My attempt of WiFi phone with Dell Axim x50v.

I was able to lay my hands on a Dell Axim x50v. It has very good wireless internet support and pretty decent battery life. I am not a phone person and I only actually call at home or at school where they both have WiFi coverage. So I decided to throw away my old phone plan and start a new adventure. I am a believer in WiFi and in the end, I'll write a little paragraph of my envision of WiFi phones.

I wanted the phone to be perfect so I did much research. I got Skypein and will get Skypeout (for those who don't know what Skype is. It is a phone you use over the internet effectually which has pretty decent

Back to the phone, which is the more technical part. It came with windows mobile 2003 which isn't really a bad mobile operating system. I am anti-microsoft in a way, in a good way but you must admit the compatibility of Microsoft products in spite of their monopoly's push.

Here come the real improvements. First, I applied WM5 A01 update for Axim X50v. Then I used a tweaked version of WM5 A03. The first patch is a standard Dell patch, so just carefully follow their instructions.(By the way, the claimed enhancements in Windows Mobile 5 are improved user interface and more robust wireless. The A03 patch I am pointing you to got rid of some other bloated things. Read On.) With the second, there's an instruction from the developer's thread which is quite succinct. Here's what you do:

1. Get a SD card. The storage capacity should not be a problem. My digital camera flash it to FAT16, but you need FAT32 (a format of partition) so you can download Pocket Mechanic to format it. The software is not free but we're just gonna use it for this, so just get the trial.

2. After you install pocket mechanic, format the SD card to FAT32 with your handheld. Then copy the two files you got from WM5 A03 onto the SD card. Then press wireless+power and poke the reset button. Hold press and power until the quality when you call other people with traditional phones and when they call you. It is especially famous for cheap international calls because they utilize internet connection to operate at a lower cost.). It costs 18 and 9 respectively to have 3 month calling in and calling out unlimited. It is a pretty big save. The only limitation is that you have to call with a computer or via your PDA through wireless internet.SD Image loader with a blue screen comes up. Then press the action key twice(the key in the middle at the bottom of your device. ). The rest is to wait.

3. In the end, hard reset by pressing power and the reset button.

In both of the processes, be patient.

Then you get something like this:


Isn't that beautiful. You may get the blue theme depending on what theme you originally had. I had the blue so I got blue. The ROM maker got rid of MSN and transcriber and saved us tons of memory. You can get the transcriber from here. It is the .cab installer. You copy it into your program files and run it from file explorer. In my personal opinion, there are other useless stuff. But this is the only tweaked version I could find. So better less tweaks than none. You could actually get WM06 too but I just don't see that much an improvement and over-recent systems unbelievably slow you down as you may have experienced with your laptop or desktop.

But we don't need MSN really. There are many good web IM services for replacement and with the small storage, we actually save a lot of memory and disk space. Microsoft makes our things bloated. I don't appreciate that.

Then I installed the registry editor to tweak things to make the PDA perform better and opera Mobile. You have to get opera Mobile I mean, it's faster than Pocket IE and it supports tabbed browsing. Opera is like the old time Netscape fighting IE. They really have killer features. And of course Skype for Mobile phones to actually accomplish my WiFi phone plan.

So much for now and if you're interested in the tweak/software part, keep a bookmark and come back later. I'll be writing about all the pros and cons after I have experienced all the effects.

PS.
Thanks for the developer at xda-developer forum for offering us the great tweaked ROMs. They're also trying to port Android into X50v as seen here. It'll take some work but it is a great idea. Imagine the day you can almost customize the system whatever you want, let the system have whatever components you want. It opens the door to much better performance and capability.

Here're the hacks I've been using:

http://paulsdigitalworld.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-mobile-registry-tweaks.html

And softwares I've been using or considered useful for some people:

http://paulsdigitalworld.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-mobile-pocket-pc-softwares.html


More about WiFi phone.

I've been considering this for a while and I think this is the trend of technology. I've also reviewed Sony Mylo. But it is much less sophisticated compared to This solution. However, I wonder if the limitation of WiFi range will obstacle its replacement of a traditional cell phone. I seriously doubt things like Hotspot@home because the switching thing doesn't seem very rigorous. So we really need some long range WiFi technology. But I believe WiFi will certainly replace GSM or Edge or 3G in the future. We need wireless coverage for laptops everywhere anyway so there's no reason not to utilize it for our phone and it's much more cheaper.

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