It made me laugh, so I thought I would pop it up. Interestingly if you goto YouTubes site this has been taken down on request, hmmm….

I noticed that Gary  had given me a bit of a bash over my iPhone reaction.

I just wanted to make my impressions clear.

I've been an 'advanced phone' user for a good many years now, I have in the past used Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, and of late Microsoft (HTC) phones, and over the years seen them advance to the state of my current phone which my parents call my mini PC (HTC Universal).

The iPhone looks AMAZING! however it has some serious shortcomings, most of which should be expected, seeming this is Apple's first foray into the phone market (we will forget the RokR).

The iPhone falls short on some serious areas. What connected phone would be without 3G? I don't want to browse over GPRS, and it's damn sure that there will not be a WiFi zone like there is in San Francisco around where I live any time soon.

The lack of developer support is a joke, what's going on there? It runs OSX? yeah right just like my phone runs Windows Vista, the kernel may be loosely related but that's about it. All of the clever video voice-mail and the likes are network dependent, and not many of them will upgrade there infrastructure just for one phone. Do you think Nokia and SE have not looked at doing similar stuff for years?

There were also some strange decisions going on, first they say we are partnering with Google, then say that Yahoo! are going to be the iPhone mail partner. Who the the heck was smoking crack in the boardroom when that decision was made? Steve give up the hard drugs and go back to pot, cause that decision is just plain dumb! Google mail vs Yahoo! mail? I'd rather use Mutt or Pine than Yahoo! (in fact I would rather be sent to prision for a crime I did not commit, and accidentaly bend over to pick up the soap in an all black shower than use Yahoo!). However my dislike of Yahoo! asside, Gmail is possibly the best 'free' mail system out there at the moment, why use a decrepid aging pile of dog muck that get's blocked by almost every decent spam filter engine instead?

Like I said, I have nothing against Apple, I own my fair share of iPods and Macintosh's after all, and what I do confess is that Apple make very good designs.

I would like to see Apple do well with this device, but I'm afraid it's probably better off if they take the phone stuff out and put a hard disk in instead, that way we would get a decent Video iPod, and let's be fair that's what we all really wanted instead of the iPhone anyway.

p.s. While I'm bashing companies, Microsoft PLEASE call me back about my Xbox 360, I've had 3 now, none of them work and I want to play Rainbow Six : Vegas!

I've been running the AKU 3.2 update on my MDA Pro for a few days now, and thought I would say how it's coming along.

My first impressions of it seemed to be correct, it feels faster and more stable, and it is.

All of the applications I have installed on it work fine, so far. The new IE is much better, not quite Opera, but getting there.

The ability to use MP3/WMA audio for notifications is a godsend, there so much smaller than the equivalent WAV files that you used to have to use.

Also, even if you are not thinking of going to AKU 3.2, then I highly recommend upgrading to radio stack 1.13. Not only is the Bluetooth now certainly more stable (not had any spurious disconnects from my Parrot 3300), but the UMTS network coverage is certainly better, I get the UMTS connection in places that it just never happened before.

On my drive home in the evening I noticed that the network is mostly T-Mobile UMTS UK, where it used to be T-Mobile UK (GPRS).

If you were thinking about the upgrade, I say do it. You won't be sorry.

I have upgraded the ROM on my MDA Pro again. I was getting a few issues that I could not quite put a stop too, so decided to hard reset the device, but while at it may as well upgrade the ROM.

The Rom I chose in the end was the latest T-Mobile Netherlands one, version 1.30.115 WWE, I teamed that up with the last Qtek extended rom 1.30.176 WWE and Radio Rom 1.09 (although 1.11 is out, there are BT issues reported with it).

If you would like to do the upgrade yourself then you can download my 'pack' of roms here, yes it's 70Mb but includes :- WinCE rom 1.30.115WWE, Radio 1.09 and 1.11 and both the QTek and TMobile extended roms.

So download it, have a read of the readme.txt file and make you choice.

Hot on the heels of my how to upgrade to AKU2 article below; I thought it would now be a good time to review the HTC Universal, but more importantly the changes the AKU2 firmware.

There are a few reviews out on the net for the device in general, so I will not go too in depth on that. I will however go into detail on the AKU advancements and the all important fixes that the new firmware brings.

Read more »

It seems there are a few search results coming in looking for how to upgrade your HTC Universal to the AKU2 Rom.

If you are using an O2 XDA Exec there is now a new Rom over on the XDA site, that would be your easiest way of updating.

However if like me you dislike all the rubbish that O2 tend to put in the ROM, then you can upgrade to one of the iMate Roms.

To do this download the latest iMate or QTek Rom (have a look here for your Rom) I use the uni_cdl_13068_130153_10900_wwe.exe ROM on my Exec.

Now download the patched MAUpgrade Util.

When you have both the Rom and the upgrade util you need to extract the Rom file into a folder (use WinRar to extract) and then place the MAUpgrade util into the same folder.

Make sure your Universal has better than 50% battery and is plugged into the USB port. After ActiveSync has finished connecting run the patched HimaUpgrade util, click through the OK's and yes's. 

Your Universal will now reboot into the boot ROM mode, if the HimaUpgrade util complains, click the close button and run it again (do not reboot your Universal, leave it in boot mode). If your device complains about country codes, then you need to put the device into BootRom mode manualy, to do this press the camera, power and reset buttons at the same time, this will then give you the Serial / USB upgrade rom mode, now re-launch the MA Upograde application and continue.

The upgrade will now happen, after 20 minutes or so enjoy your upgraded AKU2 device.

If you have any issues give me a shout, or have a look over on the XDA-Dev's Universal forum, everyone there will be happy to help.

Oh yeah, this pdf is the internal strip/rebuild/debug document from HTC, it's 21mb. 

It seems that Orange may have locked down the latest C600 rom. I would suggest that you pop along to Modaco and SPV-Developers and have a look what is going on. I personally don’t have a C600 (C550 and Universal currently) so cannot do any testing myself.

A new beta of Opera for Windows Mobile 5 / Pocket PC 2003 is out. New in this version is tabs, yup tabbed browsing on WM it’s also had the annoying pop ups disabled and other features.

Pop along the Opera’s website for the download

For those users (like my Wife, and my C550) that have OMAP processors in their phones/devices you will want to have a little download of the application below.

I will not take responsibility for any damage but this little application can overclock your OMAP processor, this gives you more horse power at the expense of battery life.

Give it a go, it may come in handy (especially on the Wizard based devices, that are a little under powered from standard)

I would not recommend you running overclocked 24/7 as the battery life downsides would become a pain, but for those applications that make your device seem like it’s powered by treacle it could be handy.

Grab your copy of OMAPClock.exe here