Nov 19 2010

Tweaking Your WinMo Device

Category: Windows MobileChrisM @ 2:10 am

One thing I like about Windows Mobile based phones is their tweakability. If that isn’t a word, as Chrome’s spell check is claiming, it should be… Anyway, thanks to other people’s research, and the ability to change your phone’s registry (as with Windows based PCs), you can easily completely customize the way your phonw behaves in a lot of different situations.
One alternative to spending a long time looking up individual tweaks and getting your hands dirty in the registry is Schap’s Advanced Configuration Tool – I’ve not yet had time to play with this a great deal on my HTC Touch Pro 2, but on the TyTn II this was a life saver, in terms of not having to remember random registry locations and values for all sorts of tweaks. I don’t think the application ties in too strongly to just older WM devices, though you may find some tweaks don’t work with Windows Mobile 6.5.x ROMs.
One thing to remember is to try and only apply a few minor, or one major tweak at a time – if something goes wrong with your phone, you will want to know which option to leave alone next time. As ever, playing with the registry can lead to problems, and so you should ensure you’ve backed up any important data before applying the tweaks that are available. Most of them won’t change anything too radically, but you could occasionally find yourself needing to hard reset your phone, if you choose a bad set of options at the same time.
Anyway, I’ve boiled down the list of available tweaks to the following categories, forgive the list style, but it would take too long to try and compile them into sentences 🙂

(Many) GUI tweaks
Today screen tweaks
Cache sizes and behaviours
Power Management settings
SIP (onscreen keyboard) tweaks
Network tweaking – WiFi,3G,Bluetooth,USB
Phone call settings
GPS tweaks
Message (e-mail, SMS, MMS and system) settings
Camera tweaks
Light and G-sensor settings
Customize key mapping
Customize file associations

One final thing – once you have found your perfect set of tweaks, it is worth exporting them (as an XML file), so if you install a new ROM or have to hard reset, you can restore your phone to it’s perfect state with just a couple of clicks (the same advice as with using HTC, see previous post).

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