I’ve spent much time playing with different web browsers on my TG01 (and the Xperia X1 before it) and, if I may, I’ll share some thoughts about them with you.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 was very good on the Xperia: fast, responsive and very good at rendering pages. Then I upgraded to the TG01 and found that there was a lot of screen corruption. I had to down-grade to Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. Unsurprisingly, Opera don’t have this on their website any more as it is an old version, so if you need it you’ll have to search for a torrent. The good thing about using 9.5 is it implements the ad-blocking urlfilter.ini which I have mentioned before. The irritating thing about this version is it uses the standard Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard by default and it is rather slow to change the keyboard each time you need to type something.

The other browser I regularly used on the Xperia was Iris 1.1.9. This is also no longer available for download as the maker has been purchased by a non-Windows Mobile friendly company. You can still find it on some download sites and there must be a torrent somewhere. I use Iris almost exclusively for viewing Google Reader. Iris pretends to be Safari on an iPhone (they both use the Webkit engine to render pages) so you get the good iPhone layout for Reader which works best on a mobile device.

I am a recent convert to the Netfront v3.5 brower for Windows Mobile Concept Version. The first thing you have to do when you install this is change the default font, the one it uses ‘out of the box’ is awful, but once you’ve done that you’ll find it is a fast, good-looking, capable browser which just zips along on the TG01.

Finally, after much fiddling about with other browsers for Windows Mobile I have, for the first time in a while, installed a non-IE browser on my desktop: Firefox 3.5 to be precise. The UI looks good and seems easy enough to get to grips with. Much as I like the ad-blocking feature of Opera Mobile I also love the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. I’ll still use IE8 with some sites, but for the moment Firefox seems perfectly useful.

As my regular reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I am tempted to buy a new one, the Toshiba TG01. There are a few things that tickle my fancy about this phone: a 4.1inch 800x480 screen, a 1GHz CPU, a whizzy GPU and an accelerometer plus all of the other features of my current Xperia X1. However, it does not have a keyboard, it has an onscreen one.

The partner has constantly been going on and on to me about how I should be buying an iPhone as he likes his so much. One of the reasons I’ve given is that I don’t like onscreen keyboards. I also think the screen on the iPhone has a pretty ropey resolution. When I had my Nokia N800 internet tablet the first accessory I got for it was a Bluetooth keyboard. I briefly had an HTC Touch Diamond and didn’t really like it as it had an onscreen keyboard and even the larger one it came with that was designed for its high resolution display was poor.

Before all of these I had an i-mate Jasjar (a rebranding of the HTC Universal). OK, it was a brick, but I loved its high resolution display and its keyboard. Why did I stop using it? Because I knackered it installing custom ROMs. Ah well…

So has technology moved on far enough for onscreen keyboards to be useful? Some people think so, maybe I should give them another try. One of the good things about the TG01 is that it has USB host capabilities and Bluetooth so if I really want to type a lot I can attach a keyboard.

One of the things that strikes me about phones like the TG01, and I would include the iPhone in that list, is that they are mature, convergent devices. They are phones, media players, gaming devices, internet tablets, navigation tools, cameras, PIMs and work tools. Little, connected computers in your pocket, basically. Speaking as a superannuated toddler I remember when such things were science fiction.

For the past week or so I’ve been playing a lot of K-Rally from Infinite Dreams. This game is very much like Supercars I played on the Amiga (or Battlecars on the Sinclair Spectrum, come to that) only with better graphics. It is a 3D racing game viewed from above in which you can drive as dirty as you like and are armed with missiles and mines. Brilliant mayhem fun. It has several play modes and you can build up a character along with way with enhanced cars. It is hard enough to be a challenge, but not made impossibly difficult. What is fun is that you can have it loaded within 10 seconds of activating your device, race for a minute, then quit the game with your progress intact.

A few days after updating the ROM on my totally brilliant Xperia X1 they released a new version (known as R3A). Bugger. I couldn’t be bothered to install all of my applications again. Therefore I was very pleased to see that someone had extracted the main update in the ROM, the camera software, and made it available as a .cab file one can install on phones with a previous version. The new camera software allows the flash to be controlled automatically and you can geo-tag your pictures. I found after installing the .cab file, (which is here) I had to restart my phone twice before I could set the camera options successfully.

