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Greg Hughes has a great write up on a bunch of "smartphone" PDA type devices. I have never used a Blackberry, and probably never will because it requires that middleware be installed, and Microsoft just isn't going to do that. So I am stuck to chose between Windows based Mobile devices and devices that support Exchange ActiveSync (The Treo 650 is one).

I think Greg raises excellent concerns about the Audiovox 5600 and the Siemens SX66 (or whatever your carrier calls this thing, there are at least 3 different companies hocking this device, and none of the companies who place their name on the device actually make it).

Greg has this to say about the Audiovox 5600:

"But the software apps are a little glitchy, and I lost count of how many times this thing either reset itself or required me to pry the battery out of the back and replace it in order to get it started and working again."

"Audio quality was good. It's small and compact and has a certain "neato" quality. But it doesn't allow me to quickly and efficiently communicate, except via voice calls."

And this to say about the Siemens SX66:

"Bluetooth worked better than any of the other devices in hands-free mode, and the keyboard makes it more accessible and usable than the Audiovox device by far. But the keyboard's pimple-style chicklet bubble layout was painful to use in the real wold - keys are tiny and way too close together unless you;re six years old (probably not the target market). Battery life was pretty awful, especially if you use the WiFi at all.

"To top it all off, this morning I grabbed the device and went to turn it on, but it did not respond. Yet, the little green service light was flashing so I knew it had power to it. I pulled the battery put it back (the Windows Mobile version of CTRL-ALT-DEL), but still no response. I started driving to work and tried it again while I was stopped for coffee at the local store. Voila! Up it comes, but totally reset, nuked, blown away, default ROM settings - everything I had set and stored before was gone. Good thing the important stuff was on my SD card... I've read and heard rumors of serious software problems with this phone, and when you combine that with the lame keyboard that looks cool but isn't at all usable, well... Returned, with prejudice."

And this is my point. These devices are not reliable enough to use as a phone. My Treo has missed a single phone call in 30 days and that was due to some third party application that I run that is buggy (but I can't live without for now).

Greg was not a fan of the Treo 650, and I agree that they keyboard is a bit cramped, but the Blackberry is no option for me, and I happen to like the 650. The number of excellent applications available for the device + the form factor are what hold the device ahead of every available Windows Mobile device.

I do agree that the usability of the Palm OS could be better. It takes to may steps to do simple things, and the OS constantly launches and quits applications since you can only run one at a time. This makes multitasking or even doing a single task across multiple apps take longer than it should. Windows Mobile is much more efficient across applications.

Zinio released an updated version of their Magazine Reader. It's much improved over 2.0. One of the things I actually do religiously with my Tablet PC is read PC Magazine in Tablet mode. I can't tell you how cool it is to sit there and read the magazine, like on an airplane, or in bed. It's one of the few times I use my tablet in portrait mode.

I do still wish that Zinio used ClearType rather than Adobe's "Blurry Type" technology.

Nooooo!!! I could not resist (sorry Steve). I had to have one. Must purchase. Well, I was walking back from a Dr. Appt near Union Square 1 hour ago, and I figured I would stop by the Sony Store at the Metreon. If you are in need of a PSP and you live in San Francisco, the Sony Store got a shipment yesterday.

I don't have any games yet though. That's a problem I need to fix.

BTW - this device was $249. I never did purchase a Portable Media Center. $500 to essentially play audio and video seemed too steep for me (I don't have kids, and my tablet can play tv shows from my MCE box). But the price for this gizmo is in line with what a Creative Zen Micro or iPod mini costs. Compared to the PMC, the device is sexier, screen is more beautiful, and the entertainment is limitless. With WiFi built in, this thing will be cool. Now, I wish it could nativley play WMV so that I could more easily get my MCE TV shows on there.

I just noticed this warning when I saved a file:

So lets see. You are asking the user a question. Unchecking the checkbox above has no clear benefit to me. However, if I do uncheck it my file may not be compatible with future versions of Photoshop or other applications.

Not I undestand it may not be compatible with other applications, but not with future versions of Photoshop?

