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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Greg has some great thoughts (as usual) on the Treo 750. I find it interesting that he actually likes the Pocket PC OS. Personally I find that the Smartphone OS is a bit less clunky, however, Palm does a nice job of working around the OS deficiencies (like writing their own SMS Chat application which is amazing). I wish Microsoft would just license that application and toss the SMS support in the OS.
However, Palm they blew it on the price. $400 for a device after a 2 year contract is absurd. Their unlocked Treo 680 costs that much. I'm not getting on on principle of that fact (and the fact that Cingular want's to stick it to me whenever I want to upgrade).
I'm sticking with the Blackjack, although I wish the Blackjack didn't have the world's lamest bluetooth implementation. It does tether very nicely to my laptop using Bluetooth and USB though for some sweet 3G surfing.
BTW, the difference between the Pocket PC and Smartphone formfactors dates back to when there was a Pocket PC OS and no phone support. Microsoft basically went on a parallel track... they developed the Smartphone OS for traditional mobiles like the Motorola MPX-200. This was released as Smartphone 2002. At the same time they added Phone support (by way of applications, drivers and dlls) to the Pocket PC OS. Windows Mobile 5 was the first attempt to unify some of the differences between the OSes. However, at it's core, Pocket PC is a stylus driven OS where Smartphone is a numeric keypad driven phone that uses T9.
Therein lies the problem. Once Keyboards became popular (thanks to RIM), neither device was a perfect fit. They both have problems with keyboards. Pocket PC OS is not 100% navigable with a keyboard. There are still modal dialogs, weird notification balloons and other random things that make using a stylus of a finger necessary. Smartphone on the other hand doesn't have copy and paste support... cause it was never meant to have a keyboard. Some other weird things... Pocket PC Resolutions go like this: 240 x 240, or 320 x 240 and so on. If you want a square screen you are stuck with 240 x 240. Smartphone OSes can support QVGA: 320 x 240 and smaller. It cannot do 320 x 320 either. Contrast to Palm OS devices which are 320 x 320.
Anyway, this should get better over time, but it's a bit sordid today because of the past, and keyboards. I think that Microsoft never believed in the mobile keyboard's success early on... kinda like Bluetooth. As a result the experiences using both leaves a lot of room for improvement.