Improve the one-handedness of your WM Phone Edition device

James and Kevin, co-hosts with me of the MobileTechRoundup podcast (BTW, did you vote for us again today at the Podcast Awards site), both have EVDO devices on the Verizon Wireless network. Every time we talk they tell me about the virtues of broadband wireless service (download speeds are generally in the 300-700 Kbps range) and I get envious when comparing my (100 Kbps download speed) EDGE service with T-Mobile. Well, I just took the plunge yesterday and am starting my 2 week trial of Sprint's EVDO service with a new PPC-6700 (HTC Apache) device. Sprint has much cheaper data plans than Verizon Wireless and if I cancel my T-Mobile data the net increase for the faster data is only US$10 per month. BTW, I had the Treo 700p in my cart, but then switched to the PPC-6700 at the last minute because I wanted to have integrated WiFi, I wanted to load it up with my Laridian PocketBible library, and I wanted to use SlingPlayer Mobile on the EVDO network.

It has been about 6 months since I used a Pocket PC Phone Edition device as a main device and I just found a great article by Jeff Kirvin on how to tweak your Windows Mobile 5 device that I am following step-by-step since he also is now using a Sprint PPC-6700 device. A lot of the tweaks are designed to vastly improve the one-handedness of the device to try to match the superior one-handed functionality of the Treo 650 and 700 series. Tweaks that Jeff details include installing Dynamo, the ETEN dialer, Total Commander file explorer, making some hardware button reassignments, and performing some small registry hacks. I am very comfortable making registry hacks, but if you aren't there are some tools to help make the process easier. Jeff also gets into setting up and optimizing the Today screen on the Pocket PC Phone, which is where you can live most of the time on the device.

I am excited to try out the high speed wireless performance of EVDO with my new PPC-6700 and think Jeff's tweaks will help make the experience even better. I have two weeks to decide if the switch to EVDO and Sprint is worth it. Do you use EVDO with a mobile device and if so can you share your experiences?