WINDOWS MOBILE 6.5: A NEW LEASE OF LIFE FOR OLD WM SMARTPHONES.

Dopod D810 was at its prime when it was launched about 3 years ago. If I can remember, the selling price is about RM2700 when it was launched. It was launched with WM5.0, with non functioning GPS. An official update for WM6.0 was launched about 1 year later, activating its GPS function.

However, due to the availability of new crops of WM smartphones, Dopod D810 was passed and not updated to WM 6.1 or WM6.5. This doesn’t prevent hackers especially from xdadevelopers forum to make their own updates, unofficially.

I bought this smartphone due to its GPS function, about 2 years after its launching, for about a half price of its official price. Quite a good price for a GPS unit, since the price of Garmin Nuvi at that time is around RM1k. You get a 3.5G phone besides the GPS, for another few hundred, quite a good bargain. I immediately updated the ROM to WM6.0 after buying it, since it came with WM5.0 ROM. It served perfectly as a GPS unit for my car. But it can never fight the newer A GPS units such as Nokia E71, in terms of GPS satellite locking time. WM6.0 is quite good and stable, better than WM5.0. However for WM devices, it is usually slow and lagging even though the processor is already 400MHz.

I did a search in the xdadevelopers forums and found a few stable WM6.5 ROMS for Dopod D810. Also did a search for WM 6.5 Treo 750v stable ROMS, but couldn’t find any. After downloading and reading the forums, I did a ROM upgrade for my Dopod D810. The procedure took less than 20 minutes.

First impression, WM6.5 seems to be much faster than WM6.0. The interface is also better than WM6.0. Most of the programmes seems to run faster on WM6.5 compared to WM6.0. Since using this new ROM for about 1 week, I haven’t got any autoreset or hanging on the smartphone.

SPB MobileShell was also updated to version 3.5 probably last year. The last version of SPB MobileShell, that I have used is version 2.0. Much has changed since then. The new version 3.5 has a much better interface as compared to the old version.

So, with the new WM6.5 ROM and SPB MobileShell 3.5, I have upgraded my old Dopod D810 as my secondary phone, replacing the old Treo 750v, which will kept lock in my drawer until the day the hackers from xdadeveloper can develop a stable WM6.5 ROM.

Can’t wait for WM7.0 to be launched early 2010, which for sure will be better than WM6.5..