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Windows Mobile 6.1 setup notes

Disable 6.1 threaded-SMS (which takes up too much screen real-estate with copyself messages) and restore the simpler 6.0 approach: edit the registry under HKCU / Software / Microsoft / Inbox / Settings / (possibly OEM) SMSInboxThreadingDisabled DWORD 1 + reboot. (There’s also a SystemFontPercent value, but it doesn’t seem to honour changes.)
Some WM6.5 phones also ship with “HTC Messaging” which has trouble displaying large fonts (or Chinese etc, even when a suitable font is installed on the device): this requires a patch to disable: install NETCFv35.wm.armv4i.cab, restart, check it’s enabled in HKLM / Software / Microsoft / .NETCompactFramework, restart, install Zenyee_Disable_HTC_Messaging_1.2.cab, restart.
Beware this patch seems to have a race condition on startup: if you have a *lot* of messages stored, and you restart your phone while the Messaging application is hung, and the startup is being unusually slow, and you attempt to re-launch Messaging before the patch’s startup script has finished running, then you can lose *all* your SMS messages (since your last backup) and your email accounts.
Even with the patch, SMS will be omitted from the “Today” screen count if you’re using the “Messaging” item, but if you’re used to using that item as a shortcut to messaging, note that on WM6.5 you’ll need to manually organise the Start Menu anyway: the top-level shortcuts are gone, so the only way to reduce clutter from less frequently-used programs is to move them to a subdirectory, and while you’re at this you might as well remove HTC Messaging and leave “Email” in a prominent place for both tasks. You’ll then need to address the threaded-SMS issue above (at least this isn’t an issue if you *don’t* disable HTC Messaging, but that’s small consolation if HTC Messaging has font problems).
If customising the WM6.5 start menu, don’t be tempted to copy the resulting “Start Menu” or “Programs” folders as-is to a new device: doing so can render the start menu empty on boot (meaning you’ll have to look up how to hard-reset your phone using only the hardware buttons). The *contents* of the Programs folder can be copied.
After installing the Chinese font, on some devices you also need to set HKLM / Software / HTC / HTCMenus / FontFace to MS Song and restart
Email setup
Microphone sometimes mutes during speakerphone calls: some versions of the Touch Pro 2 (and possibly others) do this; to avoid it, set “Reduce noise in phone calls” to “Never” in Settings / Personal / Phone / Advanced, and in the registry set HKCU / ControlPanel / Phone / Sleep to 0. Otherwise try toggling Speakerphone off and on again when the other party indicates your microphone has muted. If the problem then returns much later, try rebooting the phone at that time.
Problems playing MP3 files on SD card: Use GSPlayer (it has better buffering). TCPMP crashes on 6.5.
Disable the “connect to a Windows PC for updates” nag that’s present on some HTC WM6.5 phones (the update process wouldn’t work nowadays even if you *did* have a Windows PC): set HKLM / Software / HTC / HTCSettings_Improvement / DisableWindowsUpdate to 1
Internet Explorer on 6.5: you might want this Python script to index the “Favourites” bookmarks
Opera Mini 5.1 (2010): contains CSS rendering bugs that can result in excessive spacing. Try turning on “Mobile View” in Settings (among other things, this sets the CSS @media type to handheld instead of screen; version 15 on Android etc calls it “Data savings / Single column view”). In 2016 Opera started inserting advertising links above pages in Mini, giving the *false* impression that the site itself is involved in third-party advertising when it *isn’t*. Mid-2017’s ‘interstitial’ advertising wasn’t much better: it gives the false impression that a site *linked* you to an advertisement when it didn’t. If you *must* continue to use Opera Mini despite this unethical behaviour, please try not to judge the sites you visit by the advertising that Opera sometimes adds without their consent.
Contact photographs (in case you want to copy some from IM or similar):
In WM6.5 high-DPI (480x800) phones, Album’s “set as contact icon” option appears to require a picture of size 270 × 270 (but saves as 268 × 268). Smaller pictures can be scaled up, but larger pictures can only be cropped, so any scaling down must be done before the picture is loaded onto the phone. (If the picture shows rotated when the device is in Portrait orientation, try putting the device into Landscape orientation before using this function.)
Older WM phones usually use size 72 or 144, although they will display other sizes in contacts imported from MMS.
Phone unlocking itself: Some 6.1 phones can unlock themselves due to spurious triggering of the “keyboard slide” sensor by magnetic fields, dust etc. An obvious workaround is to set a 4-digit PIN in Settings / Lock, but you might prefer to set HKLM / HARDWARE / DEVICEMAP / KEYBD / SlideWakeup to 0 and restart. This setting is a misnomer: the phone still “wakes” but does not automatically unlock. It can still be unlocked by screen rubs in a pocket, so if people still tell you your phone has been calling them from your pocket, you may have no option but to set a PIN, even though doing so gives very little added security and greatly reduces convenience (especially if you want to put incoming calls into ‘speakerphone’ mode for SAR reduction, as this will now require *seven* taps, during which time you might not be able to hear the caller).
High CPU usage, battery drain and missed keyboard/screen events—first thing to check for is an improperly-fitted screen protector that could be “confusing” the touch-screen’s scanning circuitry. Removing this might not *completely* solve the problem however.
Faulty or missing direction pads can sometimes be worked around by using a combination of the touchscreen and the up/down slider on the side of the device.
Some Task Manager programs can interfere with the ability of the hardware ‘softkeys’ on some 6.1 devices to pop up the ‘softkey’ menus. This change takes effect until the next reboot, although softkey screen taps still work in the meantime. (These task managers might still be useful for checking for runaway processes, but will need to reboot after to get softkeys back)