I’ve been fine tuning my Xperia so it behaves and looks just as I wish. This is why I am not really interested in getting a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, mine purrs for me. One of the things I thought might be fun to change is the taskbar icons. Turns out this is easy to do.

The first thing you need to install on the Xperia is SDKcerts.cab. Then, so the battery meter can display in 1% increments, you install this battery driver. Finally you need to install some icon files. The set I recommend vigorously is the Misfortune Taskbar v2.0. I like the battery meter especially. I thought this icon set was so good I made a donation.

A few websites are showing the follow-up phone to my Xperia X1. The bigger display and keyboard look an improvement over my X1, but how tempted am I really? I hate to sound like a bit of a luddite but I am not sure I would instantly upgrade. I’ve got my X1 set up just perfectly, it does everything I ask of it in a manner that I find pleasing. Windows Mobile 6.1 works just fine for me whereas I feel 6.5, with its supposedly improved finger-friendly interface, might change the user interface experience to something I find less to my liking. I’ll have to have a look at one when they are out, but I think I’ll stick with mine.

I was in bed playing a game on my Xperia earlier and someone texted me to ask about a philosophical term. I'd never heard of it. Rather than head to the bookshelves or desktop, because I was most comfortable in bed, I decided to use my phone.

I copied the name of the term, loaded Opera and pasted it into the search box. The wikipedia entry came up which I read. It mentioned a few books on the subject, which I looked up on Amazon, again using my phone. I then replied to the text message with a brief summary of what I had read and the name and price of the best book on the subject. All of this on a phone whilst laying around in bed. Modern technology is brilliant.

So, naturally, I am writing this blog post from bed on my Xperia just because it amuses me to do so. Lots of things amuse me...

One of the things I really like about Firefox is the Adblocker plugin. Such a thing would be even more useful for a browser on a mobile phone as it would reduce the amount of time taken to download web pages on a limited connection and save some of that precious data transfer usage on your data plan. A bit of digging has resulted in me finding such a solution for Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Xperia X1. Best of all is dead easy to achieve.

First of all, download this file (urlfilter.ini). Then, using ActiveSync or Mobile Device Centre, copy the file to the My Device\Application Data\Opera9\ directory on your Xperia. And that, as they say, is that! When you start Opera next time and visit an ad-heavy page all of those unwanted adverts will not show up. Brilliant, eh?

Latest bit of software for the groovy gadget. This works fine on my Xperia X1 but I am sure it’ll be alright on other Windows Mobile phones. You install this .cab file, restart the phone then go to Settings and you can see the SRS control panel which allows you to make great improvements to sound quality on your phone. Makes a serious difference.

There are all kinds of wonderful gems out there that people have written for Windows Mobile. Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing with Webcam for Pocket PC.

This is a tiny program which runs in the background whilst you are taking pictures and it will automatically upload pictures as you take them to an FTP server of your choice. It’ll also take pictures at particular time intervals and upload them. I’ve been finding it quite amusing to have a free webcam running on my mobile phone.

You can get it here.

A few pounds/dollars is not so much money to be frittering away each week. So I’ve been buying games for my Xperia X1.

PDAmill are selling some fun games for a few dollars each. The two I’ve tried are the adventure game Arvale and the 3D space combat game Anthelion 2. OK, they both run at VGA resolution rather than the WVGA that the Xperia can manage, but that is not such a chore. They are both perfectly distracting in my quest to fart away days. Pretty good games if we are honest. $2.99 really is pin money, not even a pint’s worth, so even if you only play the games for a couple of hours before you get bored (I’ve played them one hell of a lot more than that) that is good value entertainment.

PDAmill also has games for the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone I admire, but I don’t feel the need to own one. I really love my Xperia. In my endless quest for the great gadget (the entertainment value of new gadgets will never be defined or reached) the Xperia X1 is that which tickles my unmentionables in the most satisfying manner (so far).

In my long post on software for the Xperia X1 I mentioned installing Flash Lite. Sadly, Flash Lite doesn’t run that many Flash-enabled websites, it is a bit pants. The solution that a lot of people have been raving about on Windows Mobile forums is to install the Skyfire browser.

