I wouldn't be writing this review at all if Windows Mobile 5 didn't have some serious shortcomings in the alarms department. As a recent deserter from the Palm camp, I'd been used to using my PDA (a Palm TX) as my alarm clock - I always had it with me and with some add-on midi files the sounds were fine for waking me up. Trying to use the WM5 Alarm applet in my Orange SPV M600 to do the same thing got me in to trouble. Sometimes the alarm just wouldn't sound at all, leading to some embarrassing oversleeping incidents, and if it did sound, there was often no way of cancelling the alarm, so it just kept on sounding. A bit of googling revealed that these were known issues that had been around a while but which Microsoft had not thought important enough to fix. My searches also revealed that there was no easy solution to these problems.
I tried a couple of freeware alarm programs, but wasn't particularly impressed - some of them suffered from the same issues as the built-in app, and all had pretty ropey UIs. So I turned to the commercial solutions. Spb Time was actually the third of these that I tried. One of a suite of applications from the same developers, Spb Time's UI is anything but ropey, my alarms now go off when I want them to and can be cancelled by a nice big red button or snoozed with a big green one. I also now have a very nice skinnable clock and world clock, countdown timers and stopwatches (with lap times that can be saved to a text file) all accessible through a Today plugin. Alarms can be set to go off on particular days of the week, so it is easy to set different alarms to get you up for work in the week and for whatever you do at the weekend. You can also set a one time alarm for a time in the next 24 hours. There are plenty of options for sounds (MP3s included), repeat intervals, auto-snooze and snooze delays. All in all it is a great little application, does exactly what is claimed for it and the cost is reasonable, particularly at today's $/£ exchange rate. If the experience encourages you to try other Spb apps you can get a discount on those as an existing customer. I hope you can tell, I'm really very impressed. Just to be clear, I have no connection with Spb Software except as a satisfied user of their product.
Just as a footnote if unlike me you've stayed loyal to Palm you can get pretty much the same functionality from Palmary Clock, which was one of the most used applications on my old TX.
Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts
Monday, October 01, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Orange SPV M600 and Pocket PC Reviewed
I am a long term Palm user - my first Palm device was a PalmPilot Personal in 1997. I wrote some impressions of my then new Palm TX just over a year ago. Just before Christmas 2006 I took delivery of my first Pocket PC, an Orange SPV M600. I have also spent time with a Windows Mobile Smartphone, an Orange SPV C500, where I found the Smartphone facilities so hard to use that I didn't bother - it was pretty rubbish as a phone too. This review will cover my opinions of the new device and the OS.
Hardware
I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing the hardware; the M600 is one of the many versions of the HTC Prophet (others include the iMate JAMin, the Qtek S200, O2 XDA neo), the specs are on the Orange pages and if you go to 'Help and Support' you can download a pdf of the user manual. To summarise, the phone looks cool in its slightly rubberised metallic finish, it is small enough to be held to youre ear as a phone without making you feel ridiculous, the QVGA screen is bright and clear and the overall feel is solid. Some colleagues have drop tested their M600s and they have proved to be quite robust.
Presumably to increase battery life, the M600 uses a relatively slow TI OMAP 850 200MHz processor. This tradeoff makes sense most of the time; the exception being graphically intensive operations like changing the screen orientation from portrait to landscape, which is painfully slow, and turning the camera off which is even more excruciatingly glacial. Coupled with the position of the camera button where it is easy to press it by accident this causes a slgnificant issue; I have resolved this by re-assigning the camera button to bring up the Today screen instead, leaving camera access via the Start menu.
Phone
As a phone the M600 is very good. On all the attributes that matter - call sound quality, signal strength and reliability - it scores highly. Even battery life is not bad, comfortably outlasting the C500, although heavy PDA use reduces this (presumably due to the backllght, which is very bright), as does using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Integration with the PIM Contacts list is very good, some compensation for the lack of a hardware keypad. The soft keypad is usable with your fingers, so you don't need to get the stylus out to make a call. The designers have also thought about one handed use whlch is generally possible using the 5-way navigator and 4 hard buttons. Bluetooth to a Jabra BT250 headset works well, with good range and the speech recognition is tolerant of different environments and background noise. Overall it's as good as a phone from the traditional suppliers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which is all one can really ask for.
