As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new toy – a Motorola MPx220 smartphone. I’m actually lucky enough to have recently laid my hands on two smartphones. The other was a dopod 515 which was a gift from the organizers of TechEd Beijing. The dopod is nice, but I really dig the MPx220. I’m partial to flip phones, plus the MPx220 has a camera and Bluetooth.

Of course, one of the benefits of having a smartphone is the ability to write some custom stuff for it. There are a variety of tweaks available that are predicated on registry modifications. There’s a registry editor for Smartphone 2002, but I couldn’t get it to install on since my phone is running Windows Mobile 2003. Luckily, there’s OpenNETCF.org with a wide variety of useful libraries for compact framework development. They even have registry editing libraries that work from the device or the desktop. Not sure what else I want to write yet other than an app to download movie times a la the new SPOT watch movies channel, but I’m sure I can think of something!

I’m pretty impressed with the new Photo Story. I’ve been tracking this program since it was a research project so it’s been cool to watch it evolve. However, I did run into something I didn’t like in the new version. Once you’ve built a Photo Story, you can render it to a variety of target profiles. One of the target profiles is for SmartPhone. I’ve recently got an MPx220 so I figured I’d try it out. Didn’t work as Photo Story’s target profile is for SmartPhone with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile which the MPx220 doesn’t have installed. Woops. And you can’t upgrade the device to WMP10 Mobile. Double woops.

While I’m annoyed that I can’t install WMP10 Mobile on my MPx220, I’m more annoyed at Photo Story. There’s no way to build a custom target profile that would work with my phone. I was able to build an encoder profile to convert a Photo Story rendered for the desktop to be converted down to work well on the SmartPhone. Why can’t I just do that inside Photo Story?