Fun with Windows Mobile

There should be a few more posts about Windows mobile popping up on the site from now on. I recently replaced my Nokia N73 with a HTC TyTn II. Why? Well, a few reasons. The main was that my partner wanted to buy me a birthday present last month, and I simply couldn't think of anything to ask for. She kept insisting she wanted to buy me an iPhone - this prompted me to run off and look at what was out there in the way of phones with full qwerty keyboards, and I ended up finding myself sold on the HTC TyTn II.

The TyTn is a pretty large beast, but it packs a lot of power. It's definitely not a phone which is going to be to everyone's taste, however that's something which is true of all PDA phones. After a couple of weeks with it I'm really enjoying using it, especially while travelling. The 3megapixel camera does the job of allowing me to take random photos while on the go, and although I haven't played with the GPS tagging of photos I'm guessing it's pretty easy. GPS + Google maps worked suprisingly well trying to find a street while out of town, and the benefits of having easy access to email whereever you are go without saying. The integration with Outlook is finally enabling me to use Tasks properly - my previous habit was emailing reminders to myself, which works well until you think of something on the train or anywhere else (before you say 'carry a pen and paper', you should see my hand-scribbling - evolution has given me 120wpm typing, at the cost of legible handwriting).

Oh, and using it with my laptop to play World of Warcraft while on the train amuses me as well. Luckily WoW seems to be fairly efficient in terms of it's bandwidth use - after an hour on the train I ended up using about 2-3mb, which isn't too bad.

It's also prompted me to start a few Windows Mobile based development projects which is also proving to be an interesting experience. That's part of what drew me to a Windows Mobile phone vs an iPhone - the lure of being able to write simple apps to solve problems is something any developer starts to take for granted after a while.

I'm finding that the sheer amount of apps out there for Windows Mobile can make it quite hard to find the gems amongst the dirt, and so I'll be throwing up a quick summary of my first few weeks in the land of Windows Mobile filled with some software recommendations and HTC based tweaks.

Comparing the iPhone to the TyTn II is an interesting experience. Technically the TyTn has a lot more to offer me due to the way I work and the things I do - however leaves the non technical bystander a bit underwhelmed. The TyTn has a certain amount of TouchFLO support, so here's hoping a version of the Touch Diamond's UI makes it's way onto other phones. Yes I realise it's a blatant iPhone imitation, but for me it'd be a nice combination of style and functionality.

 Print | Posted on Monday, May 26, 2008 11:45 PM |