Wednesday 29 April 2009

First Mod - blue Icons

The people over at XDA Devs have been modding for a while now, and can achieve all sorts of stuff.

Following on from my FREE Sony Ericsson themes I've done over the years, I wanted to start playing around with my new HTC, and it's Windows Mobile based OS.

My first mod is to replace the icons in TouchFlo 3D. These are the icons along the bottom of the screen, for home, contacts and so on.

The new icons are fairly simple blue 3D ones. The "hover" icon is the same but a little brighter like it's glowing. You can see the icons below.

To download them, simply use this link, and check the readme file in the archive for some notes.

Thursday 16 April 2009

Touchscreen feedback

I've just installed a handy bit of freeware called Touch Response. The idea is very simple- it vibrates the phone when you touch the screen. This is actually a lot more useful than it sounds. The problem with touchscreens is that they don't offer any real feedback so sometimes if something is a little slow to respond, you wonder if you actually pressed the screen or not!

Touch Response solves this by making the phone give a little 'buzz' when you touch items on the screen. It also isntalls a little applet to the System Settings so you can fine tune the action - it can vibrate for an adjustable time on press/release. Yo ucan also select when it should / shouldn't work, for instance disabling it when the stylus is out, or during a call.

You can download Touch Response FREE from here: Touch Response

Monday 13 April 2009

In Car holder



One of the uses I'll have for my Touch Pro is sat-nav. As such, a car holder was needed. Expansys did a 'car pack' comprising a generic "clamp" mount, windscreen sucker and charger - but it was £34 plus delivery. eBay turned up another winner with a much neater windscreen mount designed specifically for the Touch Pro, along with a car charger (and a screen protector film) for the princely sum of £5.50 including delivery from Hong Kong!

As you can see in the pictures, it allows use with the keyboard open or closed, and also rotates around so if you aren't using sat-nav and just want the phone on view in "portrait" mode, you can do. The only thing I'd like to see is a little padding around the top clip, as it's quite tight and rather hard edged - I may mod it a little to help protect the phone.

Saturday 11 April 2009

Headphone adapter


One thing I didn't like about the HTC Touch Pro when it arrived was the headphones. I actually found them quite uncomfortable, and the sound quality wasn't great either.

Of course, the only external connector on the Touch Pro is the Mini-USB based one, so I couldn't just plug another pair in. eBay turned up trumps though, and for less than £2 - including delivery from Hong Kong to the UK! - I got a useful little cable with the HTC plug on one end, and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack socket on the other. Problem solved!

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Welcome to my HTC Touch Pro blog

Hi there.
After some time with a Sony Ericsson P1, and many years of Sony Ericsson phones, I've finally 'left the fold'. I decided I wanted a Windows mobile based phone, due to the amount of software around (plus as a C# dev I fancied playing with the compact framework...) and after some reading of reviews, I decided to go for the HTC Touch Pro.

Primary 'wants' were:

Hardware QWERTY keyboard
Touch screen (for sat-nav use)
Built in GPS
Decent screen
Expandable memory

The HTC ticked all the boxes. I considered the Sony Ericsson Xperia for a while, but I much preferred the look of the TouchFlo 3D front end (although you can install that on the Xperia...) but mainly the keyboard on the HTC has a proper number row unlike the SE.

So, i'll try and update as I get to grips with this, and find new things!