So lets see. Here is what I know:

• Unchecking Maximize compatibility has no clear benefits
• Unchecking Maximize compatability may render this file unusable in other applications
• Unchecking Maximize compatability may render this file unusable in the next version of Photoshop

HELLO! Adobe? What is the point of asking me this when I save a PSD file? If I were the PM for this feature, I would have cut the thing entirely.

I just played with a friend's PSP. OMG it rocks. I have an Xbox and I play it like once a month. I have a feeling I would use a PSP a lot more. I could play in bed, on the plane or on the train. The last portable game device I used was an Atari Lynx. Great device but horrible battery life. I was also a gameboy addict (the original version). But I quit video games cold turkey after high school.

Oh, well, there goes a bunch of dough.

From a co-worker:

A funny flash video of Hitachi's new Perpendicular drive technology. Very funny.

I can't wait till I can purchase a 1 TB drive.

Last week I hopped over the pond (the other one) to visit my wife again, and had a great time in Oahu. Going back in 2 weeks and then off to Maui with my family for 6 days. After that my wife comes back home with me . Living alone is for the birds.

Two of the highlights:

Turtle Beach (click to see the full album)

A bunch of folks hanging out with 4 sea turtles. Everyone was so happy.

Isn't he cute?

USS Arizona Memorial (click to see the full album)

The inside of the memorial.

The ship is still leaking fuel. It's a realy somber experience watching the oil bubble up. Since the ship is an official Tomb, and final resting place for over 1000 people, they cannot actually enter the ship to investigate the fuel leak. Furtheremore, a lot of folks are opposed to them doing anything about it as they feel the ship is "crying".

It's been a month now since I received my Treo 650, and I couldn't be more happy. There are some minor warts on this device, but I firmly believe this is the best and most usable PDA/Phone device I have used. It easily meets my needs better than any of my previous Windows Mobile devices, and while it has a few shortfalls, they pale in comparison to the positive features I've come to rely on.

If you missed it, here is Part 1

PIM

The PIM applications are probably the one weak area of this device. I have a rather high bar for these types of things as I like my data to round trip from desktop to device and back. The most frustrating aspect of the device has been that not all the data in Outlook maps to the Palm. The specific shortfalls are mentioned below. In Part 3 I will talk about some third part applications that circumvent some of these issues.

Categories

This is the biggest limitation I have experienced on the device. I am a heavy user of Categories, and have about 25 categories in my task list. These are the categories I use to define my Getting Things Done projects. Most are greater than 15 characters each. The Palm limits me to 15 characters per category, and a total of 15 categories per Palm Application. This means that once you reach 15 characters it truncates. Also, once you reach 15 categories it stops sync'ing the 16 onward.

Contacts

In previous versions of the Palm OS you were limited to a single postal address for a contact as well as 5 phone/email addresses. Palm finally addressed this limitation and allows you 3 postal addresses and more phone numbers and email addresses. However, they do not support synchronization of many other contact fields.

Calendar

In previous versions of the Palm OS you could not have All Day events that spanned multiple days. For example, I may have a vacation event that starts on a Monday and ends on a Thursday. The Palm conduit will break these up into 4 individual events. This is problematic because sometimes it will actually span an extra day and end create an event for Friday. This has not been resolved in the Treo 650.

Support for recurring events with exceptions has improved, but they did not add features such as "Accepted", "Tentative" accept statuses for meetings. The Calendar views have not fundamentally changed, but a new "Agenda" view was added which is a bit like the Today page on Windows Mobile.

Tasks

I am a big user of tasks, and while I find that Tasks feature to be fairly usable, the category limitation really makes it painful for me. Furthermore, there is no way to set a reminder for a task on the Treo. This is a huge limitation. I don't understand why Microsoft and Palm pimp tasks so much on their respective mobile platforms.

