new lease of life to my windows mobile 2003 phone

[androdev]

i have been using this i-mate windows mobile (without wi-fi) for a long time. it was close to 30K when i bought it. off late i have started toying with the idea of upgrading to a new phone. but frankly, after some brief research, i could not find a worthy replacement for this workhorse especially considering that i have to shell out close to 30K for anything that can be called an upgrade. so i dropped the idea to buy a new phone and started working on ways to make this old phone more entertaining. the beauty of mobiles with OS :-)

Browsing:
extremely happy with opera mini. it makes GPRS surfing cheap and fast.

Yahoo IM:
i used to have "Agile Mobile" messenger, but it is no longer free. Yahoo GO does not work with my phone (WM 2003). i am currently using Palringo Vocal IM for my Yahoo IM. Fantastic but with one serious limitation: u have to close one chat window to start chatting with another contact.

You-tube:
I download/save you-tube videos on my laptop with this excellent Firefox add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006 . The files are saved as *.flv (flex light video?). I copy them to the SD card of my phone. My phone has TCPMP player (TCPMP) along with FLV player plugin (SourceForge.net: TCPMP Plugin for Flash Video on PPC). All free stuff. There are softwares to convert FLV to AVI,etc. but why bother if you can play them directly. I use the free VLC media player on my laptop which plays just about any format.

Battery and memory indicator and task manager all-in-one: Vieka - Superior Technology For You (Highly recommended)

So when will I upgrade?
> large screens becomes available (Polymer Vision - The rollable display company)
> True digital camera inside the phone (5mpx is good, but still not a replacement for my digital camera)
> 3G becomes available in India (i cant watch even youtube smoothly with the current broadband!!)

Otherwise, it will be upgrading just for the sake of upgrading!

[MC Mayank]

Hey what happened to those pda's with huge screens that used to come earlier.. why is everything restricted to 2.8" now?

[spadival]

What Imate model do u have? Its possible to upgrade some of them to Windows Mobile 5 or 6.

[hydrashok]

@androdev, I completely agree! I have an O2 XDAIIi lying with me that my Dad had, uh, abused to death after I gave to to him. I've been meaning to get it alive (we don't have a proper O2/similar service center in Kochi) and use it with my second sim.

IMHO most of the current crop of WiMo phones can't beat the old ones running Pocket PC 2003 SE (Phone Edition). The 3.5" Screen, the fast 517mhz processor (and of course the dismal battery life, heh heh) make using these phones a breeze and a pleasure. The "phone" part of things has improved a bit, but still the basic stuff feels the same (mostly).

The *only* improvement I can think of (in WiMo5 and beyond) is the fact that the battery getting run down is not an issue. IN the PPC PE 2003 units, if the battery runs down, the phone goes back to factory settings. But then that's what SPB Backup is for, isn't it?