Yeah Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly *the best* image of WM6.5, but it’ll have to do – besides, you’re supposed to be here so you can read my spleen venting, not look at pictures I managed to find on Google.

So, without further ado… where to start…

Ok, first thing is the greatly improved start menu – it’s now a scrollable/flickable menu which does work rather well, although the edition I used doesn’t have those hexagons visible and also seems to lag horribly whenever I’m on a Skype call (which I suppose is understandable) though it’s a bit of a pain in the arse because I wrote a program that turns off the screen and sticks the device in low-power mode (wonderful for the battery) and it means you can talk for hours with the WiFi burning away.

Still, I should acknowledge that the ROM I’m playing on is a test one, so perhaps the final thing should be much better… and speaking of which, it should be out this month (in an earlier post I said WM7, I should really correct that to WM6.5)

Internet Explorer is vastly improved (though there’s some pretty gay GUI fuckups that need to get sorted) and the Javascript engine in it is very good, as is its rendering capabilities, definitely outdoing Opera in some respects. Although the one thing I think we should see is some sort of new game for it – the current ones are pretty old now, and I reckon something small and fun wouldn’t be a bad idea to chuck into the OS, for those times when you’re bored/travelling/using the toilet.

Manila definitely complements it quite well as the default Today screen is alright, but still a bit wanky and definitely not up to par with Manila at all – especially when you’re talking about the new Manila versions.

Right, that’s all I’ve got to say for now, Shove it.

But for now, available at htc-unlocks.com is our Touch Pro 2 Unlocker with the usual features of SIM, CID and the ubiqitous Security Unlocking capabilities – and of course Hard-SPL into the bargain, which is naturally just what you want if you also intend to debrand your device (because let’s be honest, most providers ROMs are utter shite)

Those of you who have the rather sexy “worldphone” edition of the Rhodium (this is the one that’s both CDMA and GSM) – unlocking this one is currently a W.I.P. but I have to say, the whole concept of a PDA worldphone is very sexy to me, but I have the “mere” GSM one, which is still great looking, probably just as well I don’t tend to travel to exotic places (or the middle east) that much.

Either way, this is much less of a brick than the HTC Touch Pro / Fuze was… instead, you get the compromise of a keyboard adding a bit of bulk, combined with the lovely screen size and res sported by the HTC Touch HD.

I have to admit that it’s very difficult choosing between the Raphael and the Kovsky in terms of picking a favourite – though incidentally, they are pretty much the same device, right down to the hardware initialisation, one could draw a parallel to the Cheetah (Treo 750) similarity to the Hermes – though they didn’t have the same screen.

Anyway, onto the real stuff: the Kovsky Unlocker is available at http://kovsky.htc-unlocks.com with all the usual trimmings of Security, CID and SIM unlocking available – so you can lob a Blackstone radio on it if you really want to, or just get a warm fuzzy feeling from the cool banner that shows during boot-up.

Finally, as a somewhat interesting bit of trivia – the Prototype Kovsky has an extra button on it (and half the RAM sadly) but additionally, when it boots up or you stick it in bootloader, the screen is upside down until WM starts booting, if anyone knows why, answers on a postcard

Admit it, you fucking want it… I fucking want it; I want to have its fucking bab… OK too far.

Either way, it’s a bloody nice device and one which I really hope I’ll be able to get hold of soon and have a good play with – gotta love that chrome eh?

Anyhoo, in other news… Blackstone unlocker is released finally, available at http://blackstone.htc-unlocks.com and what’s more, we’re gearing up for the Topaz which should be released today in fact – just as soon as you whiney bitches on IRC get your Hard-SPL… then we just need to get the Rhodium sorted out.

For some reason I do feel compelled to write enough content to extend past the image on the left, which I’ve probably already achieved if I bear in mind the column width on the front page – but I’m typing this in from the editor which is longer, so I suppose I should think of something interesting or important to say… ooh, I know – hopefully, we should be getting WM7 in September and it *should* be available for Topaz and Rhodium, though this on the assumption the release doesn’t get set back due to delay (or brought forward due to a leak)

I do also have this niggling feeling that the WM7 SPLs are going to be totally different from the WM6 line and quite possibly won’t be too happy if you try and flash a WM6 OS back on without downgrading the SPL as well, but we shall see.

Currently we’re sat here going over the last modifications before packaging it up, so it’ll be here soon folks!

It’s Done, it’s out, etc etc, now go Download it

Also, if anyone’s looking to sell a Touch Pro, please let me know – the one I’ve been borrowing from a friend is going back, and I’m hooked now

It runs Windows Mobile 5, but since they remain government property, probably best not to tell anybody you nicked one if you do.

And now onto the HTC Converse… this is basically the T-Mobile Shadow II, there’s pictures leaked on the net so I won’t bore you with them, however, what I will do is give you lovely folks some specs:

It Runs WM 6.1 but sadly it’s just quad-band GSM, so no 3G, also contains a rather pathetic TI Neptune running at a not-so-blistering 260Mhz, though she does have 256Mb of ROM, which isn’t so shit, along with the usual WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities.

If you want my opinion, this is a poor-man’s HTC Nike.

Anyway, thought I’d nip one in before the end of the month so this blog thingy doesn’t look like a total sham.

So, the HD is out, it looks quite sexy but personally I’m biased towards stuff with a keyboard, so the “HD Pro” (HTC Rhodium as I prefer to call it) will be a boon, if indeed it sees the light of day any time soon.

Meanwhile HTC are working on the Panther, which is in fact a Palm device, but you’ll know it when you see it no doubt, as well as a box for your car that will run Windows Mobile Automotive edition… sounds exciting, I’m sure GM will be popping it in their ailing line of vehicles to try and tempt people away from cheap Japanese stuff.