Notes

Thankfully the Palm OS has better support for Notes than the Windows Mobile platform. Notes are real first class citizens, and not objects that live in the file system like Windows Mobile. I use notes a lot more (much like I would use paper in a Moleskine) to jot down all sorts of random things. Because the Find feature of the Palm is pretty decent it means I can find all sorts of stuff easily. It's super easy to "filter" the list down to what you are looking for by typing the first few characters of the note.

Mail

Mail is where the Treo shines. The included Mail application, Versa Mail, is hands down a winner over Windows Mobile. Not only can you see much more data on the screen, but small things that DRIVE ME NUTS about the Windows Mobile mail experience don't exist on the Palm. The best example is that with a Windows Mobile device, when you reply all to an email via your Exchange account, your email address is included in the reply. The excuse that I've been given over the years is that Windows Mobile doesn' t know your email address in order to remove it from replies. Well, Palm solved this by asking for my email address during account set up. Imagine that! Seriously, if you work in the Mobile group and are listening, this is one thing that should have been fixed long ago.

The Palm mail app supports your normal options like Signatures, reply options, folders, and HTML! Yes, that's right, you can use HTML markup. Sadly this is not supported if you are using Exchange ActiveSync.

Exchange

Lets be honest. The only reason I even considered buying this device is because of Exchange ActiveSync now found in the Treo. This keeps my device in sync with my corporate exchange box 24/7. This makes my device incredibly useful as I can keep connected to work when I'm mobile. When compared to the Windows Mobile platforms, Palm has a long way to go, but the good news is they have a baseline set of features that suffice for now, and the hardware makes writing emails a real joy (compared to using T9 or a stylus).

All synchronization is managed via VersaMail. You can configure the device to sync ever x minutes and define peak times for synchronizations. VersaMail can sync in the background, however, any manual sync must occur as a modal process (not sure why). Finally, VersaMail does not support Automatic Up-to-Date whereby the Exchange server can send SMS notifications to your device that there is new data waiting and that the device should sync. This is not a true push model, but it's pretty close and I used to use this feature on my Windows Mobile devices.

Sadly, there is no support for Contacts synchronization at this time. There is obviously no support for Tasks or Notes sync since Exchange does not yet support synchronization of these PIM apps.

The supported PIM apps are:

Mail Sync

You can synchronize your inbox to the Treo. Sadly you cannot synchronize other folder, nor can you move messages to folders on the server. This is a bummer as I used to file a lot of messages on my Audiovox 5600. By default the first 5 k of messages is downloaded (Windows Mobile is .5 k). Also the default reply options do not use the Smart Reply feature of the platform. Smart Reply is an EAS feature where the reply you compose does not quote any of the text in the original message. When the client uploads to the server it appends the original message to your reply. This is more efficient then quoting the original message (if it is large) and uploading the whole thing to the server. To use this feature you must change the default reply options.

Calendar Sync

Calendar sync works fairly well. On occasion I have seen exceptions to recurring events not sync to the client till I forced a manual sync. Not sure why this is the case.

Sync Issues

I have on occasion experienced the random sync problem. It seems that once a week I get a message from the device that an error occurred on the last sync to the server. The device then forces me to re-download all the mail and calendar events from the servers. This isn't so bad except that if you were to create a new calendar appointment after the error occurred and before the resync, you would lose that event and likely not notice it.

I've also seen the inbox get out of sync with the server such that I had to delete my Exchange account and recreate it to get the right inbox contents.

Just finished watching Battlestar Galactica that I borrowed from Mike. I don't normally like Sci-Fi, but I loved this "mini-series". Not sure what a mini-series is, except that this was a 3 hour movie. I enjoyed it a bunch though. Now to netflix to get the first season from TV.

