WinCE-ing

So I have a “new” phone. Long story, not worth going into. It runs Windows CE. My Palm Treo 650 was frustrating (PalmOS is inconsistent, and largely broken, missing important things … and it crashed … occasionally wiping out the email program and all settings). If anyone from Palm is reading this, please understand that I have every intention of avoiding your future products. For a very good reason. This phone looked better than mine from a feature perspective. We use a VOIP service for business that mails us voicemails when they arrive. These voicemails are in WAV format.

One might reasonably expect that the WinCE phone would have no trouble playing .WAV files. One would be wrong. The embedded media player doesn’t recognize non-Microsoft generated bits. And this is good? Why? Well, add to this that it sucks down battery with a vengence. The Palm was bad. 2 days and it had to have a charge. This one is AWEFUL. 18 hours, and it needs a charge. One of the menu buttons is kill/kill all apps. Um…. uh …. this is one of those “wrong” things. Turning off most of the useful features lets me get 1.5 days out of the full charge on extended battery. Add to this that it uses IE (of course!), and it doesn’t render a number of things correctly. Standards compliant things. But hey, its IE. I will deal with this until the next gen of new phones come out with wifi, gps, 3G net here in the US and world wide. I don’t need a cell phone with a camera. I just need a phone where I can email, surf the web to get information on-site with customers, get to the customers, use (opportunistically) the Wifi and 3G net… I have a Nokia T60 that I bought for the Eilat trip last January. This was nice, though none of the US carriers of GSM can do faster than 1RTT on it. While it has and does 3G, this is european 3G. Not US 3G. Which is different. OTOH, it does Wifi, very well. It includes a SIP client. It includes lots of other very nice features. The keyboard is cool, easy to use. It is almost perfect, just need local US 3G and we have a winner. I promise I won’t WinCE when the winner does in fact arrive. Update: I have heard that there are more than a few Linux phones out there. All I care is that the tools on it work. The WinCE based phone feels like windows. You have way too much clicking to do to do things you need to do. The PalmOS phone was ok in this regard, it was organized semi-logically. Though with some awesome inconsistencies (they removed sorting emails by order received in the last updated version of the email program … what were they smoking that made them do something so nuts!) I don’t care if the phone runs Linux or not. Or windows or not. It has to work, without crashing, and give me a fighting chance of using it as a phone, email/browser, and address book at the highest possible speeds. Connecting to Wifi, SIP clients, GPS are all optional, though highly desired.