Link: Jane Lewis’s Weblog : We work in a fast changing World..
What I also found interesting was reading Ewan MacLeods blog,SMS Text News about the rumour of Apple and Rim joining forces to create a “new revolutionary ” mobile phone. Well flame me if you like, but dont we have that already….it is called Windows Mobile 5 with Windows Media player for Mobile and SD cards in all shapes and sizes !
Jane doesn’t have comments enabled on her blog so I thought I’d reply here.
I’m just so disappointed with Windows Mobile. It’s appalling. It’s perfect at done one thing — address book, for example, or calculator. Or MSN Messenger, or even playing music. Try and multitask and you’ve had it.
This isn’t a Microsoft-are-shit moan. This is an opinion based on real experience from a wannabe Windows Mobile fan. I went out and bought the top of the range device — the best HTC that money could buy. (The T-Mobile “MDA Pro”) And it just didn’t live up to my hopes.
And that’s what it’s all about. Hope. The device arrived and I was delighted. Absolutely delighted. But it was pathetic as a unified messaging device. I hoped I would be able to do my email on it. Forget it. I hoped I could multitask. Nonsense. I hoped I could keep Skype on all the time and talk to someone on a Skype call whilst sending a text message. Badly.
So I’m still hunting for the ‘new revolutionary’ device.
Seriously, anyone reading thinks my points are flawed — please, please, please put me right. Show me a Windows Mobile device that can actually be used by a day to day mobile warrior like myself, and I will buy it and love it.
Meantime, I’d love to see an Apple Blackberry.
I think Jane is viewing the world through some kind of Redmond tinted glasses if she really believes that Exchange Direct Push can give a better user experience than BlackBerry!.
I tried Direct Push alongside my BlackBerry for a week (with a view to being able to ditch my seperate BlackBerry contract). In that week, the BlackBerry consistently delivered my mail quickly and reliably as it has done for the previous three years. Enabling Direct Push on my HTC Universal decreased the battery life significantly, instead of charging every two days I had to charge every night… while the BlackBerry still goes for at least a week without a recharge.
Direct Push often lost it’s connection to the Exchange server and refused to reconnect until I either rebooted the device or put it into flight mode and back.
So, I consider myself informed enough to make a decision over which push e-mail client I want to use. I choose the BlackBerry.
The thing about the BlackBerry is that they take a lot of care over the little things (a lot like Apple). When I slip my Blackberry inside it’s case, a little magnet tells the device to turn off the display (the same way the magnet in the powerbook tells the device that the lid is closed, in fact, if you rest a BlackBerry on the powerbook in the right place, both devices will sleep!). I can also tell my BlackBerry to turn itself off and on at preset times to avoid being woken by e-mails… not to mention that the mail and gtalk apps feel so seamless, they feel like part of the operating system while Exchange Direct Push just feels like a nasty hackish afterthought that’s been badly implemented.
I very much doubt Apple and RIM will get together as they both aim for very different markets. Although it would be nice if any phone Apple do release has BlackBerry functionality in it like the newer Nokia handsets.