Pat Buys an Information Appliance
So my cell phone died last week (ok, I left it on top of the car and it disappeared on the way to work), and I decided it was time to get a smart phone. I checked 'em all out, including my boss' iPhone (too expensive!), and finally decided on an HTC Touch. It runs the new, Vista-like Windows Mobile 6 OS, accepts miniature Flash cards with up to 16mb of memory, and has a cool touch-screen interface. GPS navigation, Google maps, music and video, TV stations, all kinds of crazy stuff. 2 megapixel camera with video, too, which the iPhone won't do (the video part). Even high-speed wireless from the cellular network and supposedly it connects to 802.11 WiFi (though I'm not sure why you'd bother -- the cellular network seems really fast). All for less than half the cost of an iPhone.
I've already got it linked to my GMail account, and the interface for that is really sweet. I was surprised how easy it was to reply to an email. But the really cool part was all the cool OS customization available. I had no idea people were putting out so much software for Windows Mobile. No wonder there was so much fuss when Apple initially said no to open software for the iPhone.
One complaint is that it doesn't seem to be as easy to "tip over" to landscape mode as it is with the iPhone. The iPhone has a built-in sensor for that, but this device requires you to push a button. Unfortunately the button is kinda buried and I haven't found a shortcut key for it yet (although I figured out that if I slap the camera on and then return to Internet Explorer it stays in landscape mode, which I think is a bug!).
The image on the right below shows the standard Windows "Today" page (which is a lot more cluttered on mine, having added some do-dads to show time, weather, email and news at the same time). The image on the left is the "touch" interface, which allows you to quickly grab what you want without having to go through the cumbersome Windows Start menu. It doesn't show it here, but it pages left and right, with the page on the left showing all the quick-dial numbers (which you can cover with images of the people at those numbers). Kinda cool.