WM5torage on 6.1 is likely to need ‘disable RNDIS on activate’ (the check mark might not show; try registry HKLM / Drivers / USB / FunctionDrivers / WM5torage_Class / Tbs_RNDIS = 0). Use WM5torage or equivalent if the phone does not ship with working “USB disk” software of its own.
Bluetooth problems: try switching on “Receive all incoming beams” under Beam. (This is no longer to do with IR as it might have been in early models, and leaving it off can lead other devices to give misleading error messages like “another application is transferring data with the device and it may not accept additional connections”, so it may be best to leave Beam on and just use Comm Manager to switch off the entire Bluetooth stack when not in use.) If Beam is not available, try Bluetooth / Advanced / File Transfer / Allow incoming file transfer connections.
Some WM6.x phones have an IR facial proximity sensor, which can be seen on IR cameras as a small strobing light. This runs continuously and is not related to or affected by Beam settings.
Home screen key reassignment (also on WM6.0 and WM6.5): registry / HKCU / Software / Microsoft / {Today|Home} / Keys / {112|113} set default to key’s label and set Open to e.g. \Windows\CommManager to launch Comms Manager when that key is pressed (you can also set it to a shortcut, e.g. \Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Contacts.lnk).
On WM6.5 the “Phone” settings are now hidden in Comm Manager: tap to the left of the toggle switch to access them. Disabling 3G is in the “Band” setting.
Wenlin—this *is* possible to run on 6.1, but you have to compile it with MSVC 2005 or 2008 (not cegcc, and not newer versions of MSVC which have dropped support for Windows Mobile). I was able to compile it on an old MSVC-2008 “non-commercial” installation, but Wenlin probably can’t distribute the resulting binary as they’re commercial.
Gradint—still works on 6.1+ but without GUI and without eSpeak (you can use synth-noTk.py to demonstrate some syllables); if there are errors about NoneType unicode coerce, try reinstall. (eSpeak and Tk files can be deleted)
My SBMinutes call time checker should still work if you don’t want to use wm6minutecount (anyway wm6minutecount can have trouble reading logs on 6.5 and is not quite as configurable as SBMinutes)
PocketPuTTY: on some 6.1 phones this fails to open connections unless a data connection has already been activated (by the Web browser or whatever), and beware timeouts; might pop up a question about server keys *behind* the main window (going back to the Today screen should reveal it); use terminal-type string putty if server supports it (e.g. Debian ncurses-term package), otherwise try vt220 (the default xterm can have arrow-keys issues in some programs)
You might want to turn on the TCP/IP compression options under Settings / Connections / Connections / Manage / Edit / Next / Next / Advanced.
WM’s Skype CAB was left behind by the Skype network in early 2017, so don’t bother with that
SMS validity period: This appears to be fixed at “network default” (typically 3 days), with no way to change it, perhaps because Microsoft’s own developer documentation is vague. For the fourth parameter of its SmsSendMessage function, they said “This is not interpreted as a normal SYSTEMTIME structure”, but did not explicitly say how it *is* interpreted (other than citing the GSM 03.40 specification, which describes a 7-byte BCD-like expiry format, but that doesn’t tell us which of SYSTEMTIME’s 16 bytes we have to set to make Microsoft’s library map onto it), so I expect application developers leave this parameter alone. There does not appear to be any standard way of asking the network to change its default either.
DPI issues: in the registry under HKLM / Drivers / Display / GPE there is LogicalPixelsX and LogicalPixelsY, which are normally set to 96 (decimal) on QVGA (240x320) and 192 on VGA (480x640) and seem to represent 3/4 of the device’s “real” DPI (128 or 256); these figures would be correct if the screen were 3⅛in at 3:4 aspect (3.64in at 3:5) and larger is a bonus, but 2.9/2.8in screens shrink it. If your favourite application’s largest font setting is “20 points” then it’ll be more like 18.4pt on a TyTN II or 17.9pt on a Touch Pro (the 3% shrink when moving from a TyTN to a Touch *is* noticeable, even though spec lists often approximate them to the same screen size). You *could* try increasing those registry values (e.g. from 192 to 198 or even 214) and reboot, but doing this can cause display problems such as:
Irregular-width bars in battery and signal gauges
Disappearing but still functional Start and Window-dismiss buttons
File Explorer displays incorrect folder icons
File Explorer is missing its drop-down navigation (but can still navigate with soft-keys)
Settings has some missing icons (but text is still there)
Intermittent “No program memory available” messages when memory is nowhere near full (it’s probably a general failure handler misfiring)
Comms Manager displays very small and is navigable only by keyboard
Contact details view is blank in both portrait and landscape modes

the latter issue being a probable show-stopper if you want to use the phone function.

Legal

Usual disclaimers apply—all the above is at your own risk. All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated. Android is a trademark of Google LLC. Bluetooth is a registered trademark held by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. Debian is a trademark owned by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. HTC and Touch are trademarks of HTC Corporation. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. MP3 is a trademark that was registered in Europe to Hypermedia GmbH Webcasting but I was unable to confirm its current holder. Python is a trademark of the Python Software Foundation. Skype is a trademark of Microsoft in the US (but not in Europe because it was too similar to Sky). Wenlin is a trademark of Wenlin Institute, Inc. SPC. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Any other trademarks I mentioned without realising are trademarks of their respective holders.