Small Fish, Big Pond

I’ve been curious how the Windows Marketplace will revitalize the developer community for WM phones. I admit I’ve been jealous of some of the apps that come out for the iPhone; developers flocked to the store and even though 99% are useless “fart apps” and pointless gimmicks the huge volume of production means that there are still hundreds of apps that are actually interesting and useful.

WM Phones (and Blackberry and Android) often have all the same capabilities to run these programs and without the Apple restrictions they have even more freedom to use core functionalities. But without a store for developers to congregate, find customers, and make money, there hasn’t been nearly as much attention paid to the windows phones.

Now that the new store is operating I’m tempted to try out a 6.5 ROM on my AT&T Fuze again. My gripe when I ran a cooked ROM before is that the OS was TOO finger friendly. Windows Mobile has always been optimized for stylus use (originally being a PDA OS) and hitting tiny icons with fat fingers can be a pain.

The problem is that making icons and menus too big makes it’s hard to read what they say, or you spend all you’re time scrolling up and down a list that should only take up half a screen. A perfect example can be seen in this left of shot from BGR:

I’m not sure if that’s a distorted menu from some odd setting but that’s similar to what the menus looked like on the ROM I tried. Frankly I’d rather whip out a stylus if it meant I had more than 4-5 menu options on screen and they could display more than 6 characters at a time.

There are a couple new 6.5 ROMs on XDA forums that look like they may have upgraded and removed the problem. Maybe I’ll spend tonight loading a new OS on my phone while I watch the Hexagon 3hr special (that should ALMOST give enough time for a ROM change…)