PDA
OS and ActiveSync
My first impression of the OS is that it is chaotic - the developers clearly had no agreed UI guidelines, or if they did there was no QA to ensure that they were followed. Each app, or sometimes each dialog within an app seems to have a different way of confirming actions. All the UI constructs (pop up menus, OK buttons, 'Done' buttons or menu items) seem to be used at random, and you have to hunt around the screen to find things. This is in huge contrast to the Zen of Palm, and considering the amount of money Microsoft have spent on this stuff it is frankly unforgivable.
Then there's this nonsense about the close button not closing apps, so that your available memory gets gradually eaten up. The remedy is to burrow several layers deep into the menus and find 'Running Programs' in the Memory applet and close a few apps down. If that doesn't free up enough memory, then just reset/reboot the machine. This is a hassle I could do without, and again sharply contrasts with the simplicity and usability of the Palm. So while a lot of the individual pieces are pretty good, the overall impression is that Pocket PC is a rather amateur effort.
And then there is ActiveSync. This is another area where the amateurishness makes itself felt. The UI on the PC side is just weird. If you try to see if you can configure sync for Notes, a dialog tells you that there is nothing to configure. There is nothing to configure for Contacts either, but in that case it tells you by simply presenting a 'Settings...' option, but it is always greyed out. Then there is the 'Resolve Items...' command. This appears in the middle of an information area of the application window when Active Sync has failed to sync something. Although the rest of the application is a rich client using Windows controls, this one looks like a hyperlink - blue, underlined - and following the Windows UI guidelines the elipsis (...) means that clicking it should take you to another dialog. But it doesn't - it just seems to run a Sync again, which will usually fail, for whatever reason it originally did. At no time does it suggest a cause for the failure, or any corrective action you might take. The whole thing looks and works like an early beta, not something at version 4.2. When it works, the continuous syncing is quite handy, compared to the sync on demand approach of Palm Hotsysnc. The trouble is that it doesn't seem to be very reliable or dependable.
Text Entry
I'm writing this using Notes on the M600. Of the text entry methods available to me I've chosen to use letter recognition, and I already seem to be faster with it than I was with Graffiti - I was a big Graffiti user, at least until the TX's broken character recognition put me off. Other options are the Block Recognizer - a Graffiti clone, Transcriber - cursive script recognition and a pop-up keyboard. All feature word completion which works well once you get used to it and increases the overall speed of entry.
Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes
The PIM apps are a match for the standard Palm equivalents, but for my calendar and address book I'd got used to the excellent TMP and Address XT, and compared to these the Pocket PC versions are a bit disappointing. I've mentioned phone integration with the Contacts application before, and it really is very good. I find it easy to find a contact and call them, either without the stylus, using just the 5-way navigator, or by writing part of their name into the search field. The possible hits are shown as you write, so you just need to write enough to get the person you want into the visible search list. It would be even easier if you could filter your Outlook contacts that get synced as you could with Windows Mobile 2003. This option has disappeared from PPC 5.0 and if you have nearly a thousand contacts it is a bit of a pain. I used to be able to add a category to the one hundred or so contacts I wanted on the phone, and ActiveSync just copied those. Now I get the lot, with obvious consequences for memory use and usabiity. While we are on the subject of categories, the Notes app doesn't support them at all, which is again a pain if you have a lot of Notes in Outlook.
Pocket Office
I have not actually tried these apps yet, although I did establish that the Orange supplied ClearVue PDF reader was unable to make sense of anything but the very simplest documents and was therefore pretty much useless. Pocket Word, Excel and Powerpoint don't look as full featured as the Docs To Go apps on the Palm, and syncronisation seems to be more of a manual operation. If I get around to using them I'll post a review then.
Media Player
Another thing I haven't tried is listening to music on the M600. The headphone socket is a 2.5mm effort so I can't use my favourite headphones without an adaptor, and I don't fancy being unable to make a phone call because I used the battery up listening to Warren Zevon. If I get the time I might try it for curiosity's sake, and if I do I might remember to come back and update this report.
Third Party Applications
There were a few things on my Palm that I used regularly - Metro, eReader and Palm Keyring being the most frequently needed. I was pleased to find that there were PPC versions of the first two available at the same cost as the Palm versions - free. These seem to work fine on the M600, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could use the eBooks purchased for the Palm on the M600 without any trouble. For the password vault, I'm trying out the open source KeyPass. It's early days yet but it seems to be OK.
