I use a Windows Mobile. To be more specific, I use a Windows Mobile 5 device branded by the now bankrupt i-mate. These days I just tell people that I have an HTC seeing as a lot of the younger folk don’t seem to have heard of i-mate. Coming back to the fact that my i-mate K-JAM runs Windows Mobile 5.0, it tends to get a little boring at times. Getting a new device at this time is not really appealing to me since the kind of smart phones in the Indian market are quite lackluster.

So, from time to time I wander among the interwebs and see if there are any new gimmicky freeware that can spruce up the old interface of my WM5. On one such excursion I came across Androkkid by SimoSoft Projects. Androkkid is not just another WM skin. Coded completely in .NET, Androkkid gives me the ability to have the Android interface on my less than capable WM5 device. I have only really tried Android phones in a showroom for a short period of time. Androkkid does a fairly commendable job of giving me the same experience. Which is commendable because of the fact that it is running on a device clocked at 195mhz and very limited amount of memory.

Here is the main screen after Androkkid loads. This isn't the default screen. This is the one with the look and feel of the Hero's interface.You can see 4 widgets on the screen that I put there. The top bar was misbehaving so I disabled it.

If you are familiar with the Android interface, Androkkid will be a breeze for you to use, and if you have never used an Android device before, this will be a good place to learn without breaking anything. The interface features a lot of the Android functionality that we have been hearing about like multiple home screen and widgets. You can setup Androkkid to use the simple Android interface or alternatively the HTC Hero interface. The widgets can be dragged and placed anywhere in the screen and removed by moving them to the bottom bar. You can also choose to use the Androkkid top bar (which looks like the Android top bar) or the standard WM top bar. There are also a lot of community provided themes and widgets available online to try and use.

This is the "All Programs" menu that slides up from the bottom. All the programs currently installed in the system will show up here.

Androkkid currently only works in portrait mode but the folks at SimsoSoft are working on making this a better offering. The notifications are a little difficult to access since the home screen sits on top of it all. The only problem that I faced was that every time that I enable the Android top bar where all the system icons appear, the whole interface starts flashing and flickering. Apart from that I have really liked the implementation. The other thing that needs to be fixed is the way that the icons look in the All Programs area. They get a very jagged look and really spoil the whole experience.

So if you have an older WM5 or 6 device and want to see it look and feel like new, give Androkkid a try.