Sprint had promised a first-quarter update for its Touch Pro2 way back in January, and sure enough, it’s delivered the Windows Mobile 6.5 boost right on time. It might not have as much punch now that we know everything there is to know about Windows Phone 7 Series, of course, but it’s still a pretty big deal — the Touch Pro2 remains one of the best Microsoft-powered phones you can buy in the States, and unlike AT&T’s Tilt2, it launched with that grubby old WinMo 6.1. It’s available now, complete with Sense “enhancements” and a variety of bug fixes — so if you’ve got one of these bad boys in your pocket, it seems like a must-grab.
If there’s one thing we’re pretty sure Windows Phone 7 Series will be worse at than its Windows Mobile precursor it’s in the running of various and sundry other operating systems. We’ve seen Android running on seemingly every WinMo handset ever created and more recently Ubuntu has been receiving the mobile treatment. Last month it was on an Xperia X1, now an HTC Touch Pro2 is getting a taste. A modder who goes by the handle sebbo90 is the one responsible for this, running basically the same technique as used earlier on the X1. It looks quite easy: just download a 200MB zip, extract it to your phone, then run an exe within. A few moments later you’ll be in open source heaven, and, from what we can tell looking at the video below, it works remarkably well. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to hit up eBay to find a used handset and get hacking.
We’d figured that RIM’s ambitious (if not questionable) project to port the juiciest morsels of BlackBerry OS to a virtual machine running atop Windows Mobile was abandoned long ago, and for all we know, it has — but the half-baked remnants of the undertaking are finally available thanks to the good folks at xda-developers. BlackBerry Application Suite, as its known, has finally found a proper home in a CAB file that’s making the rounds on the forums, and it’s apparently been bolted together with enough duct tape to work on an AT&T Fuze. Well, “work” is a relative term — you’ve apparently got to be on a BES server for it to work, you need to generate a valid PIN, and actuating the touchscreen requires a double-tap, but when you’re ready to stop punishing yourself with this craziness, the cold comfort of WinMo is just a couple clicks away. If you think you need this, odds are you really just need a Storm2, but hey, feel free to ruin your weekend trying to get this to work.
Windows Mobile 6.5 fever: catch it! AT&T had the good fortune of releasing the Tilt2 late enough to get 6.5 out of the gate, but the other guys have been falling in line ever since: first Verizon, then T-Mobile, and now Sprint’s getting in on the action. The bad news is that they’re only committing to a vague “by the end of first quarter, 2010″ window at this point, but the great news is that this appears to be more than a simple 6.5 bump — Sprint says that there’ll also be “significant enhancements to the Touch Pro2 user interface which will allow additional customization / personalization options and more integration with the applications users access most.” We’ll take it — and actually, why don’t you just go ahead and make it this mysterious 6.6 while you’re at it, guys?
So far, it seems like manufacturers (well, HTC and a couple others, anyhow) are staying on the ball about upgrading recent handsets to WinMo 6.5, and the next deserving pair comes from none other than T-Mobile USA — the Dash 3G and Touch Pro2. Of course, the unbranded versions of both of these handsets (the Dash 3G goes by Snap internationally, you may recall) were quite literally the first pre-6.5 devices anywhere to get updated way back in October, so you could make the argument that the American cousins are already way, way behind the curve. Anyhow, the carrier is saying that official updates for both models will be ready for download on the 20th of this month, so get ready to say your final goodbyes to 6.1 and start wishing that you’d received a 6.5.3 update instead.
Remember that leaked Ozone ROM from a couple weeks back? Yeah, well, it’s back — and this time it’s being offered in a very official way. PCD — the middleman between Verizon and HTC — is offering Windows Mobile 6.5-imbued builds for both the Ozone as well as the Touch Pro2, bringing it up to spec with AT&T’s Tilt2 which launched with 6.5 out of the gate (thanks in no small part to its late availability). Both updates are posted on PCD’s site, so go grab ‘em while the grabbing’s good.
Landscape orientation: a bastion of width-lovers everywhere. Indeed, hearts have to be melting on news that the leaked T-Mobile USA-branded HD2 ROM — which has somehow made it onto some Touch Pro2s thanks to xda-developers’ usual black magic — seems to have revealed a new landscape mode for Sense, the beautified WinMo skin formerly known as TouchFLO. Though this makes a ton of sense for devices like the Touch Pro2 that actually need to be used sideways when the keyboard’s deployed, we think it’ll find plenty of use on slates like the HD2, too. Won’t it?
Sprint had promised a first-quarter update for its Touch Pro2 way back in January, and sure enough, it’s delivered the Windows Mobile 6.5 boost right on time. It might not have as much punch now that we know everything there is to know about Windows Phone 7 Series, of course, but it’s still a pretty big deal — the Touch Pro2 remains one of the best Microsoft-powered phones you can buy in the States, and unlike AT&T’s Tilt2, it launched with that grubby old WinMo 6.1. It’s available now, complete with Sense “enhancements” and a variety of bug fixes — so if you’ve got one of these bad boys in your pocket, it seems like a must-grab.
Remember that 