The other thing I'm trying out is a utility called Magic Button. This aims to deal with the application shutdown/memory issue discussed above, by actually closing applications when the close button is tapped. Again, this seems to be doing it's job and it is also free.
The Verdict
The only thing I'm still depending on the TX for is waking me up in the morning (using the excellent Palmary Clock), so at the moment it looks like I'm going to be able to stop carrying the TX around, and just use the M600. It works fine as a phone, and the PIM functions are good enough. It's both ironic and extremely surprising that in many ways Microsoft Office and Outlook integration works better on the Palm. The Pocket PC OS is frustrating - it is fairly easy to see where the user experience could be massively improved by actually managing the developers rather than letting them hack away at random. It is interesting that the market is clearly saying that this inconsistency and general flakiness is not a barrier to success - I think a discussion of the reasons for that requires its own post. I'll miss Palm, but probably not enough to make me continue using two devices where I could manage with just the M600.
Hardware
I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing the hardware; the M600 is one of the many versions of the HTC Prophet (others include the iMate JAMin, the Qtek S200, O2 XDA neo), the specs are on the Orange pages and if you go to 'Help and Support' you can download a pdf of the user manual. To summarise, the phone looks cool in its slightly rubberised metallic finish, it is small enough to be held to youre ear as a phone without making you feel ridiculous, the QVGA screen is bright and clear and the overall feel is solid. Some colleagues have drop tested their M600s and they have proved to be quite robust.
Presumably to increase battery life, the M600 uses a relatively slow TI OMAP 850 200MHz processor. This tradeoff makes sense most of the time; the exception being graphically intensive operations like changing the screen orientation from portrait to landscape, which is painfully slow, and turning the camera off which is even more excruciatingly glacial. Coupled with the position of the camera button where it is easy to press it by accident this causes a slgnificant issue; I have resolved this by re-assigning the camera button to bring up the Today screen instead, leaving camera access via the Start menu.
Phone
As a phone the M600 is very good. On all the attributes that matter - call sound quality, signal strength and reliability - it scores highly. Even battery life is not bad, comfortably outlasting the C500, although heavy PDA use reduces this (presumably due to the backllght, which is very bright), as does using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Integration with the PIM Contacts list is very good, some compensation for the lack of a hardware keypad. The soft keypad is usable with your fingers, so you don't need to get the stylus out to make a call. The designers have also thought about one handed use whlch is generally possible using the 5-way navigator and 4 hard buttons. Bluetooth to a Jabra BT250 headset works well, with good range and the speech recognition is tolerant of different environments and background noise. Overall it's as good as a phone from the traditional suppliers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which is all one can really ask for.
PDA
OS and ActiveSync
My first impression of the OS is that it is chaotic - the developers clearly had no agreed UI guidelines, or if they did there was no QA to ensure that they were followed. Each app, or sometimes each dialog within an app seems to have a different way of confirming actions. All the UI constructs (pop up menus, OK buttons, 'Done' buttons or menu items) seem to be used at random, and you have to hunt around the screen to find things. This is in huge contrast to the Zen of Palm, and considering the amount of money Microsoft have spent on this stuff it is frankly unforgivable.
Then there's this nonsense about the close button not closing apps, so that your available memory gets gradually eaten up. The remedy is to burrow several layers deep into the menus and find 'Running Programs' in the Memory applet and close a few apps down. If that doesn't free up enough memory, then just reset/reboot the machine. This is a hassle I could do without, and again sharply contrasts with the simplicity and usability of the Palm. So while a lot of the individual pieces are pretty good, the overall impression is that Pocket PC is a rather amateur effort.
And then there is ActiveSync. This is another area where the amateurishness makes itself felt. The UI on the PC side is just weird. If you try to see if you can configure sync for Notes, a dialog tells you that there is nothing to configure. There is nothing to configure for Contacts either, but in that case it tells you by simply presenting a 'Settings...' option, but it is always greyed out. Then there is the 'Resolve Items...' command. This appears in the middle of an information area of the application window when Active Sync has failed to sync something. Although the rest of the application is a rich client using Windows controls, this one looks like a hyperlink - blue, underlined - and following the Windows UI guidelines the elipsis (...) means that clicking it should take you to another dialog. But it doesn't - it just seems to run a Sync again, which will usually fail, for whatever reason it originally did. At no time does it suggest a cause for the failure, or any corrective action you might take. The whole thing looks and works like an early beta, not something at version 4.2. When it works, the continuous syncing is quite handy, compared to the sync on demand approach of Palm Hotsysnc. The trouble is that it doesn't seem to be very reliable or dependable.
