Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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This sounds a bit sordid, but I wanted to follow up on my Nokia E61 post having been an actual owner of the E61 & the E62 (I managed to own a 62 for a short while even though it's almost the same device as the E61).
Well before closing the chapter on the E62 here is what I noticed different from the E61. The E62 was easily twice as slow as the E61. I'm not sure what Cingular did to cripple this device but opening emails, deleting emails and navigating the OS was painful. The E61 did not have this problem. Cingular also managed to cripple all J2ME apps basically rendering Google Maps useless.
So there you have it. Bubba does a good job describing his brief experience with the E62. I don't agree with all of his points, but he is right about it being slow. Either way, while I was playing with my E61/62 Bubba was using a Moto Razr, Cingular 2125 and then 3125 before that died... now we both have Blackjack's and love them. I ran into Bubba two days ago and I saw his Blackjack and he saw mine and we were like "beatch, you cheated on me" and then he said that he liked the device so much he didn't want to blog about it cause he didn't want anyone else to have it... spoken like a true Gadget addict.
If you are on the market for an E series device get the E61. It has WiFi, but the 3G support won't work in the US (different frequency) and J2ME apps are usable. Since there aren't many native Symbian apps, this is an important point.
I will say this. The hardware build quality and attention to detail is great. The device sensitivity to ambient light was better than any device I've used (very mac like). But the Samsung Blackjack wins hands down vs the E62.
Oh, and if you read my E61 post again you will note that I lied about never buying another smartphone that could not do copy paste. The Blackjack cannot do this as my friend Steve Schreiber points out on his very detailed analysis of the Moto Q experience:
Cut ‘n’ Paste: Where for Art Thou? Let’s just get this out there right away, the Motorola Q does not have any facility for Copy/Cut and Paste. This is an issue that has been written about quite a bit already, so I won’t waste too much text on it here. For various complicated and unimportant reasons to the end consumer, the version of Windows Mobile that the Q is based on doesn’t support this key feature. This should be true for any Windows Mobile device that doesn’t support stylus input or have a touch screen (a key difference between Windows Mobile PocketPC - which devices like the Palm Treo run on - and Windows Mobile Smartphone - which the Moto Q uses). WM Smartphone was originally designed for phone form factors and some Program Manager must have decided somewhere along the history of that sub-platform’s development that “no one would ever want copy/paste on a phone, I mean this isn’t a ‘PDA’” - I can almost imagine the meeting that this decision was made. This same type of thinking is also why the Q and Smartphone platform devices don’t read Office documents out of the box today (though this may change in the future). To the WM team, I realize I’m probably simplifying the “decision” to cut this - in my mind - key feature, but there you go. To those that would argue “you can’t do copy/paste right without a touch screen”, I direct your attention to the Blackberry, which has done it since its inception just fine. The lack of this feature makes a number of the other software shortcomings (I mention below) more glaring. Instead of being able to work around a bad UI flow by copy/pasting someone’s number/name/whatever you’re left to just bitch and try to remember it in your head - or worse write it down on a piece of paper.
Let’s just get this out there right away, the Motorola Q does not have any facility for Copy/Cut and Paste. This is an issue that has been written about quite a bit already, so I won’t waste too much text on it here.
For various complicated and unimportant reasons to the end consumer, the version of Windows Mobile that the Q is based on doesn’t support this key feature. This should be true for any Windows Mobile device that doesn’t support stylus input or have a touch screen (a key difference between Windows Mobile PocketPC - which devices like the Palm Treo run on - and Windows Mobile Smartphone - which the Moto Q uses).
WM Smartphone was originally designed for phone form factors and some Program Manager must have decided somewhere along the history of that sub-platform’s development that “no one would ever want copy/paste on a phone, I mean this isn’t a ‘PDA’” - I can almost imagine the meeting that this decision was made. This same type of thinking is also why the Q and Smartphone platform devices don’t read Office documents out of the box today (though this may change in the future).
To the WM team, I realize I’m probably simplifying the “decision” to cut this - in my mind - key feature, but there you go. To those that would argue “you can’t do copy/paste right without a touch screen”, I direct your attention to the Blackberry, which has done it since its inception just fine.
The lack of this feature makes a number of the other software shortcomings (I mention below) more glaring. Instead of being able to work around a bad UI flow by copy/pasting someone’s number/name/whatever you’re left to just bitch and try to remember it in your head - or worse write it down on a piece of paper.
Hopefully Windows Mobile 6 will address a lot of the current batch of problems with Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones.