There was a time when I’d give my left nut for a WinMo 6.5 phone that didn’t suck, but my chief complaint with my Samsung SCH-i760 was that it lagged, and a solid year after 6.5 was released to manufacturers there were still reviews about 6.5 phones spontaneously grinding to a halt. Truth be told, the time when I’d give up something important for a decent 6.5 phone ended when I got my Droid X – at that point I was still open. For what it’s worth, with the exception of when the phone sleeps with the DroidLight app focused and off, I literally couldn’t make my X lag if I wanted to.

Windows Phone 7 looks cool, but looks I don’t really care about as much – truth be told, I didn’t hate the look of 6.1 on my Samsung. WinMo also had a giant stack of apps for it, both free and paid… Android’s market is a reasonably “open” ecosystem, and while the iPhone is a closed ecosystem, it’s at least teeming with interesting stuff.

WP7 trades in the open, wild-west ecosystem for an iPhone-like closed system that Microsoft promises will be bristling, even to the point where forthcoming projects became news to developers. It doesn’t inspire much promise, particularly when Android is rather open and it’s still lagging behind the iPhone in many cases.

Don’t get me wrong there are many fantastic games and apps for Android that are completely free, with the only drawback to playing all my old SNES games out and about being the ads popping up for acne home remedies at the bottom of the loading/menu screens… but if Microsoft is actually hoping to contend with the iPhone instead of entering a war of attrition with Android, I get the feeling they might wind up having to pay or subsidize developers.

On the whole I still can’t help but get the feeling I should be excited about WP7, but every phone I’ve seen so far I’ve been turning my nose up at it.

“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.

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.

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.

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.