I’m a big fan of keyboard-based app launchers such as Launchy for Windows or Quicksilver for OS X. If you have a large number of apps installed on your computer, it’s often easier to pull up the program you’re looking for by hitting a hotkey combo and then typing in the first few letters of the app than by sifting through the Windows Start Menu or OS X dock.

WiMoRun brings the same sort of experience to mobile devices running Windows Mobile 6.0 and up.

Basically, once the app is installed, you just select the Run app from the program list, and then type in the name of the app you want to launch.

Honestly, I’m not convinced that WiMoRun is much of a time saver, since it generally takes a lot longer to type using a Windows Mobile on-screen keyboard than a PC keyboard. But if you happen to have a ton of apps on your device, I suppose WiMoRun can save you a bit of scrolling.

The app also includes an auto-complete feature, and a dropdown list of available programs.

WiMoRun is available as a free download from the xda-developers forum, although you’ll need to register for an account to download the installer. You can also download it from Freeware Pocket PC, no registration required.

Sure, Microsoft already has an app store for Windows Mobile, called Windows Marketplace for Mobile. But like most official app stores, the Windows Marketplace requires developers to submit apps for approval, pay some cash, and jump through other hoops that might turn off small, independent developers.

And that’s where XDA Market comes in. This is a brand new third party market developed by a member of the xda-developers forum. The idea is that anyone can upload apps for free, and they can even upload apps that will only work on one specific device — generally a big no-no in the official app store world.

The XDA Market consists of a web interface for uploading and managing apps and a Windows Mobile client allowing users to download apps. There aren’t any apps at the moment, because you know, the market is brand spanking new. But if the project takes off, it should become an interesting place to find third party, independent apps for Windows Mobile. And if it really takes off, I suspect the system will become really, really slow because it’s being hosted on the developer’s home server.

You can download the Windows Mobile installer file from the xda-developers forum.

Like the look and feel of Microsoft’s new Kin phones, but don’t feel like buying a phone that won’t actually let you run third party apps? No problem. KinLauncher is an app that provides a Kin-like program launcher for Windows Mobile.

The user interface sort of falls apart once you actually click a link on the program launcher and realize that you’re still stuck with the default Windows Mobile (or HTC Sense) web browser, email, phone, and other apps. But at least KinLauncher makes the home screen a lot… greener.

You can also customize the buttons on the program launcher, although the default options look pretty decent with messaging, phone, email, browser, music, camera, settings, alarm, recent, and The Spot buttons.

KinLauncher is available as a free download for Windows Mobile. You can check out a video of the app in action after the break.

via xda-developers

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HTC’s Sense user interface for Windows Mobile phones replaces the custom Windows Phone user interface with a series of widgets and menus that make it easier to navigate with your fingertips and see your information at a glance. But if you want a really customizable UI that crams virtually every possible bit of info onto your home screen, you might want to check out MaxSense, tweaked version of the HTC Sense software that supercharges the home screen.

MaxSense is built on HTC Sense 2.5. But it adds a number of features, including:

• 3 home screens, which you can access by dragging left and right like you would on an Android phone
• A ridiculous number of icons in the taskbar for accessing WiFi, Bluetooth, network info, sound profiles, and so forth)
• Support for widgets including clocks, alerts, and weather)
• 75 quick links panel
• Task Manager shortcut

The MaxSense user interface is starting to show up in custom ROMS for phones including the HTC HD2 and HTC Touch Pro2.

The folks at PocketNow have put together a pretty detailed walkthrough of the MaxSense user interface. You can check out the video below.

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When Opera launched Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile last month, the browser was only officially made available for devices running Windows Mobile 5 and 6. That’s hardly surprising. I can’t remember the last time I saw a new application released that was compatible with Windows Mobile 2003. But you know what? It turns out Opera Mini 5 is compatible with older versions of the operating system — it’s just that the installer file wasn’t designed to work with them.

But Smartphone Magazine’s Werner Ruotsalainen repackaged the CAB installer so that it works perfectly on devices running Windows Mobile 2003 and 2003SE. And it runs beautifully on my aging Dell Axim X50v PDA.

The Dell Axim has a speedy 624MHz Intel XScale processor and a nice big 640 x 480 pixel VGA display. It would be ideal for surfing the web if it weren’t hampered by an aging version of Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera Mini 5 provides all of the features we’ve come to expect from a modern web browser including full page views, double-tap to zoom, browser tabs, and a start page with shortcuts to your most frequently visited sites.

If you have an old Windows Mobile device lying around, you should really give Werner’s repackaged Opera Mini 5 installer a try.

Because Opera actually compresses pictures and other data remotely, the browser offers fairly zippy page load times even on devices with slower processors. It also features Opera Link, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks and other data with the desktop version of the Opera’s browser.

You can check out my hands-on video with Opera Mini 5 beta on my Dell Axim X50v after the break.

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We’ve already looked at how to install a theme on your Windows Mobile phone to give it a Windows Phone 7 Series look in advance of the launch of Microsoft’s next-gen mobile operating system. But here’s a way to get just part of that look. You can install a set of icons inspired by the Windows Phone 7 Series “Metro” user interface.

The icon set includes 29 circular icons in stark black and white. You can then use a utility such as JWMD Icon Changer or Change Start Menu Icons to load the new Icon Set on a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone.

You can find more detailed instructions at the xda-developers forum.

via the:unwired

ZumoDrive is a service that lets you synchronize files on your PC with a cloud-based storage system. In other words, click on the music directory on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, link it to your ZumoDrive account, and you can pull up a web browser on any computer to listen to music, view photos, watch videos, or download files that have been shared.

The company has offered an iPhone app that lets you access your files on the go for a while. Today the company launched new mobile apps for Google Android and Palm WebOS.

It turns out the Android app is a bit half-baked. While I could use it to find files and listen to audio on my Nexus One, things got a little funky when I tried playing long MP3 files (like 30 to 60 minute podcasts). Each time I tried to listen to one of these, I got an error message and lost the ability to pause the playback or adjust the volume. The only way to stop the audio was to kill the app.

I’m not the only person having troubles. Several users left complaints about similar problems in the Android Market.

Fortunately, ZumoDrive for Android handled music files a little better. I was able to stream a few MP3s without any problems, and the ZumoDrive player even showed album art as the music played.

I fired up the ZumoDrive app on my iPod touch to see if it was more stable, and it really was. If you’re looking for a way to stream your video, music or photo collections from your desktop to your iPhone — with the added benefit of web access from any computer, ZumoDrive is a pretty nice solution. I just can’t really recommend it for Android users yet. I haven’t tried the WebOS version.

ZumoDrive offers up to 2GB of online storage space for free. If you want additional storage, you’ll have to pay for it.

The new apps are available from the Android Market and Palm’s App Catalog

You can check out my hands-on video with the ZumoDrive Android app after the break.

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It seems like every day there’s a new story about someone figuring out how to install Google’s Android operating system on a phone that was designed to run Windows Mobile. But what if you want to keep your Windows Mobile phone, but add a little geek cred by making it look more like an Android device?

XDA-developers forum member Dark Ninja has released a tool that lets you cover up the default Windows Mobile taskbar with one that uses Android-style icons. There are also a few themes that go with the taskbar.

Dark Ninja’s Android Taskbar is available for most Windows Mobile phones and PDAs with VGA, WVGA, and QVGA displays.