HTC Touch Pro (Sprint), Windows Mobile 6, and my list of the best / top applications

08 November 2008 By brian 245

After obsessing over my new HTC Touch Pro phone (on Sprint) for about a week, tweaking the configuration, downloading and testing dozens of programs -- I'm finally content that I'm leveraging at least 75% of this incredible device. Here's the list of applications / tools / programs that I've settled on. Hopefully I can save someone else the time it took to google through all of the winmo garbage out there, and if anyone has any recommendations for great tools I've missed please leave a comment!

The List:

Mapping, Tracking & GPS

Chatting, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Blogging

Photos, Audio, Video, Editing, Distribution to Flickr, Youtube etc.

Calendar Synch, FTP, SFTP, VNC, Wireless, Shell, Putty, Etc

HTC Touch Pro Configuration Tools Etc

Details:

Mapping, Tracking, GPS

Google Maps for Mobile - http://www.google.com/mobile/winmo/
Cost: Free
Self explanatory, easy, and integrates perfectly with the GPS on the Touch Pro.

GPS Tuner - http://www.gpstuner.com/
Cost: $34.00
I tried out a variety of GPS navigation packages, from full featured (like Tom Tom) to very basic. My primary interest was the ability to track bike trips & hiking as opposed to getting driving instructions spoken to me on the road (for me, Google Maps is good enough to get around on the road). GPS Tuner does a fantastic job of recording and reporting on trips, tracking waypoints, and placing all of this data on Google maps. I liked it enough to purchase it for $34.00 with one free upgrades for a year.

TrackMe - http://www.luisespinosa.com/trackme_eng.html
Cost: Free
I wanted to be able to share my location and other GPS data with friends online and had to search around awhile before I found this excellent application posted on the xda developers community forum. Developed by Luis Espinosa, the program allows you to either send GPS data to his server from which it can be shared via login & password, or you can download a set of php scripts and install them on your own server. If you go the second route, the data is stored in a typical mysql database which means you can do pretty much anything you want with it. I wrote a small Drupal module to display the google map strip you see at the top of this site using data from the TrackMe database.

Fire Eagle - http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/
Cost: Free
Fire Eagle was suggested by someone in the comments on this post. I checked it out, and indeed it's very cool -- basically a project of Yahoo that stores locations and provides an API for developers to create applications that can interact with your location data (embedded gmaps, rss feeds, etc...) There is no obvious way to automate uploading of GPS data from a winmo phone to Fire Eagle, but it could probably be done with Navizon available at http://www.navizon.com/download.asp (although I haven't tried it) -- or alternatively I've written a small Drupal module that updates a Fire Eagle account via the TrackMe database. Contact me if you're interested in the code.

Chatting, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Blogging, etc

Tiny Twitter - http://www.tinytwitter.com/
Cost: Free
It's easy enough to post to twitter via SMS, but I don't have an unlimited text plan whereas I do have unlimited data. Tiny Twitter let's you easily send tweets via the Twitter API.

TBlogger - http://darrenjohnstone.net/downloads/
Cost: Free
I have several blogs, and like to post to them on the go. If you're familiar with software packages like Ecto or MarsEdit, they make this task extremely easy on OSX / Windows. For Windows Mobile, I eventually dug up this excellent tool developed by Darren Johnstone. It's more basic than Ecto but gets the job done well, with support for multiple blogs (including Drupal), tagging and even image uploads.

Parlingo - http://www.palringo.com/
Cost: Free
Of all the tools I looked for, instant messaging apps had the most competition. The three closest contenders were Parlingo, Beejive and Fring. I tried all three -- Fring was quickly eliminated as it didn't seem to have much functionality yet in the Windows Mobile beta. Beejive was a very close contender to Parlingo, it ran a bit leaner than Parlingo and worked well for the primary function of sending text messages, but it didn't support sending audio and images. So I ended up with Parlingo -- it seems to use a bit more memory, but picture messaging straight from the phone's camera is fun and the interface is great. Only issue I've had with it so far is that it doesn't seem to work on the touch pro's wifi connection when there's no cell service.

Skype - http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/windowsmobile/
Cost: Free / Purchase call credits
On vacation this past weekend I was out of the country and had no cell reception. I did have wireless at the hotel though, and was able to use the Skype client to make several calls out. It worked amazingly well, and for $10 I was able to purchase enough call credits to last me a year.

Photos, Audio, Video, Editing, Distribution to Flickr & Youtube

Shozu - http://www.shozu.com/portal/index.do
Cost: Free
I like to take pictures & video, but I rarely manage to get them up online for anyone to see. Shozu takes care of this by allowing you to automatically upload photos and video taken on your phone to dozens of online services including Flickr and Youtube. They don't currently have a release specifically for the HTC Touch Pro, but on the recommendation of someone on the forums you can use the version for the HTC Touch Dual which also runs Windows Mobile 6. It works well, except some of the icons and fonts appear a bit small. I love this application, particularly, how it allows you to choose whether you want a photo to go to your Flickr account immediately after you take it. Oh, and on the HTC Touch Pro be sure to go into the settings and turn on Geo Tagging (tested with Flickr and Youtube, works great on both!)

