A Dutch Life

Since leaving Microsoft I have discovered that those on the outside actually have to buy their own phone (Shock! Horror!). This comes with two problems, one obvious, one less so.

1. I now have to pay for my own phone (and contract, but that is another post)
2. I now have to choose exactly which phone I want.

At Microsoft we were always supplied with standard issue HTC, and while the first Windows Mobile based models were a disaster, the more recent ones were actually pretty good. The last one I had looked like this:

It’s was a pretty good phone and with the slide out keyboard you could type emails and text message at impressive speed. The problem however was that you could not do any typing, like writing a text message, with just one hand.

Now I dont bring this up to brag, I’m sure a lot of people can text one handed (a lot fewer one handed, riding a bike, carrying 3 bags of groceries and having to ring’your bell to ensure a red bike riding tourist gets out thje way) and this of course is a very very useful thing to do. 

So, faced with having to buy my own I looked around at the “Blackberry” style which have a “full” QWERTY keyboard in miniture. I wanted to get the Blackjack after reading about Omars experience, but the battery life issues scared me off and I have not yet seen a commitment to upgrade them to Windows Mobile 6.

The store around the corner had an amazing deal on a Treo 750, and while not all reviews I found were glowing, there were some people who seemed really happy. I also found a statement from Palm which said they would be upgrading them to Windows Mobile 6. So I jumped, it looks like the picture just off to the right.

I have to say it feels pretty weird to own a Palm given their history, one which had them with their Palm Pilot locked in battle with Windows CE, but after a couple of weeks of use I’m really pleased with it. Sure it’s is a little bigger than a lot of phones this style, but the size is in a way convenient, fitting in your hand very nicely. The keys are superb, I’m very quickly up to a typing speed which is beyond the “Nope, this is just too frustrating” stage.

The battery life is not brilliant, but then again I do a lot of data “stuff” (will explain in a future post) and it still does the minimum which means it lasts a whole day. One thing that is clear is that unlike HTC, Palm has rounded a lot of the edges that you find in Windows Mobile by including their own software. Normally this would fill me with fear, but they have been really smart and subtle about it. Examples of this include the SMS Reader which groups your text messages, sent and received, by recipient. I never want to go back to the old folder based model!

You can also see their long experience with hardware shining through, its very easy and fast to go into flight mode, and switching the phone to silent is done via an actual switch, as in one that you move with your finger.

Palm has also just launched a blog, about time, should be interesting.