So, Hard-SPL…

As you’re probably aware, since the Diamond, HTC decided to get shitty and MPU the area the SPL executes from; this was real fun for the SPL coders as they now had to totally move the data section because any attempts to write to the RAM area from the ARM11 would silently do nothing and naturally, when data you’re expecting to be there isn’t, you usually crash… so anyway, the way around that was simply to relocate the entire SPL to an unused area of RAM… mainly a trial and error job, but not too bad since the virtual address it was originally located at wasn’t really anything significant.

Now we move onto the HD… The same sort of bollocks is going on again, but this time, they’ve managed to find a way to make it sodomize itself during boot. Naturally, it’s a pretty puerile measure and nothing new, just a case of driving the car through a swamp instead of a marsh… or in layman’s terms “it’s going to take a wee longer”

This is a bad joke right? please tell me this is a bad joke? no? shit?

Ironically, The actual short selling business got blamed last time around when the great depression was on, I think even Keynes took the opportunity to have a bitch about it – though of course, it’s utter fucking bullshit, you might as well just ban selling too, then we can make sure all stock prices only go up… fucks sake.

The silver lining (I guess) is that they haven’t banned short-selling across the board, and limited it to select stocks. Unfortunately, one of them is CME, which pisses me off no end as that just so happens to be one of my favourites to trade; only being able to go long on the fucking thing is a bit of a piss off to say the least.

I think the thing that disgusts me most is the belief and will of the government to try and basically manipulate their way out of a recession, I suppose you can only reduce things to a puppet economy so far before you totally lose control, so let’s see what happens next…

Speaking of puppets, I think that basically sums up the FSA to me now – a mere puppet organisation serving government interests, and the SEC is almost as bad. I’m partially thankful I don’t bother with the UK markets, but then, statements like this just annoy me:

“The Commission is committed to using every weapon in its arsenal to combat market manipulation that threatens investors and capital markets,” – SEC chairman Christopher Cox.

Is that not just the most ironic statement ever? – Yeah… fighting manipulation with manipulation, fucking brilliant. Sadly Mr. Cox, the only thing threatening investors and capital markets is you – the ban on short-selling is fucking stupid.

The one useful thing he did do was to ban Naked Short Selling – I fully support this; It’s not fair game for hedge funds to place sell orders continuously without bothering to back their short sales on borrowed certificates, it’s like buying goods on fake money so you can sell the goods back to the seller for a higher price, take back your fake money, destroy it, and keep his real money. (the inverse here is that it creates fake stock certificates rather than fake money). But beyond this, the whole thing is a fucking joke.

In any case, this bullshit better prove to be short lived or I will not be a happy fucking bunny.

Ah the good old days, the days before TransferMSCertBuffer, signed code, MFG SPLs and MPUs.

The one thing I do love though is the NBH, the NBF was horrid, crap, shite and a pile of wank, though of course, this introduction of signing wasn’t so good… life could have been worse I suppose, they could have adapted NBF for raw signing and that really would have been bollocks.

Now we’ve ended up with three common bases, HTC do their utmost to ensure that the shipped SPL is as boring and tied down as possible, and now they’re actively trying to stop you overriding it.

Basically there’s a common base for NAND, and another for DOC and yet another for OMAP (which, as it happens, tends to use DOC for storage); the NAND/DOC bases are relatively similar – for example; if you replace the HTC cert with your own, you’ll find you can happily load your own diag images and whatnot… unfortunately this isn’t the case on the OMAP and for some reason entirely beyond me, they require the Diag cert for diag images, so you have to replace that too, or just patch it.

I’ve grown rather fond of signed code; it does minimize idiocy, although on the OMAP devices (some, not all) we find that the SPL is a bit of a disaster because on occasion, it does become very easy to get yourself stuck in SPL permanently, since HTC compile the odd one to always boot to update mode before doing the actual ROM update (is one team a bit more paranoid than the other or did they just get bored or something?)

Of course, one should be somewhat grateful for the fact the startup code on these things is relatively robust since the fact the SSPL can boot at all shows that the initialisation done isn’t bad since it doesn’t die on its arse too often.

Now onto the latest devices… there’s this little thingy called the Datamover or Dmov for short… right now I’m not entirely sure how it can be utilised but it does seem to service a spot of intercommunication between the ARM11 and ARM9 so… just what can be done with it exactly remains to be seen, though of course, one can still de-gay the ARM9 boot procedure with a spot of runtime code.

You know… I can see why they changed from “Engineering Mobility” to “Smart Mobility” – Have you noticed how the former does sound a lot like they manufacture crap for the elderly? Actually, I’ve ruined it now, they both sound like manufactured crap for the elderly.

Oh yes granny, check out what you got from the people at High Tech Chairlifts; just be careful though, you need to update the firmware every few weeks and if the power goes when you’re at the top you’re going to fly all the way to the bottom, which might be better since it will run rather slow; they never licensed the proper drivers for the motor.

On the HTC Diamond, the ROMs have a check built into the kernel and rilphone.dll to have a poke at a GPIO to see which region it’s from; if you patch the kernel one out, it will boot, however the rilphone.dll check will cause it to issue a command to the radio (aptly named the BRIC command by HTC) although it doesn’t kill the radio, it just makes it shut itself off… so again, this can be patched out.

Of course, this just goes hand-in-hand with their miserable MPU protection that they added to further shit on attempts to load an SSPL to the device… now come come HTC, unless you plan on marking the entire OS RAM space as read-only which would definitely cause problems (ok, I’m understating, the OS wouldn’t boot) – the SPL can always be moved around to wherever is preferable.

Personally, I think this is all that bloody Grace Fuller’s fault.