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When I got my WinMo phone, I was sorely disappointed with Verizon’s “push” offerings – the Blackberry system worked out pretty nice with what little I’d played with my wife’s phone, so I was expecting great things. How do I say this politely? Verizon’s “Wireless Sync” system is patently terrible.

“Push” email worked, in the sense that it saved my battery a lot… but the minimum polling time for checking your mailbox is every 15 minutes – completely unacceptable for what I wanted. Though “Pocket Outlook Express” or whatever it is supports IMAP, it doesn’t support the “idle” feature so again you’re basically stuck checking mail every so often.

I finally found, buried away in Google’s docs, information about using ActiveSync with their systems, but then when I tried it, it didn’t work with Google Apps. So I went on my way using IMAP and just assumed that dead batteries at 9pm would be how I’d live my life for now.

Today, my phone needed a reinstall anyway because it was really starting to chug and in my attempts at getting a YouTube client installed on it I think I may have inadvertently installed malware on it. So I reset it to factory settings, and decided to give Google’s ActiveSync server another chance.

I followed the instructions to enable Sync with our Google Apps domain, and enabled Calendar while I was at it. Next, I setup a new ActiveSync/Exchange server at m.google.com, using my Apps username and password as detailed in the instructions for setting up sync on WinMo.

To my delight, it worked flawlessly. It plopped all my contacts immediately down on a fresh phone, and anything I put in Google Calendar shows up quite quickly in my appointments list.

Best of all, email shoots through at lightning speed. My phone’s now ridiculously quick again (though a purge of all the installed apps I tried and hated probably didn’t hurt that) and I’m optimistic about tomorrow’s battery life.

I was going to call up Verizon and see about getting a Droid X (they’re back-ordered anyway), but I’ve only got about another month until my “new every two” is up and that’d save me some money on it. In the mean time, I’ll let all these new Droid X owners supplement reviews and see if there’s anything I might hate about it. The last thing I want to do is be stuck with another phone I hate for two years.

So I decided to post another review of some Windows Mobile software. This one will be quick, because there’s not much to this application – however if you have a full-keyboard device then you probably really want this app.

It’s called NullKeyboard by “Beemer”, and it’s fantastic.

The basic premise is that my phone has a full qwerty keyboard on it. I know WinMo has a transcriber as well as an on-screen keyboard, but you know what? There’s almost never a situation where either is easier than sliding the phone open and typing.

My phone’s Windows Mobile 6, in all it’s wisdom, has no way of knowing (apparently) that you have a full qwerty keyboard, so some legacy apps pop up with the on-screen keyboard anyway for no good reason.

This app simply acts as another input provider, and simply never appears on screen even when instructed to by the application. It’s simple, and it does exactly what it says. Install this, select it from the keyboard menu at the bottom of the screen, and never see the on-screen keyboard again.

Totally worth the pricetag of… freeware. If I’m ever in Spain I’m gonna have to buy this Beemer guy a drink.

I love my Windows Mobile phone, but there’s a couple of things WinMo seems to be constantly just plain missing. The first is a good, simple Flickr uploader that has camera integration. Yahoo! Go! sucks. But I digress…

The other, until recently, was a good windows mobile twitter application. They’re either very minimalist (twobile) or bloated and clunky (pocketwit). Then I happened upon Twikini, and… well… it just works.

You get the familiar mobile twitter interface – lines of tweets with the person’s photo, in reverse chronological order. It supports GPS (if my phone had such an animal, boo!) as well as a bunch of other things you’d expect like re-tweets, twit-pic integration, direct messaging.

The one thing it could have done without? The Windows Media Player integration – much like the IRC “MP3 announcers” of the late 90s, people who do this kind of crap should be shot. If I wanted to know what song you were listening to – I’d ask. I guess though, much like firearms and murderers, it’s not the tool it’s the people who actually commit the crime. Yes, announcing your MP3s obnoxiously often over the internet should be a crime.

The best part of Twikini though is that it just plain works. It’s quick, it doesn’t hang my phone up, I don’t ever have the urge to kill it in the background to make something else go faster (*cough*microsoftfacebook*cough*) – it’s just a well written little piece of software.

I’m usually loath to pay for anything for my phone, but it’s only five bucks. I’ve been hunting around for a freeware alternative, but I’m not sure I’ll find it.

I’ve been trying to find a Windows Mobile WordPress client for a couple days now and this one seems pretty useful. I might remove twitter tools and actually use twitter now.

Verizon, in their infinite wisdom, see fit to rob you of all kinds of things that make their devices useful… so that they can later charge you for their inferior offerings. Whether it’s tethering (hey, pay $15 a month for this app which doesn’t work as well as the freeware tethering!), GPS (it’s a $600MSRP smart phone but we didn’t put a real GPS receiver in it so we can charge you for VZNavigator, even though Google Maps Mobile is 100x superior!) or even MSN Messenger (we removed the built in MSN messenger so you’ll use our’s which works off text messages even though you have a data plan, hey at least it’s good on your battery!).

Well after a few hours of Googling around, I found a few ways to get MSN Messenger on a Windows Mobile smartphone. First of all, there’s going to mobile.msn.com in your browser. Lame, and totally not a good experience at all.

Then there’s Fring, a freeware client for all kinds of services. I didn’t have fun with it at all, it’s bulky and takes to advertising itself over your status message.

Finally, after much browsing, I discovered a way to get the actual MSN service which is supposed to be bundled with WinMo but most providers remove it. Simply download the full installer for Windows Live Mobile and you’re all set… it seems so simple I have no idea why it took me so long to find it (probably because most reasonable Windows Mobile installations already have MSN/Live so no one thinks twice about it).

So I figured I’d review some of the awesome, industrial products (rawr) that freeware developers are putting out. I might review the odd pay app too, but I’m a cheapskate so don’t expect that to happen often.