Skyfire lists an impressive selection of video content it’ll play: Flash (up to version 10), Silverlight (2.0), QuickTime, Windows Media and BBC iPlayer videos. I installed it last night and gave it a go.

The first thing to note is that it is a really ugly browser, not only the UI but the way it renders webpages is highly unsatisfactory. It doesn’t seem to display pages at the full resolution of the Xperia screen, fonts and pictures seem very blocky. Opera Mobile 9.5 which comes with the Xperia looks much better.

Navigating pages is more difficult that it should be. When you try and click links it’ll zoom in and out in seemingly random ways. When it zooms in you really can see how ugly the pages it renders are. There is a zoom in/out button on the address bar, but once again Opera Mobile does this in a much more seamless manner.

Finally, it is very slow. Loading pages seems to take an age and when you do manage to navigate to video content it is really choppy and low quality. Basically, I don’t like it. I would suggest you download this only if there are Flash pages you absolutely need to look at on your mobile device.

If you just want Youtube on your Xperia then get the Youtube player and panel linked to here. This plays videos more smoothly and at higher resolution than Skyfire. You can get iPlayer running in Opera Mobile by following these instructions, again it looks better than in Skyfire.

I managed to step on the earphones for my mobile phone, this somewhat impacted on their ability to reproduce sound. So I ordered some new ones: Sennheiser CX 500 to be exact. You can get them for £35.99 from Amazon, or for £11.99 including postage from Ebay. There seems to be a slight disparity in pricing there…

I thought my old earphones that came with the Xperia X1 were good enough, I’ve only been playing MP3s through them after all. How wrong I was. When testing the new ones a couple of minutes ago I was amazed by the sound quality. The bass reproduction was quite incredible and they do a damned good job of stopping external sounds. Top bunny earphones, alright.

So I go to the partner and say that I never really thought the quality of earphones for playing MP3s was that important, being compressed music and all. He looked scornful and says, “The only people who complain about the quality of MP3 music are those who have just spent £2000 on a CD player.” I may be a superannuated, slightly spent toddler, but I can still learn things.

I highly recommend them.

Yet more software for my Xperia X1, I’m afraid. I just love my phone:)

I quite enjoy puzzle games where you can quickly solve a problem and then come back to the next puzzle a bit later. Such games are very good for playing on the underground or buses when you only have a short period of time in which to fart around. Two in particular have been sucking in my attention over the past few days.

Meon is one of those games where you have to hit all of the targets by bouncing light beams around. I played a similar game on my Amiga many, many years ago. Naturally, the graphics are a lot better on my phone. Ho ho ho. You can download a free trial here, and if you like it is doesn’t cost so much to buy the full version.

Spb Software, who are responsible for the brilliant Spb Mobile Shell for the X1, also make a few games. Spb Balltracker is a superficially simple puzzle game that soon becomes more of a challenge. You can finish off a level in a few minutes, so this is good for a quick play when you are travelling. You can download a trial (or buy it) here. If you buy it may I suggest you re-install it using the ‘install registered version’ option. When I tried registering mine just by entering the registration key into the trial version on my phone it started crashing. No such problems if you re-install.

I installed Xperia Tweak a few days ago, very handy. It allows you to change some of the default behaviour of the X1. I particularly like that you can use it to set a default panel to boot up into (ideally the SPB mobile shell I mentioned here) rather than going to the Windows Mobile Today screen and leaving you to choose a panel manually. My other favourite tweak is the ability to turn off the pointless ‘Message sent’ popup after you send an SMS. It is very handy. You can download it here. I think I might send the author a donation…

I am sure there will be more posts like this, as I love my phone and cannot help fiddling with it and adding software. For today I will update this post with an additional piece of software you should get rather than add another post.

If there is one thing I don’t like about Windows Mobile (and there probably is only one thing) it is that some applications don’t close when you hit the close button; they keep running in the background. This is not much of a problem, as modern phones are quite fast and have plenty of memory, but if you are running a demanding game (or suchlike) you don’t want background tasks running. The solution? Install tMan. This is a neat little task manager which sits in the top right of the screen. Hit its menu button and you can see, switch to or close any running applications. This is a ‘must have’ piece of software for Windows Mobile phones, it is free too. You can get it here.

One final point, as of today I am going to start tagging my posts a bit more seriously. When I first started this blog I didn’t know about tagging, but it is really time I got myself more organised.

