Usable PDA, capable of phonecalls
March 21st, 2010 Posted in draft, technologyI have been a great fan of HTC windows mobile phones for quite some time. I played around with iPhones a couple of times and had some serious problems with it. Recently, though, I got one for myself and I have converted: I love it!
It has a few drawbacks, but the plusses greatly outweigh them!
I played around with my sisters iPhone for a day, and I thougt it wouldn’t be good enough for me. The problem, I now realize, was me. The onscreen keyboard is pretty good, but it takes a week or so to get used to it. I played with the phone for a day and – more importantly – did unusual things like enabling wifi, email and typing weird things like passwords, switching back and forth between numbers and letters. The iPhone isn’t too good in that. But now whenever I type normal text in an email, the predictive engine gets better at each stroke, it seems.
And it is a damn good phone too. Very intuitive.
A couple of drawbacks remain. First and foremost: I hate Big Brother: Apple is controlling what I can and can’t put on my phone. I bought it. It is mine. Let me decide.
The other thing is the not-so-easy way to NOT pickup a phonecall. You’d have to press the shutdown key twice, whereas everything else is on screen. Perhaps I am the only one, not always willing or wanting to pickup whoever calls me?!
The biggest problem is that most apps forget your ‘state’, when you switch between them. They are not frozen, but shutdown, and you need to navigate all through it again. This seems poor design, as some apps do remember the state…
My last problem is with multiple mailaccounts: I need to go back to the homescreen to move from mailfloder to mailfolder. I’d rather have a favorites-button (like in a lot of other apps), where I can add my most used folders.
But nevertheless, I am impressed. It is very intuitive to use, it works great with exchange (apart from color-coding appointments or marking them private). It works extremely well with wifi and is much more stable with Bluetooth than all my HTCs.
It is hard to explain simplicity, as it is hard to make difficult things easy. Yet it does.
Bring on the iPad…