At the moment the phone is only available through Telesales and Online, but it should be in Sprint Corporate stores around the 28th. It is selling for $249.99 with a two year contract and after a $100 mail in rebate. My sprint contract just expired this month so this is a very tempting phone…Although people over at XDA forums are working on bringing the touch flo interface to other phones, I have it on my Mogul right now but it is a bit buggy and kind of a memory hog unfortunatly especially since my Mogul only has about 24 MB of RAM available at startup.

In the browser it says that new users can type in the code ‘phelps8′ on the skyfire website to download beta 2, I highly recommend it. The browser goes at blazing speeds because a server renders the pages and then sends the images to your phone. The flash support is also pretty awesome, the only annoying thing is that it doesn’t have an ad blocker so you are able to see those flash animated ads, and they can even have sound which kind of stinks. I would not recommend it for anything security sensitive, since everything goes through their server, but for just browsing the web it works great.

You can download the update here: http://america.htc.com/mogulupdate/

Be warned though that it is a ROM update so it will completly wipe your device. Also be sure you have at least 50% battery so that it doesn’t cut out during the install.

This home screen plug-in is pretty much the most used feature of my Mogul, since it is the first thing I see when I turn it on. This home screen mimics the home screen of the HTC Touch.

The home screen includes a nice looking digital clock, a quick and easy to read display of incoming texts, emails, and missed calls. It also includes a tab for favorite contacts which lets you easily call or send a text to one of nine people. It also has a favorite programs menu which lets you add up to nine different programs. Next it includes a weather tab which you can set up to download weather data for your city which it displays nicely with some high resolution graphics. The last tab allows you to change your phones ringing preferences from normal to silent or vibrate.

The program does take up a little bit of your free ram, but honestly I don’t miss it for all the extra functionality and convenience it provides. The other link is for the HTC Home Customizer which gives you the ability to change the order of the tabs, the look of the tabs, and the look of the clock. It gives you lots of options to change pretty much anything.

HTC Home Plugin

HTC Home Customizer

The main thing that keeps me from buying a new phone to replace my Mogul is the wonderful touch screen. I used to have a Palm TX PDA and it was great untill the digitizer shifted and my taps were no longer recognized. The screen on my Mogul has had no such problems. So I have found that using my fingers with the touchscreen is my best bet. One of the most useful programs I have now is HTC Home, which is a plug-in that gives you a finger friendly home screen just like the HTC Touch has. It allows you to have a nice big clock, a favorite programs launches, favorite contacts, weather, and more. Programs such as this and Slide2Unlock take this phones touch interface to the next level. I am just hoping that somehow someone can get the HTC Diamond’s interface on this phone…although with only 64MB of RAM it will be quite cramped. I will do a posting with more details on HTC Home later this week.

Many people suspect that some sort of program cache that HTC puts on its phones is the culprit for the HTC Mogul memory leak. I really don’t know what it is but this little program does seem to help. It will typically free up 1 meg of ram, but I have had it free up 9 megs once, but I haven’t been able to duplicate that. The program is called Oxios Memory. Once you install the cab file, you just run the program when you feel you need some more memory and it will pop up a little dialogue saying how much memory was freed.

You can download the program right here: Oxios Memory

The PocketCM keyboard is a program that when installed adds another keyboard to your list of input methods. To access it you just have to click on the arrow next to the keyboard icon on the bottom of the screen and select the PCM Keyboard. This keyboard gives you larger buttons along with a magnified view of the selected key. It will also allow you to slide your finger to another key in case you hit the wrong one, the letter is typed after you release your thumb from the screen.

It also includes auto-complete and auto-correct which helps when you type a letter wrong. The dictionary that the program uses is also expandable, if you type a word it does not know you can hit the plus symbol next to the word and it will automatically be added to the dictionary. It also has some other nice little features, such as holding down the enter key to bring up options for cut, copy and paste. While if I was typing something long I would use the QWERTY but for replying to a text or something along those lines this little keyboard definitely comes in handy.

You can watch a video and download the keyboard from the PocketCM website here.