A pox on thee!

I have succumbed to the upgrade bug, but I must admit only partially. As a fan of handheld PCs, I have been looking out for a reasonably cheap HTC Universal for a while. Considering that these juggernauts used to cost an arm and a leg, it is amazing how far prices have fallen in the last 18 months since they came out. That said, they are still pretty cool devices - full keyboard, VGA screen. Most importantly though, there is a huge community out there dedicated to hacking the device, and several builds of Windows Mobile 6 are available.

Anyway, the way I see it, my h4350 is a great device for Skype, but it is always running out of memory and cannot run Skype, Messenger and Pocket Internet Explorer at the same time. Another annoyance was that the browsing experience on a QVGA screen is very limited.

So, when I received the HTC Universal, I flashed it with Midget's Windows Mobile 6 ROM (version 7 I think), then set about loading on the replacement programs - Skype, Opera Mini, and Deepfish browser. My early impressions are that the browsing experience, even using PIE is infinitely better, especially in high resolution mode, and the new Messenger with it's voice clip feature is pretty stunning. Skype also runs beautifully and looks great.

All in all I think it was a justifiable purchase, but now I need to find a role for the old iPAQ.