I love to mess around with my Windows Mobile phones. My first WM phone was the HTC Apache, which I used on Verizon’s network. It was awesome. It came loaded with WinMo 5, which was an okay OS. UTStarCom never offered Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 for this phone, which basically killed the phone.
However, several amazing people found ways to get around that and they developed their own home-brewed Windows Mobile 6.1 ROMs for the Apache. These people share their time and their work on sites like ppcgeeks.com and xda-developers.com. They even went so far as to make it relatively easy for the rest of us to do the same thing by creating an easy-to-use application called BuildOS, which they refer to as a “kitchen” where you can “cook” your own ROM and throw several applications into the firmware image, then flash it to your phone.
Now, I’m nowhere near as hardcore as these guys. But I do still like to enhance my phone with a number of their tools. I’ve moved on from the Apache and now use the Sprint Mogul. As I said, I like to mess around with my phones, which means I install and uninstall a lot of software. To keep my phone from getting messed up, I generally test any new software in a WinMo virtual machine. Microsoft provides these virtual machines free of charge, so it’s a great way to play with Windows Mobile and any new apps without having to commit to a full PDA phone.
