Color me not impressed with my new ‘smart’ phone. Company does not want the blackberry, so my
8700c is now shelfware.
Old goodness...
new busted...
With a healthy discount, I went shopping for a new phone to
replace my precious. The Cingular 8525
seemed to be the best match on paper.
Larger keyboard, microSD slot, 320x240 touch screen, blue tooth, and
802.11g, - it sounded nice. A browser,
email, and phone… That is all it has to do.
An MP3 player was a bonus.
I could kill someone at this point.
How could anyone say that interface works? My blackberry more or less could do
everything with the thumb wheel and a second 'back' button.
Most actions were anticipated – being the default action to click with
the thumb wheel, with the most common other options a jog away. Not so with this WinCE device. (Yes, it is now windows mobile or something…
the old name works). The very first
call, I placed the phone to my ear, only to have the earlobe click ‘end
call’.
The OS (or at least the app implementations) feel compelled
to make you touch the screen. You get a
dialog box with a user name and password, for instance, it will bring pop up
the software keyboard and give you a single text box to type something in. But you have to touch the textbox first! Dialog box after dialog box. I could scream.
Battery life sucks.
The thing is always trying to shut the screen off. If it does, you have to hit the power
button. No other button brings the
thing to life. My blackberry was not
great, but would easily get a few days between charges. This thing looks like a day tops. And it weighs more, up hill, both ways...
The volume stopped working on day two. Volume was maxed and nothing. I ended up doing a soft reset, which
restored sound.
Google mail works with wifi, but not so much with the cell
based (g3?) data service. Google maps
works just fine. The wifi itself does
not allow you to assign a static IP, so to use my wifi, I had to set up a DHCP
server in my house. I really miss the push email. Now I have a nice long wait for the next pull cycle.
/. does not render worth a dam on the pocket IE. Looks like I'll need to type in an exact URL to the login box, as that does not render in the default anonymous view. Things might work better from the 'simple' view I usually use. Multiply is not much better.
From the development side, I'm OK with wince. I've got a copy of Visual Studio 2005, so I'll be interested to see how C# works on this thing for personal stuff. Back in the day I was impressed with the C++ and (biting my tongue) VB environment for building little apps. Not sure if there is any J2ME options on this or not. Tis ok. The dev tools were one thing they got right in the past. I see registry hacking in my future. Perhaps this thing can be made to work.
I get an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 when it comes out in a few weeks. Perhaps they improved things. Argh.
