Recent Articles

A while ago I wrote a detailed step by step tutorial on how to edit your Registry on your WM phone. Since then I have been asked several times, across multiple boards, which registry hacks should they do. If you are new to editing the registry and go searching across the internet, you might find yourself a little overwhelmed with how many reg tweaks you find. There are hundreds upon hundreds of registry edits / tweaks / hacks (they all mean the same thing) that you can do. Some are very specific for certain phones, some are for the more advanced users, but most are easy to do... but which ones should the average user do?

To help answer this question I have gone through several forums, websites, threads, etc... and I have picked some of the most common and helpful. (Not to mention fun, cool, and easy). This list is not meant to be an extensive resource of all the reg edits that you can do. This is a list of some of the most popular and useful reg edits to help those who may not know which ones to do when searching the web and forums with hundreds of reg hacks to choose from. I know there are loads that I have left out for one reason or another... too hard, too phone specific, known conflicts, or simply had to whittle down from the thousands to choose from. If you have a favorite reg edit that you feel I should have included, then please post it below to add to this one stop resource of the most common reg edits.

Meanwhile, read on for a massive list of Registry Edits I have Loved!

Sections:

• Performance and Optimization
• Increase your Battery life
• Eliminate Animations
• Improve Sound Quality of Speaker Phone
• Free up valuable ROM space
• Fix up Pocket IE
• Tame Alerts and Reminders
• Power up your Bluetooth
• Tweak your Interface

But before we begin, I want to give the standard warning that editing the registry can stop your phone from working... until you do a hard reset and restore your last backup. No matter if you are a noobie WM user with your first WM phone you bought a month ago, or a six year veteran WM power user, you will need to do the following 3 things before you begin:

1) You will need to download and install Registry Editor on your phone. My personal favorite, and very highly respected and preferred choice of many, is the Registry Editor included with Resco Explorer 2008. You can also use the popular free PHM Registry Editor.

2) Review a couple safety tips for editing your registry. Even if you are veteran user, please read the "Safely editing your registry" section in the Edit the Registry Tutorial.

3) Backup your phone before each time you are going to edit your registry.

Also a quick note of clarification when the directions below say to reset your phone after making a change in the registry. If you are using WM03, then you can simply reset right after you make the change, without any problems. But if you are using WM 5 or 6, the memory is handled differently. Simply put, it will take several minutes after you make a change in the registry for the change to stick. If you find that you made a change in the registry and then reset the phone only to discover that your edits are missing from the registry, then you did not wait long enough before resetting the phone. A few minutes time should be long enough in most cases. If the geek in you gets the best of you, you can find technical reasons of why this happens here.

Please also note that some reg edits may not be supported by all phones due to different WM operating systems, manufacturer or carrier enhancements for specific models, etc. On the flip side, there are also loads of really cool phone model specific registry hacks that are only supported by those specific phones. Because of this, go the the forums for your specific model of phone and you will find some threads listing many registry tweaks just for you.

Now, let's start digging in!

Performance and Optimization

Increase phone performance

This is the one that is shown step by step in the Edit the Registry Tutorial, so this is the perfect one to start with. You can change the memory used to cache fonts glyphs, this allows you to use more memory to speed up the display.

Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\GDI\GLYPHCACHE\
You can change the "limit" value :

4096 : this will slow down the display, but use less memory
8192 : this is the default value on Pocket PC, average memory/performances
16384 : this will speed up the display, but use more memory, twice the default Pocket PC value

In addition to the above edit if you have WM 5 or 6 you can also do the following:

Enable FileSystem cache

To enable the FileSystem cache, speeding up overall performance at the risk of the cache not being written on a sudden reset:
HKLM\System\StorageManager\FATFS\EnableCache = 1 (DWORD decimal)

To disable again:
HKLM\System\StorageManager\FATFS\EnableCache = 0 (DWORD decimal)

Note that by default, the cache size is zero, and you will see no effect. See "Increase FileSystem cache" below to increase the cache size.

Increase FileSystem cache

To increase the file system cache:
HKLM\System\StorageManager\FATFS\CacheSize = 4096 (DWORD decimal)

To return the file system cache to zero:
HKLM\System\StorageManager\FATFS\CacheSize = 0 (DWORD decimal)

You can set the value to pretty much anything you like.

Increase FileSystem filter cache

To enable the file system filter cache, speeding up overall performance with file management:

HKLM\System\StorageManager\Filters\fsreplxfilt\ReplStoreCacheSize = 4096 (DWORD decimal)
To return the file system filter cache to zero:

HKLM\System\StorageManager\Filters\fsreplxfilt\ReplStoreCacheSize = 0 (DWORD decimal)
You can set the value to pretty much anything you like.

Please note: When increasing Cache you are using up more of your RAM. If your phone has a large amount of RAM, then it is beneficial to increase the cache sizes. But if your phone has a low amount of RAM, like with the PPC-6800, then you can still try these edits, but if you start to run out of memory too fast, you may have to revert these back to the default or lower settings.

Increase your Battery life

General edits

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\AsyncMac1\Parms
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\Irsir1\Parms
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\PPTP1\Parms
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\L2TP1\Parms
Default value type and value are
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:1
Change to
“DisablePowerManagement”=dword:0

You can find detailed explanations of what each of these do here.

And awaaay we go: go check out the Samsung Epix at AT&T site now. You're looking at an ideal price of $99 after various rebates (mail-in or no) and a Treo Pro-cringing price of $449 without contract. Specs are exactly as we told you last night.

