Phones

Running doesn't have much to do with cell phones, except that I sometimes use them during a run. That makes them fair game.

I had an older Blackberry. Loved it. It had survived some hard knocks and the glass was cracked in the corner and the battery was dieing, but it was an email machine and a reasonably good phone. Unfortunately it also comes with a backend server license fee.

My company decided that, to save major $, they would eliminate Blackberrys for everyone not high enough in the organization. Windows Mobile phones have a free synchronization license. My company cut a deal with a couple of wireless carriers; mine, Verizon, included the HTC TouchPro and the Samsung Saga as the two options for people at my level. Both are "personal digital assistants". Both come with unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited text messages. For all those free things I am grateful.

Both the Saga and the TouchPro are dated devices which are hard to find in Verizon Wireless stores any longer. I read some excellent reviews, particularly the CNET.com reviews. I did finally find both phones in the stores and they confirmed the CNET reviews to the letter. So I got the Saga and between the two I'm fine with my choice. I bought the extended battery and I am glad that I did.

The Samsung Saga runs MS Windows Mobile 6.1. This is where my user experience begins to fall apart.
1. In Blackberrys, there is a thing called "auto text". It allows someone to enter a series of characters that the device will replace when written. So for example, I entered "abt" and "about". Whenever I typed "abt" and pressed the space key to go to the next word, the device replaced it with "about". Oh, and auto text will also do intelligent first-letter capitalization. I had "fx" for "functional", "tx" for "technical", "descr" for "description", every first name you can think of with proper capitalization, "sh" for "should have", "ch" for "could have" - I had over 1,100 of these. I could bang out an email pretty quickly that way.

Windows Mobile 6.1 does not support anything like this. It does have an "auto correct" feature that will put the hyphen in some acronyms and capitalize words under some circumstances, but per Microsoft Support there is no way to extend it. This is a major pain in the neck.

2. In Blackberrys, any sequence of 7 numerals is assumed to be a phone number. It was smart enough to figure out all sorts of ways people separate the area code, prefix, and number parts - using a dash, using an underscore, using a period, using a space - the Blackberry would figure them all out. This was great. Any time someone scheduled a meeting and put the phone number in the meeting invitation, just click on the phone number and the Blackberry would dial it up.

Windows Mobile 6.1 does not support anything like this. Any phone number that is in the subject line of an email or meeting invite is ignored completely. Any phone number in the body of an email or meeting invite is usually ignored unless it is formatted with dashes, and even then sometimes it won't recognize it as a phone number. I haven't been able to figure out the magic and there is no MS-published help available.

This issue is an example of the overarching problem with MS Windows Mobile: it creates a mini mobile PC which happens to have a phone. The integration of the two is not done well.

3. Did I mention battery life? When my Blackberry was new, the battery would last for two and a half days, easily, before recharging. The Saga lasts for a day if I haven't been very busy, otherwise I better have power available. And this is *with* the extended battery. There are ways to extend the battery life which essentially amount to crippling the ability to send and receive emails (ex: I currently have the machine set to sync emails whenever they come in. Just like the Blackberry. I could set it to sync emails every 10 minutes, which will save some battery juice, but then every 10 minutes I get a flood of emails versus seeing them as they arrive. Why would that even be an option?)

4. It is nice to be able to use Internet Explorer on my phone. The Blackberry browser is pretty awful. But IE pulls down full pages unless I explicitly tell it to go after the mobile site, which takes forever and the font is so teeny tiny I can't read the page. The Saga does come with an alternative browser called "Opera" but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work very well.

Every day is a new adventure. I am considering upgrading to Windows Mobile 6.5, but I worry that it will not solve my problems and give me new ones I like even less. Many of my peers have gone to iPhones. I am soooo strongly tempted, but I have heard nothing good about the AT&T network and I know the Verizon network is good. And then there are the Google android phones. They look nice, some great marketing around them, but I have no idea what they are like.

Oh well, too late now. I'm going to be a Saga/Windows Mobile guy for a couple years...