Tone's Notes

There are plenty of pictures already out there about Verizon’s current coolest PocketPC phone. Here’s my experience after four days with the phone.

Generally the device works, but the many small annoyances are a continual time drain to live with or work around.

Mechanically the phone is of pleasantly high quality with a few exceptions:

·        The slide mechanism that connects the keyboard with the display has an annoying amount of side to side play.

·        The voice memo button is located right above the volume+ button with almost no tactile cues to differentiate them.

·        The little rubber plugs that hide screws tend to come loose and disappear.

Call quality seems to suffer from the placement of the microphone. I’ve gotten generally negative comments from the people I call. Much of my calling occurs in one bar coverage areas.

The coolest thing by far is how easily I was able to fire up Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 and build and deploy a .NET Compact Framework based application to the phone doing full internet access.

There are however a great many annoyances:

1.      WirelessSync doesn’t seem to be configurable at the folder level. E-mail that never bothered me because I have rules which shunt it off to logging folders caused pop-up notifications with sound effects. If I disable the notification, I lose all e-mail notification. I worked around this problem by moving the logging folders out from under Inbox.

2.      Junk mail that I never see in my desktop Inbox seems to avoid the rule engine sometimes and winds up on the phone, where it seems to persist indefinitely. No work around exists for this. So e-mail notification has to be turned off.

3.      There’s an enable/disable ActiveSync on the WirelessSyncàSetupàActiveSync Setup form that took a while to find and completely prevented ActiveSync from connecting at first.

4.      There’s a general lack of consistency across the user interfaces which makes it hard to locate appropriate settings. Like where do you go to keep the backlight on after dialing a phone call that requires entering a password? Backlight, Phone, or Power?

5.      The remote control application won’t let you re-learn a button, or delete and re-add a button, or even just add new buttons to an existing layout. You also can’t change labels or device names. It’s a very limited toy application.

6.      Can’t run maps.google.com on either Picsel browser or IE Portable in Windows Mobile 2003. Not that much of a surprise since Java applets are no doubt not supported. But for some reason, some sites, like Flikr.com, can’t be browsed by Picsel. Though IE did work on the site. For some reason the requests get routed to a generic Yahoo picture services page.

7.      Trying to install Microsoft Reader for Pocket PC version 2.4 took much too long to get working. I bought a single title from amazon.com, downloaded it and placed it in my active sync pocket pc files folder. It seems to have gotten all wrapped up around the initial configuration of reader, possibly a switch from wi-fi to USB connection to ActiveSync. First ActiveSync failed with errors. Then it would not connect. Now it reports “2 items not synchronized” and still it spins. How long does it take to transfer less than a MB over USB 2.0? Minutes later the sync fails.
Leaving the system in its cradle overnight, then pressing the reset button for 30 seconds in the morning seems to have restored syncing and not cleared my Outlook data or installed programs. ActiveSync 4.0 seems to have issues with Wi-Fi.

8.      Using Microsoft Reader on a 240x320 screen is generally annoying. There’s so little text per-page that you’re constantly tapping next page. So far, it makes it hard to stay in the flow of the story.

9.      SafeStore seems under documented. I’m guessing it’s a bit of flash memory built in, as opposed to RAM which isn’t safe. And as I found out in #12, it holds all user settings in addition to having a little space left over for backups, saving notes, or anything else that you might normally put on an SD card.

10.  Why can’t I add my password to my voicemail speed dial to get one button access to my messages? You can create a new number under a contact with two commas between your mobile number and the password plus sharp sign. Assign it to a speed dial other than “1”. The same trick doesn’t work for the hard coded voicemail speed dial.

11.  Why does the touch pad interface go away in phone mode? It gets replaced by a single graphic telling you to use the numeric key pad. But you also lose access to “call history” and “speed dial” buttons, forcing you to close the slider if you wanted these options, then reopen it if you want to type again… Of course you can’t do that if you’ve elected to have closing the keyboard terminate the call.

