I have been using a couple of phones, smartphones.
I was a tester for HTC series of Windows Mobile phones. To me, Windows Mobile is not even advancing since the day Windows CE launched.
The design philosophy is simply not right. It was taken from a PDA approach, and adding phone functionality. The worst is, it was trying to do what a desktop computer should, and of course with a lot of short comings.
I was first using Apple Newton MessagePad 120 which I bought from Singapore back in 1993. It was a truly amazing experience of having a PDA carrying around and it is surprisingly fast and accurate on handwriting recognition, much faster than my later HP iPAQ which I bought in year 2000.
I have never been impressed by Palm's PDA, even at the later date, I bought a Tungsten for my wife, and I still never like it.
Newton sets a high standard for me on PDAs and smartphones that I came across. Frankly, none so far beats Newton on its friendliness, even the iPhone.
I am still keeping an unit of Newton MessagePad 2100, except that the battery connector dropped out, the unit is still functioning well with AC.
After Apple discontinued Newton, I was looking for a replacement, or rather, an upgrade. There comes HP iPAQ which was first seen when one of my colleague bought it sometime year 2000.
I was impressed by the color screen, and bought 2 units, one for my wife, and one for myself.
There's little connectivity on iPAQ, I can slot in a wireless card, which requires a backpack, and the unit become almost 2 X as thick, and of course, heavy.
But both my wife and myself have been suffering from short battery life, typically lasted for 1 hour when actively using it; and often screwing up our contacts on both iPAQ and PC when ActiveSync don't work properly.
I started to admire the long battery life of Palm, and of course Newton.
My iPAQ was later flashed with Linux, seems to work pretty well with a number of Linux distributions available for iPAQ at that time.
After iPAQ, I have not been using PDA for quite some time. I truly believe that PDA must be connected to be useful, and battery life, extensibility, are all important aspect of PDA/smartphone.
Then came Nokia/Sony Ericsson's Symbian phone. I was attracted, and bought Nokia N70.
It was a horrible experience where my N70 is consistently running out of battery when I need most. Screen was too small for me to do anything meaningful except calling and accepting calls.
In 3 months' time, I traded the unit with Motorola Razor 3G, cheapest 3G phone at that point.
The Moto disappoint me with its short battery life and slow response. No choice, go look for an ordinary phone, Sony Ericsson K70, then SE T610i while waiting for iPhone 3G to be at our shore at reasonable price.
iPhone 3G is not perfect either, short battery life, i.e. my usage pattern of getting connected almost every moment requiring me to charge the phone atleast twice a day. I was later found out the short battery life is largely attributed to 3G/GPRS switching which forces the phone to scan for available 3G signal.
But iPhone design philosophy is very much different from Windows Mobile, where iphone is basically user centric, where WIndows Mobile is a shrink-Windows on a phone.
I will blog more on my findings on iPhone in the following days.
