New phone review

[dryfter]

Old phone's battery was getting even worse, and then it started doing this continual-flashing-backlight act the other day for a while too. Odd.

New phone arrived yesterday.

Took some effort to transfer all the contact details over - you can send one at a time from the Nokia via bluetooth, but if you Select All, the Send option vanishes. The Orange Backup utility exists on both phones, which backs up your contacts to a remote site, and is free. I backed up the contacts from the Nokia (took about 5 tries), and then restored them using the same utility onto the SPV. Unfortunately, it lost random people's numbers in the process. ie. They still had a name in the address book - just no details. Yet for other people, it took all their numbers and addresses fine. Odd.
Annoyingly, the various apps I could sync the Nokia to (gnokii, OSX) weren't the same things I could sync the SPV to, so that was a no-go. Although now I know more, I think I could have done it.
I manually entered all the missing number last night, which took a while, but let me practice with the handwriting recogn.

Note: Writing is really hard when you're on a bumpy bus.

The SPV M500 (rebadged HTC Magician) supports Graffiti - it has 3 different recognition modes, but I found graffiti to be the most accurate for me.

The phone itself feels a bit quicker than the Nokia 6600: You click things, and stuff happens, whereas the Nokia tended to spend ages doing simple things like bringing up a message box. This is despite the new phone running Windows CE 2003 SE!

I was initially worried about Linux connectivity, but people have been working on this since the iPaq came out, and the SynCE project works with the phone fine, and has various tools to sync between iCal, Evolution, Gnome, etc. although I haven't had time to experiment with them.

I've installed Nethack, ScummVM, and SSH so far; I couldn't get Opera to go on though, but maybe I selected the wrong version. (Any ideas?)
The phone is less stable than the Nokia though.. I've crashed it twice so far, and I've only had it for a day. (Although only in dodgy 3rd party apps I was trying out.)

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

You have nethack and SSH on your phone. Utter geek!

I used gnokii on a work project once. gnokii + cheap 6110 phone + cheap contract + permanently plugged-in charger installed in the server room was the cheapest and simplest way to send SMSs from our server. We were only sending an SMS once every few minutes on average, so it could easily handle the data rate.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's always been a phone like that everywhere I've worked. I think there's one over there *points* too. It surprised everyone by ringing one time. Took minutes to realise where the sound was coming from.