Kinoma Play - http://kinoma.com/play/
Cost: $29.99
My basic need for streaming was to be able to stream radio stations from Shoutcast. Kinoma does this very well, as well as a ridiculous amount of other things I haven't had time to experiment with yet. Definitely worth the $29.99 for the full version.

CorePlayer Mobile - http://coreplayer.com/content/view/28/69/
Cost: $29.95
I wanted the equivalent of VLC for Windows Mobile and this was the closest I could find. CorePlayer Mobile is based off the same line as TCPMP -- I would have been happy with the free version except that I couldn't find anything recent / working after spending half an hour reading through posts on the xda forum. The commercial version works great and has been able to load any video I've thrown at it.

TrakAxMobile - http://www.trakax.com/software/mobile/
Cost: $12.00
I work with a lot of video oriented organizations, and therefore wanted to be able to do some basic editing and mixing of audio/video on the phone. Surprisingly, this program does an excellent job of this. I've only played with it for a few hours, but I was able to mix in an mp3 track with a video I took on the phone, as well as edit out some less appealing sections. You can check out the very silly video of Sharee & Eva at Cheeseman to see an example. Probably not for everyone, but very reasonable at the low price of $12.00

Qik - Qik
Cost: free
Qik allows you to easily turn the video camera on your phone into a live stream that you can be viewed on Qik's site, or be embedded into your own site. Remarkably easy to setup, I was streaming live within 10 minutes of downloading it.

Pocket Artist 3 - http://www.conduits.com/products/artist/
Cost: $19.95
The photos on the HTC Touch Pro are decent (3.2mp), but still 'typical' of camera phones. I noticed they often come out a bit washed out, and in need of touch up in various areas. Photoshop can make quick work of some of these basic issues, but it's not really worth it to me to copy the photos from the camera, to a computer, edit the photo, and then upload it. Pocket Artist 3 is basically a reduced version of Photoshop for Windows Mobile, and excels at touching up, drawing on comments, etc. I haven't purchased it yet, but plan to shortly.

Calendar Synch, FTP, SFTP, VNC, Wireless, Shell, Putty, Etc

zaSFTP - http://www.zatelnet.com/zasftp/main.php
Cost: $19.95
I really didn't expect to have to pay for an SFTP program. Since I spend more than half my life as a web developer, it's a high priority for me to be able to move files around between servers (SFTP & FTP) -- so I spent a long time searching for something decent. Really, this was the only SFTP program I could find. It's not pretty, but does it's job well enough. I don't think it would be worth the $19.95 to most however.

Pocket Putty - http://www.pocketputty.net/index.html
Cost: Free
The other essential tool in my life as a web developer, an SSH/Shell client. Putty is great on windows, and works well on Windows Mobile as well. This program doesn't have an installer, so you have to manually add it to the menu -- but besides that functions just like regular Putty.

RealVNC - http://www.realvnc.com/products/beta/ce/
Cost: Free
We troubleshoot our lab of video editing computers, as well as the XServe they are connected to via VNC. This program works quite well for this purpose, and I'm also intrigued to test it out as a remote during presentations..

OggSync - http://oggsync.com/
Cost: Free, $29.99/year subscription for more features
I do all of my calendaring through various google accounts. I have about 6 google calendars, and really wanted to be able to import events to the outlook calendar in Windows Mobile. This application works perfect for this. It's free if you just import one calendar, and aren't worried about setting it up to auto-import. Since I can't justify a $30/yr subscription, I just run it once every couple of days to update my main calendar.
KeePassPPC - http://sourceforge.net/projects/keepasssd/
Cost: Free
I use KeePass for my password vault. It's secure, and has a version for almost every OS out there (I'm using it on OSX, Windows, and Fedora).

WMWifiRouter - http://wmwifirouter.com/
Cost: 19.99 Euro
Tethering over bluetooth is great, but being able to create an adhoc wireless access point is even better. Works particularly well for sharing the phone connection with others on a trip, or with a client during a meeting.

HTC Touch Pro Configuration Tools Etc

Diamond Tweak - http://montecristoff.webs.com/
Cost: Free
This easy tool provides a nice gui to change a majority of the configuration on the HTC Touch Pro / Diamond.

HTorch - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=440405
Cost: Free
Let's you turn the flash on an HTC Touch Pro into a flashlight. Simple, but awesome.

Slide 2 Unlock 2 - http://www.ac-s2.com/
Cost: Free
Adds a nice slide interface for locking & unlocking the phone.

Well that's it. Took me much longer than expected to find all of them. Let me know if this list helped you out, or if you have another favorite application you would recommend!