If, like me, you've ever looked at the user interface on an iPhone on an HTC device with TouchFlo and felt a moment of jealously because your Windows Mobile Professional / Pocket PC device wasn't as cool then I've got some good news for you.

No longer does your phone have to be green with envy, when it can be blue. Blue with the new "Home" interface from Pointui. They modestly describe this little add-on as the definitive interface for mobile devices and, for a usually stylus driven device, the last few days running it on my Wizard have been quite impressive.

A quick summary of what Home delivers is found on the site but to give you an idea of the number of ways this little (and did I mention free) app makes life easier they I'll repeat them here:

• Control your device via touch or your thumb with the directional control
• Smart Lists Navigation ™ with bookmarks allows you to easily locate an item in even the largest lists
• Choose the slide navigation that suits you
• One touch access to calls, email, text messages and music
• Easily see who and when calls were received, made and missed
• Using the Applet Ribbon ™ you can easily access the time, tasks, appointments, calendar and up to date weather forecasts and current temperatures
• Easily manage your sound, wireless, battery and device settings
• Easy create new emails, text messages, multimedia messages, tasks, appointments, documents and spreadsheets
• Load and switch between running applications effortlessly

I should point out though that the software is still in it's early days and has some blemishes but, as the very active forum on the site shows not only are the developers encouraging feedback they are responding and improving at quite a pace (and the build in updater means that you're never too far behind when they do release some improvements)

Despite some of the little hiccups I've found with it in the few days of using it I'm going to keep it hanging around, which is more than I've been able to say for most of the other alternative launcher apps after a few days.

So, what don't I like about it at the moment? Nothing serious luckily (and I've got high hopes these will be addressed)

• No direct link to contacts. There is a (for me) redundant top level icon for the music player. I'd happily trade that for a link to contacts. I'd happily swap the SMS link for a customizable option as well.
• The Mail icon only shows one of the inboxes (I've got three - Exchange, Hotmail and Gmail as well as SMS) ... I'd like to see that take me directly to whatever one is selected on a press and hold, with taps cycling through (or expanding the icon to show what mailboxes have new messages)
• On the Applet Ribbon I love the fact I can cycle to tasks or my calendar, but I hate the fact I can't thumb down on a specific one and have it open. The calendar takes me to today... which can be quite irrelevant.
• There are very nice replacement icons for WiFi, Bluethooth and Data connections... but the WiFi doesn't really show me if it's connecting (or when it's connected which base station)
• While I'm on the subject of the WiFi and other connections... because of the mess of Windows Mobile native functionality and the HTC Comms Manager I end up having to delve into various settings screens just to get things turned on and connecting. Not really a Pointui problem but something I wish they wrapped more intelligently)
• The hardware buttons don't work. This one is a real pain. I've mapped ActiveSync to the voice recorder button and TinyTwitter to the comms button because they're things I activate frequently - but with Home running they get ignored.
• Task manager is great - though it would be nice to be able to stop a program from it as well as switch to it.

My only other gripe with using Pointui's Home is what happens when I hit the end of their customization and revert back to a standard Windows Mobile interface in say Pocket Outlook or Pocket IE (I keep meaning to replace that with Opera but I'm too cheap! At least Skweezer gives readable pages on that screen). It's less jarring than using the HTC TouchFlo  launcher (and of course the iPhone has a consistent UX so it's not really an issue) but it's still something that reminds me that Windows Mobile is starting to show its age, especially on the Professional (touch screen) devices.

All in all there's very little that I'd say is a show-stopper, and it does demonstrate the sort of functionality which could easily be incorporated into Windows Mobile. As the UX is starting to look a little aged (like PalmOS before it) with the new contenders in the shape of iPhone, Android and Series 3 S60 devices from Nokia it's about time WM got spruced up a little... and Pointui is a good step in the right direction.

Edit: Check out this post in the Pointui forums for documentation on some of the customizations that help address some of the issues above.

Well, after an initial good start my iPhone had to go back. It was a good enough phone and most of the time was adequate. But the reliance on the PC was a real problem - if the machine went to sleep or someone else was playing a game then the phone became useless. I suspect a lot of the problems are down to the machine that was used as the host being a multi profile box so someone other than the skype user could be in control.

I did like the charging cradle and volume of the Linksys iPhone though, as well as the fact that managing quality of service (QoS) was as simple as with the standard Skype app.