12.  Somehow I got into a mode after I place a call such that where it says “Verizon Wireless” (above the phone number display area) gets replaced by the words “Emergency call only” and an Exit button. What’s with that? So I find a “Reset All Phone Settings” button within the phone options dialog. It requires a password. After a few guesses it turns out to be the last four of my mobile phone number. Sure go for it. “Reformating SafeStore…” What? What does that have to do with phone settings…. Unless it’s the same flash memory used for all persistent device settings. And when the interface says “phone settings” they really mean “device settings”… After a quick wireless sync, mostly back to where I was. And remarkably the “Emergency call only” behavior is gone… Speed dial settings are gone. As are all user setting changes.

13.  Started out thinking I had to use “Files” synchronization in ActiveSync to move data files onto the device. After finding the “explore” function and seeing that I can drill down into the file system on the device by starting at My Computer, it becomes clear that “Files” synchronization is more about synching files modified during offline access. Why is it that it wants to make the root of the shared files “T My Documents” when I renamed my device from “Pocket_PC” to something else that only starts with a “T”.

14.  Well trying to copy and paste this word document between my desktop and \My Documents\Personal on my Pocket PC caused Windows Explorer to crash on my PC and has wiped out all the folders besides Templates on the Pocket PC. Wahoo. This happened consistently over three attempts. “Simple” word files work fine. This one includes some office automation stuff that may be responsible for the crashes. Whatever it is, the ActiveSync conversion process chokes on it.

15.  On the likelihood of the Samsung i730 being upgraded to Windows Mobile 2005: The senior sales associate at my local Verizon store summed it up simply: “The phones have what they have, they don’t tend to get upgraded. We come out with a new phone instead.”

16.  After resetting the phone, the pairing with my Jabra 250 headset was lost. Pressing the main button on the headset brings up the “enter pass key” form, but no passkey I’ve tried (0000, 1234, last four of phone) succeed in registering the device. No errors are displayed either. It turns out you have to hold the power on the headset for 6 seconds to a steady blue light, then start on the phone under the Bluetooth devices interface. Click on New… and have the phone try to find the headset. Doing it any other way seems like it should work, but it doesn’t.

17.  Voice recognition using a Jabra 250v headset in a Honda CRV at highway speeds is very unreliable. Too much background noise it seems. Voice recognition in quite conditions is fine. Signal strength between the headset and phone isn’t good enough to walk around a room without carrying the phone. The volume of the voice recognition prompts is often much too soft. It’s volume is probably a combination of the headset volume with one of the two independent volume settings for the i730. With all three at their highest setting, the prompts are still soft in the car.

18.  Despite setting the backlight settings to aggressively favor being on, I’m constantly frustrated by the display being dark and not responding to screen taps. It typically takes the press of one of the main action buttons to re-illuminate the backlight. Very annoying when on a call and being asked to “press 2 for…”. The keyboard does work in these situations but getting it out is often not the most convenient thing to do.

19.  There’s no easy indication of remaining battery life or of new voice mails. Battery level can be seen by pressing the launcher button and looking at its toolbar. The voicemail icon gets lost in a small balloon icon that must be manually expanded to see a number of icons that don’t fit on the small screen.

20.  Unlike every cell phone I’ve owned, it is not a substitute for a watch. Much too hard to quickly tell what time it is. Have to press the phone’s talk button to bring up the phone interface. There’s a tiny clock in the upper right corner. To see the date you have to press the main “back” button (not to be confused with all the other back buttons which are specific to individual programs) to get to the Today screen, for which there isn’t a hard button.

21.  Muting the microphone during a phone call requires a very careful screen press with your finger or stylus.

22.  The various “Today” themes also control the darkness of horizontal stripes that appear on the messaging interface. Some themes produce stripes that are so dark they make the text impossible to read on the right side of the screen. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off just this part of the theme. “Forest” is particularly bad in this respect.

23.  The speed of the EVDO service is not remarkable. Browsing ordinary web pages is very slow compared to the desktop broadband experience. There seems to be a connection handshake required before each new page which noticeably slows down browsing. Using a WiFi connection works better. Tried several times to download video clips from the Windows Media site without success.