I only recommended a couple of games in my post on Xperia X1 software, but I’ve found a couple more I like. I’ve been playing a free Tetris clone quite a lot these few days. Most distracting. You can get it here.

Universe Conquest costs the princely sum of $1.95 but is quite a good, simple, strategy game; it is basically Risk in space. I’ve been playing it a bit and it seems fun enough for very little money.

Playing games on my phone has been fun and a general success. Most of them don’t require huge playing time, and as my concentration span is not so long these days that suits me just fine.

I've had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1for just over six months and I bloody love it; it is the best phone I've ever had. The keyboard is great, as is the high-resolution display and it has a handy GPS for when I get lost. I thought I would suggest some software that takes advantage of its general brilliance.

The first thing you want to install is the SPB Mobile Shell (screenshot on the right). This is the main interface I use for navigating my phone, much better than the ones that come pre-installed.

There are a couple of things you should grab from this list of Xperia software. Namely, Flash Lite, Windows Live Search and Remote Desktop Mobile. Flash Lite will make browsing things like YouTube in the Opera browser a lot better. Windows Live Search is very powerful and will show results on a map, and Remote Desktop looks great on the high-resolution display.

YouTube will work with Flash Lite in the browser just fine, but if you are a YouTube addict you'll want to get the YouTube application and panel that are linked to here.

To take advantage of the GPS you really want to get Google Mobile Maps. Again, this looks great on the high-resolution display. You'll never get lost if you install this.

If you like instant messaging you will not go far wrong with Palringo. This connects to all major IM networks and also allows you to send sound and image files as part of your messages. This has kept me feeling connected to my friends when I've been locked up in the bin. Obviously, you'll also probably want to install Skype for cheap calls and messaging. Check your data plan allows you to connect to to Skype before you get landed with a huge bill, or just use WiFi.

I also go on IRC to chat to my friends in a schizophrenia support room. For ages I didn't have an even passably good IRC client for Windows Mobile, then I discovered IRCy which may look a bit crude, but it has full functionality. Good software.

For reading RSS feeds you can use Google Reader in the Opera browser, but I've installed Newsgator Go!, a great-looking and powerful RSS reader which syncs up with the Newsgator channels you subscribe to on your desktop.

Another crude but effective program is the blogging client the Diarist. This is good enough to leave quick blog posts when you are on the go, but won't win many awards for its design.

Finally, there are two games the Xperia owner should not be without. Xtrakt is a free 3d racing/shooty kind of game that looks an absolute treat with the Xperia's 3D acceleration. The other game costs $10, but looks such a treat and plays so well you really want to get it. It is Need for Speed Undercover, which is reviewed more fully here. It is a real game, which makes me really impressed with how mobile phone gaming is developing.

I'm just going to add to this post a bit, there are a couple of Xperia X1 websites that you might want to keep your eyes on for more software. Xperia-x1.com seems to be updated quite often and it has a category for software to watch. Xperiax1.net doesn't seem to be updated so often, but there is news there. Finally there is an official blog from Sony Ericsson here.

I've had a really groovy phone for about six months now: an Xperia X1. It has a great little keyboard, a fantastic high-resolution display and whizzy internet connection speeds. I've already installed a blogging client, Skype, an IM client and an RSS Reader. All I really needed to make this the ultimate tool for one who gets thrown in the bin regularly was an IRC client. There is a schizophrenia chatroom I go to a lot and I find it very supportive. I've been vaguely looking for an IRC client ever since I got the phone, but all of the Windows Mobile offerings I could find were total crap. Today I was fortunate enough to stumble across IRCy, which seems a great little program and the solution to my problem. OK, it is not much of a looker, but it works a treat and is cheap, too. That is just what I need.

I'm not planning a trip to the bin, indeed I am feeling quite good at the moment, but it is good to be prepared.

I had reached the end of my old mobile-phone contract, so I chose a new phone: a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. It may lack the G-sensor of the HTC Touch Diamond, but has a higher-resolution display, higher storage thanks to it taking microSD cards and a perfectly usable keyboard. I have had it about a week and am extremely pleased with it. There is a good review of it on Modaco. If you get one I strongly suggest you download the Spd Panel from their site, it is the main interface I use for navigating the phone's functions.