On 02/06/2007, at 2:16 PM, Jon Davison wrote:
My mobile plan is up in a couple of weeks and am looking at a PDA type phone. Any observations on the current range that are Mac compatible? Has anyone had any experience with the Palm Treo 750, the 3 Dopod D810, the Nokia E65, or the new Blackberry? pros and cons of each would really help.
Like many others, I personally am holding off getting work to upgrade my old phone until Apple releases the iPhone in Australia (hopefully by the end of the year?)
My wife and I currently both have Windows mobile-powered HTC-designed PDA-smartphones (O2 Mini and O2 XDA IIs) which try to do just about anything and run almost any software - I have a library of SciFi novels that I've purchased online for $6 each that I read on my XDA IIs and I have a complete theological library, Destinator GPS turn-by- turn software (with a Bluetooth GPS receiver) for use in the car, and use the free AvantGo software to download the Sydney Morning Herald, C-Net and several other newspapers and publications, local Movie session times, etc. I synchronise the diary with Outlook/ Exchange on my Dell PC at work and rely on it as my brain for remembering appointments etc. I have a 1GB SD card for extra storage of video clips and movies I've converted to wmv format so I can show people video footage of our last holiday, funny videos etc.
However, I am getting to the stage of loathing my XDA IIs as from the user interface perspective, it is the worst phone/PDA I have ever used. The OS crashes and freezes daily, texting, the address book, connecting to wifi, launching apps, the blasted start menu etc are all some of the worst-designed pieces of software I’ve ever seen. If you let the battery go too flat it erases all the data you've got on the internal 128MB of flash (who the heck thought that was a good idea!!?)
Physically my XDA IIs has so many plastic buttons and a slide-out keyboard half of which don’t work anymore that I am about to go back to using my old Sony Ericsson P900 PDA phone which despite it’s own problems is so much better as a phone and PDA it’s like night and day. The Windows mobile PDAs used by upper management at our campus cause an out-of-proportion number of support problems with synching faults, connectivity issues etc.
Windows Mobile is a terrible phone OS with tiny on-screen buttons for choosing contacts to phone, horrible SMS texting and is as flaky as Windows 95 (Mac OS 7 was never this bad!) with regular freezes and required resets and the number of convoluted steps required to connect to our campus wireless LAN is unbelievable and sometimes it works but more often it doesn't. Most Windows Mobile PDA users on campus have given up trying to connect to the campus wifi (including our the campus Telecom manager!) I’m growing to hate it more and more every day. It's like death from a thousand cuts.
The iPhone’s OS X is a far more robust, capable OS than Windows Mobile and being a direct subset of the desktop Mac OS X promises to be far more powerful and flexible than the shoddy Windows CE (Windows Mobile) which bears no relation to Windows XP other than superficial looks and that horrible Start menu (on a tiny screen – why for the love of Pete!). Heck Windows Mobile is crammed into only a dozen or so megabytes on the XDA IIs while OS X on the iPhone is a fully featured 500MBs in size.
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