If you so happen to own a Windows Mobile phone or played with one before, there are likely to be many things that you find rather terrible about it. What with the iPhone, Android and Palm, it’s no surprise that Windows Mobile deserves to be shunned to a shameful corner in the market. However what most people don’t know is that the Windows Mobile team seems to be getting their gear together and is doing some major upgrades for the next iteration of their platform – Windows Mobile 7. Though it still lacks in many ways, it’s definitely a move forward.

Many people on the Windows Mobile platform are not making the most of it – they aren’t using a smartphone as a smartphone. Through this article I hope to touch up on some of the ways your phone could be used.

Improve the overall experience

Before you start trying to use your phone for tasks, you might want to make your phone more usable first. Windows Mobile was designed for a stylus and envisioned as a minature desktop – something that really makes it a terrible OS to use. Windows seems to have made touch-friendliness its main target for improvement and these upgrades are available for all users, without having to buy a whole new phone. However you’d have to search quite a bit, (I recommend the XDA community) to find something that really clicks – meanwhile this introductory article should help.

Flash a newer ROM

This is the equivalent of upgrading your operating system. I wrote a review of it here but development has already progressed much further than those screenshots display. Windows Mobile seems to aim to challenge the likes of the iPhone with its WM7 version coming apparently in Q4 of 2010. With this aim and the rapid ongoing development it’s hard not to expect greater things in the future. Even though it’s not out yet learning how to flash a ROM will grant you access to the ongoing development – and of course making your experience a lot, lot better. I would go so far to say that even 6.5 on my aging Dopod’s hardware (popular name HTC Hermes) is fast, and really makes the device a joy to use (yes, quite shockingly the newer ones are less resource hungry!).

Get started and learn about flashing ROMs in the XDA-Forums. Highly recommended.

Theme it properly

Whether you have flashed a recent ROM or preferred to keep your old one (I recommend flashing), a theme will do wonders. There are already themes for WM6.5 and can really sharpen up the phone in no time. A good wallpaper, colourscheme and not to forget icons too can spice things up. If you are using shells or widgets then finding matching skins for those will help give your system an integrated feel.

Themes can be found on the XDA-Forums as linked above, as well as on FreewarePocketPC.

Use a Shell/Widget/Plugin for the Today screen

For those already with WM6.5, it comes with Titanium and that is a huge improvement from the today screen, giving you quick access to pretty much all of the phones functions outside individual applications right on the front screen. However many other interfaces are available (most are crap) and some are really quite something, such as SPB Mobile Shell (pictured), TouchFlo/Manilla (2D or 3D), Home2, and various today plugins (available on FreewarePocketPC).

Ensure the basics exist

Make sure that you’ve got the basic set of applications – Windows (Live) Messenger, Windows Media Player, Office Mobile (including OneNote?), and … wait for it … Windows Marketplace and Microsoft MyPhone. This basic set of application should come with every phone and if you didn’t get it, you should hunt it down. Windows Marketplace is Microsoft’s attempt at the iPhone’s App store and Google’s Android Market. It was quite recently released (and even more recently cracked and available for free on XDA) and though I’ve only seen very few applications available on it (and even fewer free ones) it’s been a joy to browse and no doubt has a lot of potential once more developers add their stuff. Microsoft MyPhone is a new service to bridge mobile and web synchronisation. It’s quite nifty allowing two-way synchronising for SMSes, contacts, calendars and todos – all accessible through a web interface. It also allows synchronisation with social networks (though Microsoft’s Facebook application is very good) as well as synchronisation between several devices. Some of it’s “pro account” features involve phone tracking and remote phone lockdowns,

In my next post on this topic I will start going through specific uses and my recommended applications for that use. But taking those first easy steps can really make a difference.