breaker (game), Voice Recorder as well as handwriting recognition. Additional applications: Camera, Wireless Manager, MS Bluetooth software, On Demand (Handmark Express), Adobe Reader LE, Audible Player, link to get Good’s messaging client, Zip (unzipping application), Sprint Software Store, Sprint Music (coming in July), Clear Storage (wipes out all data and resets unit to factory defaults). ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 trial edition for PCs included.

Expansion: 1 MicroSD slot. 512 meg card included. Up to 2 gig cards supported.

Since I bought mine OEM, I was missing all of the “X included” from above. In fact, all I got was the phone itself and a charger. Good, I don’t need all of those extra accessories anyway

Pictures of the phone (click to enlarge)

I bought the phone used on eBay, so it came as-is, which means that there were some scuffs on the lower right of the device, and a slight bruise on the LCD (unnoticeable unless you’re looking for it). Also, I can’t get wifi to work at all with the device, so I presume that the internal component that manages wifi is busted. I doubt I would use if it I could though, since I have an unlimited data plan and it’s plenty fast.

Photos taken by the phone

I’m pretty underwhelmed by the camera on this phone. Sure, it’s 2 megapixels, and the flash is pretty rad, but the quality is less than staggering. I took some photos in pitch dark of my white dog, here’s how they turned out (click for original size):

Also tried without flash at work:

Better, but still not great.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect so much from such a tiny camera.

Flickr has a really neat and easy way to upload pictures to it from the camera, just send an email to a special email with the subject the title of the image and the body the description of the image, and it will set those properties accordingly. Pretty neat if you ask me. It even supports geotagging.

The main problem with geotagging on this phone is that the camera application will not automatically geotag; there is no setting to force it to do this. There are some applications that will allow you to geotag on demand (e.g. I just took a photo, let’s apply my current GPS settings to it), or geotag periodically (e.g. every half hour let’s check for new non-geotagged photos and geotag to my current location). Neither of these really work right, so I’m still stalking that “killer app” for geotagging on my WM 6.1 device.

Applications and Games

While I’m still looking for some apps that fit my needs for certain tasks, I did find quite a few helpful apps and fun games that make this device easier to manage. Here are a list of them:

• Skyfire – a rad web browser, best in show currently in my opinion. It doesn’t behave like a normal mobile web browser, instead of dealing with WML or even dumbed down HTML, it takes full pages as they would render in modern computer web browsers and displays them accordingly. In fact, the version of Skyfire I’m using sends user agent “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17″. The zooming and panning behaves very similar to Opera mobile, which is probably as best as you can do. The best part of this browser is that it fully supports javascript AND flash! Proven by watching a Youtube video from the phone (which streams seamlessly), and checking my Google Feed reader. Very amazing piece of software.
• Dashwire – synchronization of contacts, photos, videos, ringtones, text messages, phone bookmarks, and much more. I used this when changing phones from my Treo 700wx; it backed up all photos, contacts and texts and ported them over to the new device in less than 20 minutes. Their web util is pretty rad too, it allowed me to quickly and easily post pictures to my Flickr that were on my phone.
• HHC – HTC Home Customizer – Allows full customization of the Today screen. Very essential, looks a lot cleaner than the vanilla Today screen.
• Multiplayer Championship Poker: Internet Edition – I find this a fun thing to do before I go to bed or am bored.
• Google Maps for Mobile / Microsoft Live Search Mobile – I haven’t decided which of these are better for GPS managed directions and location mapping.
• Windows Mobile Mail (link goes to biased review) – Works really well with Gmail for IMAP usage.

