I recently got myself a T-Mobile Dash aka HTC Excalibur. It is indeed a lovely piece of machine - a great usable QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth, Wi-fi, Edge, touch-sensitive Jog Dial - you name it, it has it. All this is packed in a very sleek, elegant package.

One of the best things I like about the phone, is that its a Windows Mobile Smartphone - ultimately extensible and incredibly intuitive. Now I can get myself one of the high capacity micro SD cards, and load the phone with tonnes of applicaitons out there. From traffic condition to maps, all will be at my finger tips. And did I say, I can program it too? One of these days, I will write a compact framework app!

One of the cool, unique input features that the phone supports is a touch-sensitive Jogger Dial found on the right of the screen. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box Jogger can be only used to change the volume of the phone. I feel this is a waste of such a great feature - Im not sure what HTC/T-Mobile were thinking when they did this.  In fact, it is irritating that it changes the volume when you accidently press it while talking on the phone. 

However, the creative folks on Howard forums have reverse engineered a solution to fix the default behavior and in stead use the Jogger as a scroll bar. Briefly:

To Enable Scrolling:
• HKCU\ControlPanel\JogBar\Settings\SwitchToAudioFunc = 0
Tapping on the Jogger itself:
Opens the application/link on current focus - this is default behavior.

Tap on Bottom Key Launches IE Mobile (or anything you might want to configure):
• HKCU\ControlPanel\JogBar\Settings\BottomKeyApplicationName = \Windows\iexplore.exe
Tap on Top Key Performs Back
• HKCU\ControlPanel\JobBar\Settings\TopKeyApplicationName = BACK

If you own one of these devices, please get a registry editor for the smartphone and change it asap to unleash the real power of the Dash!!!