One notable thing here: the Epix pretty clearly isn't identical to the non-US Samsung i780. For one thing, it's the same thickness throughout the entire device instead of having a hump up at the top and a thinner area below. For another, its gagetry title is the i907, not the i788 as we'd previously suspected. It also apparently has haptic feedback, but we're going to go out on a limb and suggest that it's the standard type of haptics we've seen on Windows Mobile, which is to say it will be pretty lame and you'll want to turn it off.

Three posts in a row on the Epix -- crazy, no? If that tires you out, you'll be happy to know that our brand new baby-sister site Android Central has a G1 unboxing and quick comparison to a few Windows Mobile phones to stem the Epix flood.

If you have an HTC device that has an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.0 available, make sure you grab it by Oct. 31.

HTC has announced that the free updates will no longer be available come November.

Who should heed this news? Says HTC, owners of the following devices:

• HTC S620/S621 (aka the Excalibur).
• HTC P4350 (the Herald).
• HTC P3300 (the Artemis).
• HTC Advantage (the, er, Advantage).

So if you have any of these devices, get your download on before it's too late. And as a reminder, the Windows Mobile 6.0 update to the Palm Treo 750 (another HTC-aided device) also expires on Oct. 31.

As a few sites around the web have predicted, Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta got itself a shiny new update this morning. They've added widgets to the browser (or is it a platform now?) and also updated their SDK for development of mobile widgets, not to mention Dragonfly, a set of on-device developer tools. All that looks pretty good to us, we're just glad they've updated wishing they would update their text wrapping to match the on-device version of Opera on the Diamond series, because the current setup is really harshing our mellow. Other notables:

• Custom software keyboards are still a little wacky
• No Flash (yet)
• English Only
• You have to keep Opera running when the widgets manager is running

You can head on over to http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/ to grab the download. Ball's now in your court, er, courts Microsoft, SkyFire, Mozilla, et al.

Thanks to Jeremy for the tip!

Update: I just installed and noticed a few things. One -- my Treo Pro is pretty hacked up, so it might just be me, but it didn't seem to install over the previous Beta, which led me running out of storage memory. You might want to consider uninstalling the previous version first. Two -- Under Settings -> Advanced, there's a new slider to allow you to set your cache size. (We'd still recommend the hack that moves your cache over to the storage card if you're worried about storage memory, but it doesn't seem to be working for me just yet). Three -- the widgets are kind of fun, but we're not seeing anything that's killer yet.

We explained a little while ago a few of the reasons why we're looking forward to seeing Firefox Mobile, aka Fennec. Now, it's time to start playing.

Mozilla has posted "an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only." [via Gizmodo]

And test, we shall.

Fennec still is only actually running on a Nokia 810. But you can get a taste of it now on your desktop or laptop computer. The full version of WMExperts.com loaded without a hitch (minus Flash, of course), and I got 90 out of 100 on the Acid3 test, which is in line with those early shots we saw. Yeah, it's a release candidate on a desktop PC, but we're still starting to get goosebumps.

Check out Mozilla's alpha release page here, then get your download on, be you a Windows, Mac or Linux OS.

Edit: Wait a minute. ... Flash is (kind of) implemented? They're expecting full-on add-on support? This is looking better by the minute. Unless you're running a non-touchscreen device.

Back in May we caught a little guff for shrieking with glee when we saw the Treo 800w show up on DSL Reports. Still, though, we added the site to our arsenal of places to poke around when we're thinking about new devices. We've been checking it periodically this week (you hush) and, well, we just spotted the proverbial Sasquatch. You can head over to DSL Reports to see if you can catch the elusive beast yourself. We grabbed what we saw in the screenshot above.

That, friends, is a “Sprint Treo850e” pulling down 1060 kbps with .229s of latency on the spcsdns.net network, running MSIEMobile 6.0. The Treo 850 that we know and love is the Treo Pro. The 'e' is new to us, as is the fact that it's running on Sprint. This means one of two things is happening: Somebody is messing with your pals at WMExperts or the Treo Pro is coming to Sprint.

So, how are you Treo 800w owners feeling just now?

We all like to customize things to match our personality and tastes. From our computer

We still have a couple of weeks before we learn when the Xperia X1 will be released in the U.S. — but you can at least figure out how to use it in the interim.

Engadget Mobile spied the user guide (pdf link) to the long-awaited (and awaited ... and awaited) Sony Ericsson device. We'd previously seen a couple shots from the manual, but it's good to finally see the whole thing.

A couple of interesting notes:

• Instructions for video calling. Dieter recently gave us the good news that the North American version (X1a) of the phone will keep the front-facing camera, but don't expect to actually make a two-way video call on AT&T.
• Instructions for the built-in RSS reader. A nice touch.
• aGPS and QuickGPS. We've discussed aGPS before (and AT&T recently flipped the switch on it). QuickGPS downloads the positions of the satellites from a server and uses that knowledge to lock in more quickly.

So, yeah, we're still tapping our fingers waiting on an official release date and price.

Here's a thought: We've been expecting this thing to come out on AT&T, given the radio bands it uses. But with the number of customizations built into software side of the device, is it possible Sony Ericsson will just release it unlocked and keep meddling hands off its ROM? Probably not, seeing as how it's carrier-wed in Europe. But a boy can dream.