I have been using your new fangled High Definition PVR with two tuners for a few months now. Let me tell you, this is the buggiest piece of consumer electronics I have ever used (note: this is the version with the TV Guide Software, not the Microsoft Foundation). I can't believe that you are making me pay to use this device as it does not function most of the time. Here is a list of my complaints:

1. Every so often, the devices forgets that I get ABC in high definition and proceeds to record shows like Alias in Standard Definition. To correct this I must delete the recording, and create a new one. Of course I'd rather hurl the box from the window before going through the 20 step process to do this.
2. At least 3 times a week, the box records a show for 0 minutes, 5 minutes, or 49 minutes, but not the full hour. The box has no idea that it did this.
3. At least once a week, there is no audio that comes out of the box, so I must powercycle it. If it is recording something, I must wait for it to finish before being able to powercycle and hear the audio.
4. If I use the power on/off feature of the box, 99% of the time, there is no video or audio when I turn it back on. I need to start a pre-recorded show then go back to live tv
5. The UI is HORRIBLE. Who designed this software? It sucks.
   1. Adding a new recording is like a 20 step process.
   2. Anytime you make a mistake you have to start over
   3. None of the controls for the PVR (to go to the recorded TV list and start a show) work from the on demand application
6. The box can't deal with some really basic conflicts
7. I have no way of knowing what shows I actually watched from the recorded TV list
8. Your box didn't even handle Daylight Savings time correctly. It updated a day late!!!

It's truly appalling what a buggy product this is. If TiVo shipped this product back in 1999, they would have gone out of business in their first year. It's amazing that 6 years later, you have produced a product that is 100% worse than TiVo or Windows Media Center. This box is so unreliable, that I cannot count on it to be anything fancier than a dual HiDef Cable box. I actually have to watch the shows I really care about when they are on TV.

One day, I hope to have support in my Windows Media Center box for CableCard so that I can go back to my trusty and reliable Windows Media Center to record TV. When that day comes, it will be a joyous one. I cannot wait to call you up to come pick up this box.

Yes, we are spoiled rotten in the US. I hope Gas prices keep going up. It's the only way we will understand what it is like to drive a car outside the US where it can cost $50 to fill up a small compact. It's the only way that car companies will actually treat fuel efficiency as a problem to solve. Our combustion engine technology hasn't fundamentally changed since the beginning.

So the next time you go and buy a car, take the gas mileage into account, or quit your whining.

One interesting thing I did not know. My buddy Mike let me know that a lot of gas stations won't allow you to pump more than $50 of gas at once. You must stop, pay, and then continue. This is a problem for people with cars that have gas tanks > 14 gallons.

Found this great tip from Ed Bott. You can take advantage of the explorer.exe command line switches to scope a view to only contain the subfolders. For example:

explorer.exe /e,/root,"C:\Windows"

will open the Explorer Shell showing the Windows directory and all it's subfolders while hiding the other namespaces.

Why doesn't Shutdown work? Shutting down Windows and Shutting down Outlook requires user intervention 80% of the time for me. Yes I run Add-ins in Outlook, so what? I also run software in Windows. I don't care that an Add-in might be holding an Outlook resource, or that some Windows process won't go away. Last time I checked I was the boss of the computer. When I say shut down it should do everything in it's binary powers to exit. I mean if I can go into task manager and end processes forcibly, or hard power down my computer, I should be entitled that when I issue the same command that the software honor my request. Why is this so hard?

It's gotten so grim that I am considering buying this. What is the world coming to such that I have to pay good money for Outlook to shutdown? But my options are to run Outlook without any Addins (including my own), or paying money for another add-in to take care of business. Oh the irony. Anyone know of a similar tool for XP?

Now I understand why Cingular hasn't launched the Audiovox 5600 Smartphone that AT&T was selling. Audiovox is exiting the mobile phone business and selling to UTStarcom, Inc.

Now I've never heard of UTStarcom, and I'm not sure this helps our effort to increase sales of MS Smartphones as consumers are brand focused, and probably know Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, but also never heard of UTStarcom.

Did you know that if you hold down the SHIFT key when selecting Thumbnails View or opening a folder, the Filenames for the items will not be displayed? I didn't, but just found out because for some reason I had no filenames in any of my Thumbnails view and could not figure out why. This seems like an obscure feature since I could find no mention of it anywhere, and it took me 15 min to search for the answer on the web.

Here is an example. While this is usefull for Picture Views, it's usless for looking at folders/files.

[via MalekTips]