And now the stuff I’m still looking for:

• As mentioned above, I’m looking for a better way to deal with geotagging. It should be a function of the camera application, ESPECIALLY on a freaking GPS enabled smart phone camera.
• A nice, free way to nicely deal with synchronization of calendars. There are a handful of non-free apps out there that will sync with Google Calendar (which is good enough), but none are worth the price in my opinion. At this point, I’d rather not have this feature than pay for it.
• How to turn off this incessant flashing? There’s no easy way to turn off the phone’s “service light”, an LED that flashes every 2 seconds or so to notify you that it has service. This can be quite distracting in a dark room when I’m trying to sleep…
• How to master the vibrations… I never have sound on my phone enabled, so ideally every “notification” would vibrate. For some reason the device isn’t obeying my settings for new texts to vibrate. Still gotta work on this one…

Criticisms

A lot of people will complain that the storage on the device is lacking, and the RAM (64MB) is rather lackluster. Honestly, I still have most of the storage available on my device, and I’m not even using any external storage. I doubt I would ever put music or videos on this device, so for the few apps I have and the 7 days worth of emails, ~256MB is more than enough storage.

Perhaps related to this, the phone itself seems to lock up a few times a week. ‘Lock up’ should be defined as unable to wake. The phone, which should have plenty of battery and is still on (as identified by the signal lights flashing), will not come out of a blank screen “sleep” state. If a call comes through, the screen will turn on, but no inputs will be accepted. So if you press the Answer button while a call is coming in, it will not answer and the call will go to voicemail.

Through asking around, some people seem to think that this is due to certain application usage, and I have personally confirmed that the “Weather Plugin” for the “HTC Home Customizer” (as previously mentioned) seems to have a memory leak in that it will always cause this issue. When not using the Weather Plugin, it appears to only happen when the phone is below 25% remaining battery. I have talked to others with this phone who confirm they have similar issues.

Another thing that appears to aid in not freezing up is using the HHC “X Button” plugin — an app that will actually close a program when the X button is pressed, rather than leave it running in the background. It makes sense that this would be a crashing issue related to the low RAM on the phone, so I’m not really sure why the Windows Mobile developers decided to make it like this. If you tell an application to close, it should close; you should not have to jump through hoops (e.g. go to Settings => Memory => Running Applications => Click Terminate) to close a running app.

So although this issue is pretty annoying, I think I’ve recognized a way for its impact to be minimized.

Conclusion

This is by far the best phone I’ve had to date. This would be only my 2nd smart phone (behind only the Palm Treo 700wx) and my 4th or so Windows Mobile PPC. It really does fail in comparison to the iPhone in function and elegance, and the Android enabled devices for speed and power, but the fact that I can use a stylus is a welcomed fallback for me, and Windows Mobile — while beginning to show its age — I still really enjoy using. The fact remains that all the hype these days is going toward iPhone (not on the Sprint network) and the Android devices (not on the Sprint network either). That being said, I like how small and thin this phone is (comparatively at least), and this is the fastest I have ever seen a Windows Mobile device. This might just be one of the best options for a Sprint plan.

Yet despite my positive experience with this phone, there are still quite a few setbacks, many of which make me want to throw this phone at the wall at times. And until it can do everything I need it to, I can’t really be happy with it.

Score: 7.5/10

$149.99 original price with Buy it Now.
-$15.00, -10% coupon in my ebay messages
+$6.99 shipping
= $141.98 paid.

(in 60 days)
-$45, -30% Microsoft cashback.

Overall amount: $96.98.

This Windows Mobile 6.1 device should be a good upgrade from my WM2003 Palm Treo 700wx, but I think the feature I’m most looking forward to is the GPS — and there’s gotta be some auto-geotagging settings.

Since I have the Sprint Employee Referral Program for my phone, I have included in my plan free unlimited data, or Power Vision as they call it. So while I am not very mobile, I thought I’d give tethering on my laptop through my phone a try.

I downloaded and installed PDANet on my Windows XP system, and connected my phone via its data cable to the laptop. After installing, on the phone I went to the PDANet tray and clicked connect. Afterwards, the Windows system had a popup indicating it had connected.

From my couch, I get 2 bars of signal strength (out of 4), and various bandwidth tests I did rated me at ~220Kbps. Not great, but definitely usable. I really wish I researched this before the New York trip, man was it a pain to get a constant connection going.

On top of everything Joel said, anytime I put this device in my pocket, it seems to starting playing music. Now, I don’t think my pocket’s random button presses can outsmart a screen lock, but there seems to be no way to lock it completely out of the media player. I tested it to validate what my pocket told me, if you hold down the play button (on the outside of the unit), then press a direction, it will browse your music library. Pressing play again starts to play your music. If the phone is on “silent”, it doesn’t care, the media player works on its own volume. What kind of feature is this…? It seems like the only solution to having it not play music when random buttons are pressed is to delete my music library.

