Being the gadget freak that I am, as soon as I heard of the Windows Mobile 6 release with the Blackjack II, I did what I had to pick one up… sign another 2 year contract :( All in all, not a bad deal, considering I've had the same service provider for close to 8 years now. Going from WM 5 to 6 was a great jump. One of the complaints I do have though is the fact that there is no simple way to change the default home page for Internet Explorer. Talk about annoying! Especially since certain service providers love to change it to one of their own. No I don't want to buy a new wallpaper or ringtone for my phone... I want to browse the internet! So after hacking around a bit, I found the solution. Using a registry editor, you need to change the value of a key. I used the PHM Registry Editor : Smartphone Edition, but any regedit application should suffice. Navigate to the following key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Microsoft > Internet Explorer > About URLs, and select Values (Figure 1).

Figure 1

You should now see a number of different Values listed here... blank, home, home_0409, etc (Figure 2). From my experience, certain phones default to different values, so find the correct value and select it. This can be done by looking in the "Value data" field and verifying that the URL listed is the one Internet Explorer is defaulting to. Mine was the "home" value.

Figure 2

Once you have found the correct value, change the "Value data" field to the new home page URL of your choice (Figure 3). Select done and now load Internet Explorer. Your phone should now default to the home page you specified. If you have issues, try rebooting your phone and then load IE. As a disclaimer, modifying registry keys is always dangerous and can harm the functionality of your operating system. So please be mindful of what you change.

Figure 3