I’ve used a few mobile phone platforms over the years. My first was a hearty Motorola StarTac - remember those things? haha. Most recently I’ve used an HTC phone made for Verizon - the XV6800 with Windows Mobile 6. I was pretty excited, let myself buy into the hype. My Treo 650 (which for the most part I was enjoying) was broken with a shattered screen so I went out and bought the HTC.
As I’ve said, I’m so far unimpressed. Windows Media Player will, for no reason I can tell, not remember my place in the podcasts I listen to. It will not resume playback consistently. Sometimes it just skips to the next track or reqwinds itself. And yes, it does this even when the phone is supposedly locked.
The ActiveSync is another bit of a problem. This is the software that synchronizes the phone with our company email server - Exchange. During synchronization, I get a couple errors a year about a malformed contact that breaks synchronization. That I can deal with. What hurts me the most is the way ActiveSync will lose its synchronization frequency settings. I usually like to have it set to always be connected and receive all items as they arrive to the server during business hours. After hours, I have it check once every 4 hours. For some reason I have not been able to work out, ActiveSync will lose all of its synchronization settings and revert back to manual sync - meaning it will only sync when I engage the sync function.The touch screen leaves much to be desired. To use it effectively, you need to use a stylus. Not because the screen isn’t sensitive enough, but because the icons and things you need to click on are so small. It took me about a month to get used to how to click with my thumb so I didn’t hit the wrong item - and I still hit the wrong item about 10% of the time. Pulling out the stylus is inconvenient (and I lost mine anyway).
On the recommendation of a colleague, I bought a piece of software that does help me out a little bit in this department. It skins itself over Windows Mobile - its fairly customizable and makes the phone easier to use without a stylus. The software is called SPB Mobile Shell, and it came bundled with a decent (not fantastic) RSS reader, another SPB Phone Suite utility, and a nfity utility I don’t need to use (because of my plan) that measures your data activity so that if you have a limited plan you can know when to stop using features like data, texting, or air minutes before you sky rocket your bill.
I hear there’s an update to Windows Mobil 6 - moving up to version 6.1. Its not available today, but I hope it resolved some of the problems I’m having with the phone. Like locking up on me (or at least appearing to have locked up), managing memory better so I don’t have to soft reset the device (which SPB Mobile Shell makes very easy, so I do it weekly at least).
I don’t mind the slide-out keyboard, but I prefer the Treo 650 and the Blackberries for their “in-your-face” keyboard. The Treo gets my overall bid, but I hear that Palm isn’t doing as well as they have in the past and I’d be worried about their Operating System becoming something obsolete and un-developed.
I dislike Blackberries, but only because in order to get them to work with an Exchange server, you have to purchase licenses for software and it becomes another maintenance issue if something goes wrong. Before Virtualization was at its current state, that usually meant purchasing not only software, but also hardware (I should offer vmware appliance services to RIM for Blackberries - hmmm… I wonder if I can offer hosted blackberry server services to people including Exchange… not a bad gig). Other than that, they are good phones and have a lot of custom software avilable to them.