The above is just a minor quirk, I’m aware, unless of course I’m in a meeting and have to explain why Ozzie is singing “Bark at the Moon” from my pocket. I never have and probably never will use this phone for music listening, video watching, or any of the other things for which it was intended. I dislike the interface, but it’s functional, barely. This combined with the fact that I’m missing my digital to-do list devices of the past, namely and most notably my Viewsonic V37 PocketPC, I’ve decided to upgrade my phone.

So I bought used (found with the Forum FS/FT Thread Notifier) a Palm Treo 700wx. It is a little less powered than my Viewsonic V37 was (312MHz XScale compared to 400MHz XScale) — btw how is this even possible, my Viewsonic was made in like 2003. At any rate, I look forward to getting this going and playing around with it. It should at least hold me over until Android devices are out.

This tutorial requires
1) An MP3
2) An LG Fusic / LG FX550 phone.
3) Windows XP (untested otherwise)
4) USB Data Transfer Cable for the LG Fusic

First, prepare the mp3. You probably don’t want an 8 minute song as your mp3 ringtone. I’d suggest keep it at ~30 seconds maximum. If your phone rings for more than 30 seconds… you really don’t deserve a cell phone. I used WavePad trial edition, then very easily trimmed, adjusted volume levels, and resaved my mp3. You can go with low quality, since it’s on a cell phone. I encoded it at 128kbps, mono channel. Rename this saved file to “MP3.mid”.

Next, connect your phone to your Windows XP computer, and install drivers as necessary. My computer actually found the drivers on its own, here’s what I did. After it’s connected, right click on My Computer, go to Manage. Go to Device Manager and find the device that doesn’t have drivers installed (should have a yellow exclamation by it). Right click on it, select Update Driver. On the following screen, select “Yes, this time only”, for letting Windows Update search for a driver. Next check “Install the software automatically”, then click Next. When it finds it, the driver won’t be WHQL certified, so you’ll have to click “Continue” to let Windows install it. Wait a few minutes, and the driver should be installed. This might introduce a few more “Unknown” devices to the Device Manager, so repeat the same process until all relevant Devices have drivers installed.

Next, on the LG Fusic. Go to Tools => Music Composer => Compose Melody => Keyboard Mode. Play a key, then save it as MP3. We will be overwriting this and using it as the MP3 ringtone later.

Next, install BitPim for Windows XP. From their website, “BitPim allows synchronization of Phone Book, Calendar, WallPapers and RingTones and manipulating the embedded filesystem in CDMA cell phones”, but we’ll only be using it for last one, “manipulating the embedded filesystem in CDMA cell phones”. Once installed, assuming your phone is still connected via USB, setup and configure your phone. I knew mine was connected when it said “Other CDMA phone on COM6 – Detected”, with a green Circle next to it. Go to the View menu, and ensure that “View Filesystem” is checked. On the left pane you should see “Filesystem”, near the bottom. Open that, and in the next pane you should be able to navigate to “/melodyComposer”. Drag and drop “MP3.mid” from the first step into this window in BitPim, overwriting the existing file.

Finally, on the phone go to Settings => Sounds => Ringers => Caller ID => My Melodies => MP3.mid. And wha-la, presto, sha-zaam.

Worked for me as described. Let me know if your experience varies from the above.

This is if you currently have T-Mobile service, want to cancel it and not pay the early cancelation fee.

Starting next month all users will be billed an extra .86 for each line they have with t-mobile.

This is a change in the contract. What this means to you is that you have between March 1st and March 30th to call T-Mobile and say that you want to cancel your service and when they tell you that you must pay $175 or whatever $ cancelation fee you tell them that due to the change in the contract and the new fees you don’t have to pay the ETF (Early Termination Fee)

“This $0.86 fee per line will be charged in order to recover some of t-mobile’s costs related to government mandates, programs and obligations such as E911, number pooling and portability.”

So maybe now I can get rid of my 4 year old phone and get a newer one