Although many like to use HTC's TouchFLO3D, using the Sliding Panels (aka Titanium on WM6.5) is sometimes preferable — in fact I often find it more efficient and revealing, which is why I'm taking a well-deserved hiatus from HTC's design.

Case in point, there are lots of really good 3rd party plug-ins that can be added to the sliding panels to augment their functionality. Sure TouchFLO3D may have lots of eye candy, but as far as speed of access, Titanium is faster.

In this post, I'll share with you three which really improve the usefulness of the default WM6.5 home screen: Twitter (Titanium Artesea), Favorite People (AppStar Titanium) and Weather (Showaco TitaniumWeather*).

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For you dev (and adventurous) types out there, Sony Ericsson has released the software development kit for the still-unreleased Xperia X1.

What's in store?

Developers can use the Windows Mobile SDK, free of charge, to produce a wide variety of panels to meet the consumer’s demand for a rich, individualized multimedia experience on their phone. Users of the Xperia™ X1 will be spoilt for choice as they personalize their handset with panel applications to suit their mood and lifestyle.   Whether it is a search engine, advanced calendar or social networking application, music or film catalogue, sports or news related content, the panels enable you to access any information – quickly and directly – with a simple tap on the 3” super high resolution touch screen.

So while you still can't get your hands on the phone, you can get a head start on customizing it.

Read the full press release here; get the SDK here; and check out a video with Ramanth Bhat, senior manager of application and product planning, speaking about the sliding panels interface, after the jump.

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If you're one of the lucky ones who already has a WM 6.1 device, are looking at buying one in the future or have - ahem - procured one in some other way, the Microsoft Mobile Team Blog offers instructions on how to customize the sliding panel homescreen.

It takes a bit of work with the same home.xml file found in other WM standard builds, as well as some registry tweaks, but nothing more sinister than that. The bad news is that, as yet, the most you can do is re-order the panels, adjust how alerts appear in panels, and play around with images. They do say that they'll be letting us know more about creating panels in the near future.

As always, before diving into the guts of your device, be sure to back up your information. Or don't, if you like working without a net.

If you’re looking to get yet another "monitor" on your computer, have you considered your WM Smartphone? Microsoft SideShow for Windows Mobile might be your answer. SideShow has a sliding panel view much like the BlackJackII with 6.1 installed. It allows users to view PowerPoint, Widows Media Player, and even check your inbox -- all over Bluetooth. If you're running a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 smart phone and have the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack with the .NET compact Framework it should run smoothly.

The fact I find interesting is that even if your computer is off, you can still get the content that was sent to your smart phone previously. This would work great with music especially if you don’t have to keep turning on your computer to sync.

Update: Check out this nice Screenshot tour too.