So on to the next device. A Belkin Skype WiFi phone. This looks and feels like a slightly lighter version of the old Sony T610 and is totally self contained - unlike the iPhone there's no charging cradle (shame as you have to leave it tethered to the USB charger), and no USB dongle to connect back to the PC because it talks directly to your WiFi router.

The quality on this phone has been pretty good, but there are a number of issues - and I'm not sure if they're because we have a Linksys WRT54Gv6 router or if the phone itself just isn't that clever.

Initial setup is rather hard, and they really should include a wizard to help the process. For a start I use MAC filtering on my WiFi router and the only way to find the MAC address for the unit is to connect and then query the settings (Update: I did find it printed under the battery) but the process of entering my WPA2 network key and configuring it for a fixed IP address (so I could tweak QoS) is all a bit tricky on the keypad.

QoS setup was a pain. For some reason it refers to the port it's using as "Skype Port 1" - no indication of what real port it's using so setting up port forwarding or assigning QoS to a port is rather difficult. I picked the same port that Skype had been using on the PC and it seems to work - not sure if it helped though.

The big bug with this phone is that it sometimes falls of the WiFi network for no apparent reason, and then fails to reconnect properly (I've often touched a key to wake it up only to see it saying "Unable to connect to internet on XXXXX" - but clicking proceed and it re-establishes the connection just fine). It means missed calls and frustration in the house.

There are one or two other little niggles:

• The ring tone volume. It's too darn quiet. If the TV is on then forget about hearing it if it's in the kitchen. In-call the volume is okay though.
• I miss the cradle for charging (having to plug in stops it feeling like a "house" phone) - there are two metal bars along the bottom that look like they could be used for charging so maybe there's one in the works
• I'd also love a handsfree/speakerphone mode for those long conference calls.
• It would be nice if the firmware checked itself for the latest version as well as the Skype client version (a "latest version" check said it was up-to-date, but it was running old firmware)

Hopefully, thanks to the fine folks at CruchGear my next experiment in the world of Skype as a home-phone will be more positive. I just won a give-away that means I'll be trying out the SMC Skype phone (looks very similar to the Belkin unit) that comes with it's own FON router... hopefully a more reliable pairing... will know when the package arrives

After reading a bit about the iPhone in the press recently I decided to give one a try. I made a couple of calls  and on Friday night hopped in the car to go and pick one up.

As I'm not into geek box porn I was more interested in getting my hands on the toy, getting it charged (yup, it doesn't ship with a charged battery so 14 hours of toe tapping while you wait for it to juice up) and making my first call.

Saturday morning I grabbed my trusty Windows Mobile K-Jam tapped out the digits and.... success, the iPhone was ringing.

Initially I wasn't that impressed with call quality - there seemed to be a bit of a delay and voice was clipped but after a few seconds it seemed to settle on the network and, while not perfect, wasn't too much of a problem.

The handset feels quite flimsy compared to the K-Jam or the RAZR but very similar to the usual DECT home phones - we'll have to see how well it survives it's first drop!

My only other grip is dialing out requires me to enter the country code and area code, so even when calling locally I have to prefix it with +1 425 which is a bit annoying, and the Skype contacts are not immediately visible unless you copy them to the local contacts list. I know it's only one extra click but seeing as most of the time this is going to be used with Skype it would make sense to make it easier.

Yes, use it with Skype. You look confused. This is the iPhone I'm talking about. No, not the over hyped offering from Apple but the Linksys VoIP iPhone :)

While I'm keen to see the new marvel from Cupertino at home we're trying a pure VoIP solution to see if it's practical and usable, and so far it seems to be. With SkypeIn we have numbers both in the 425 area code and one for folks back in Australia. With SkypeOut we can call anywhere in the world for 2.1c/min and Skype Unlimited gives us unlimited outgoing calls here in the US.

So far it has been fairly trouble free. There are some options you should look at to involve quality of service (QoS) on your network (if possible increase the QoS for the Skype port - randomly assigned when you installed Skype, and set port forwarding to direct Skype TCP and UDP traffic on that port to the specific machine where Skype is installed).

Our Skype PC is connected via WiFi and the DECT handset allows roaming so the experience is pretty good. Of course (just like the cable VoIP offering that costs significantly more) we won't have 9-1-1 coverage but with mobiles I think we're reasonably secure.

I'd like to see the Skype integration become more seamless, and the need to dial the +1 for local calls go away but so far the process has proved to be fairly reliable and painless.

The only major improvement I'd like to see would be one handset that can connect to both Skype and Windows Live Messenger and let me use my preferred VoIP service or talk to users on either service seamlessly