HTC Touch Pro on Boost

1. HTC Touch Pro on ebay for around $150
2. Convert Boostmobile iDen account to CDMA
3. Profit

Profit includes EV-DO Rev.A data for $0.35/day that open up lotsa possibilities.

• Tethering from WinMo
• VoIP from WinMo
• Flashing with 6.5 ROM (MightyROM6)
• Installing Android

Following are general links for HTC Touch Pro

• Howards Boost CDMA
• PPC Geeks instructions to flash CDMA ROM
• xda-developers HTC Touch Pro CDMA thread

It is not clear if Haret booted Android could be used to debug Android apps from Eclipse.

Of all the ROMs for HTC Touch Pro out there Herman is the best (SKI and Freedom quite suck IMHO). I like MaxSense the best, second best would be Cookie, Titanium is plain WinMo 6.5. All Herman ROMs cannot provision for Sprint data, so anytime I swap ESN, I need to flash stock Sprint ROM.

WinMo 6.x

Stock WinMo 6.x is truly pathetic. The best that MS could show when it comes for touch enabled devices is a hack-hook into WndProc to sometimes recognize gestures on WinMo 6.5 phones posted on Oct 29th and as of end of Jan 2010 still having issues. Apart from that, nothing is really new in WinMo 6.5 - same old WinForm development with ugly UI centered around limited keyboard (as in key press even with no position information). So, despite that Windows Mobile Marketplace have just couple hundred apps and thus is ripe for plucking, despite that $99 might still entitle one to submit 5 apps for free (past Jan-01, 2010 expiration) as opposed to $99 per app submission, it ain't worth it developing for WinMo. (NB. students could submit apps for free and don't need to pay for Visual Studio, so what kind of applications we will have in the market place after a while?)

Bottom line is... Microsoft has very long way to go and it is not surprising that things are so pathetic. First they need to do a lot on SDK side and changes would need to be radical and it is doubtful they would be radical considering MS background and the way they implemented support for touch enabled devices. Second, considering the hassle developing for WinMo, application submission cannot cost $99 per submission. It won't work like that. Something like Blackberries $20 a pop in 10 quantities might work, $99 is plain way too expensive and until WinMo 7 gets proven track record would not work period.

Anyhow, porting games to WinMo would require porting CALayer and otherwise effort quite similar to Android port. Unlike Android thought there is no need for custom BoardView to handle touch, rather see hack above to handle touch events in the Form subclass (that would be an equivalent of Android activity). Re-read marketing for iPhone developers material and start with something trivial like FlashCards, Flickr (there is an app for posting to all blogs and alike, but no gallery app).

Sprint Blackberry cannot be activated on Boost CDMA without $50 plan or can they? May be by calling customer support once things settle down? Does it worth $90 when Touch Pro is 136? If BB cannot be activated on Boost CDMA consider Blackberry on TMO once 9 series would start selling in BestBuy.