Windows Mobile Marketplace not working on HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile 6.5

Mr. Analog · December 10, 2010, 02:44:00 PM

Well, this is sad, but I finally got Windows Mobile Marketplace installed on my phone and, stupidly, it just would not connect to the server once I had it up and running.

Through some Googlin' I found out that you actually have to change a registry value for it to work. Now this post has been around for a while and many, MANY forums link to it (here if you want to read: http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/windows-mobile-marketplace-on-a-cooked-custom-rom ). Generally this affects phones using a custom ROM, this includes TELUS phones (branding, lock-in, etc).

I actually had to download a Registry Editor (CeRegEditor, very cool, very easy to use) and modify the flag to get it to work, which, it does now... brilliantly I might add.

Very frustrating and not something I expected having to deal with out of the box and it makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with Microsoft. I mean it's easy to point the finger square at vendors who add custom ROMs and I can see why MS would be a bit leery about a custom ROM sayin' "hello" to their service but man is this ever stupid AND frustrating. The Average Joe would be utterly baffled by what I had to do to get this to work, way to promote adoption through ease of use guys!

/rant

Lazybones · December 10, 2010, 08:18:40 PM

Windows mobile is dead... Windows phone 7 is the new iPhone like replacement accept it takes you backward a year in features.

If you want a functioning app store look at android, iPhone or Blackberry. Marketplace on wm was never really complete from what I remember it was more of an experiment.

Mr. Analog · December 10, 2010, 09:05:24 PM

It seems to be fairly good but yes, it's dead there's virtually no movement in that community. I just wanted to finally get the damn thing set up and I took an hour today to do it.

In general I like my HTC Touch Pro but the retarded restrictions Telus enforces make it nearly useless.

Lazybones · December 10, 2010, 10:01:06 PM

It should be trivial to get a clean rom from the xda developers site to fix any restrictions...

Mr. Analog · December 10, 2010, 10:26:47 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on December 10, 2010, 10:01:06 PM
It should be trivial to get a clean rom from the xda developers site to fix any restrictions...

It is, but the point being it should just work out of the box, this is probably why Windows Mobile Marketplace has failed. Conversely for any iPhone user, getting apps is easy.

Lazybones · December 11, 2010, 12:00:51 AM

Quote from: Mr. Analog on December 10, 2010, 10:26:47 PM
Quote from: Lazybones on December 10, 2010, 10:01:06 PM
It should be trivial to get a clean rom from the xda developers site to fix any restrictions...

It is, but the point being it should just work out of the box, this is probably why Windows Mobile Marketplace has failed. Conversely for any iPhone user, getting apps is easy.

It is not just the market place... WM is buggy as hell on some devices... when I had a windows mobile phone I had to run unofficial roms just for the damn thing to work half the time, if I was lucky..

That is what I like about the iPhone... there is no IT bull@%&# to use it... It is like TV / Console, it just freaking works but with that comes some limitations.

Mr. Analog · December 11, 2010, 12:12:34 AM

I think there are caveats to both, I can't speak for iPhone but I do know that Windows Mobile has gotten better (not GREAT, but better) there are a lot of great apps already bundled into it that make some things really easy (like RDP and VPN clients) and then there are some things that are just painfully broken (frequent lock ups, lack of easy content delivery, etc). There have been a few BIOS updates now that have made it better over the last couple of years, though there were some really brutal bugs for a while (i.e. when 2010 started the timestamps on new texts showed up as "2016", I thought I was getting texts from THE FUTURE!! LOL ).

I think a lot of what makes my experience with Windows Mobile 6.x on the HTC Touch Pro, let's say... "happier", is TouchFLO. It really wraps things up nicely and is pretty stable for the most part.

Oh! And I will say this about the GUI, it integrates things in an intelligent way. I like when I get a text or e-mail (or whatever) if the phone sees a telephone number it adorns it and then gives me options to add to contacts, make a call, etc. I love context aware features like that, very handy!