Text Entry
I'm writing this using Notes on the M600. Of the text entry methods available to me I've chosen to use letter recognition, and I already seem to be faster with it than I was with Graffiti - I was a big Graffiti user, at least until the TX's broken character recognition put me off. Other options are the Block Recognizer - a Graffiti clone, Transcriber - cursive script recognition and a pop-up keyboard. All feature word completion which works well once you get used to it and increases the overall speed of entry.
Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes
The PIM apps are a match for the standard Palm equivalents, but for my calendar and address book I'd got used to the excellent TMP and Address XT, and compared to these the Pocket PC versions are a bit disappointing. I've mentioned phone integration with the Contacts application before, and it really is very good. I find it easy to find a contact and call them, either without the stylus, using just the 5-way navigator, or by writing part of their name into the search field. The possible hits are shown as you write, so you just need to write enough to get the person you want into the visible search list. It would be even easier if you could filter your Outlook contacts that get synced as you could with Windows Mobile 2003. This option has disappeared from PPC 5.0 and if you have nearly a thousand contacts it is a bit of a pain. I used to be able to add a category to the one hundred or so contacts I wanted on the phone, and ActiveSync just copied those. Now I get the lot, with obvious consequences for memory use and usabiity. While we are on the subject of categories, the Notes app doesn't support them at all, which is again a pain if you have a lot of Notes in Outlook.
Pocket Office
I have not actually tried these apps yet, although I did establish that the Orange supplied ClearVue PDF reader was unable to make sense of anything but the very simplest documents and was therefore pretty much useless. Pocket Word, Excel and Powerpoint don't look as full featured as the Docs To Go apps on the Palm, and syncronisation seems to be more of a manual operation. If I get around to using them I'll post a review then.
Media Player
Another thing I haven't tried is listening to music on the M600. The headphone socket is a 2.5mm effort so I can't use my favourite headphones without an adaptor, and I don't fancy being unable to make a phone call because I used the battery up listening to Warren Zevon. If I get the time I might try it for curiosity's sake, and if I do I might remember to come back and update this report.
Third Party Applications
There were a few things on my Palm that I used regularly - Metro, eReader and Palm Keyring being the most frequently needed. I was pleased to find that there were PPC versions of the first two available at the same cost as the Palm versions - free. These seem to work fine on the M600, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could use the eBooks purchased for the Palm on the M600 without any trouble. For the password vault, I'm trying out the open source KeyPass. It's early days yet but it seems to be OK.
The other thing I'm trying out is a utility called Magic Button. This aims to deal with the application shutdown/memory issue discussed above, by actually closing applications when the close button is tapped. Again, this seems to be doing it's job and it is also free.
The Verdict
The only thing I'm still depending on the TX for is waking me up in the morning (using the excellent Palmary Clock), so at the moment it looks like I'm going to be able to stop carrying the TX around, and just use the M600. It works fine as a phone, and the PIM functions are good enough. It's both ironic and extremely surprising that in many ways Microsoft Office and Outlook integration works better on the Palm. The Pocket PC OS is frustrating - it is fairly easy to see where the user experience could be massively improved by actually managing the developers rather than letting them hack away at random. It is interesting that the market is clearly saying that this inconsistency and general flakiness is not a barrier to success - I think a discussion of the reasons for that requires its own post. I'll miss Palm, but probably not enough to make me continue using two devices where I could manage with just the M600.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Palm TX: First Impressions
This is my 5th Palm device since 1997. I've had a 512k Pilot Personal, a 4M Palm IIIx, a 16M Clié T625c and then a 64M Tungsten T3. The T3 I won in a competition (thanks Proporta!) but all the others I paid approximately £200 for, so I guess that is what I consider to be an acceptable price for a PDA. With all of the others this meant that I had to wait for the price to drop, but the TX started at this price. As recorded at Palm 24/7 (scroll down to the 'Palm Europe Trade-in Offer' article) I traded my Pilot Personal in so I got a very good price, but the Dixons airport stores are selling the TX for £195 and it is readily available online for around £210. Such is progress in electronics - I'm glad I don't have to try to make a living off hardware.
Right, on to those impressions...
Despite the Outlook hassles, overall I think I'd have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the TX. Of course I'm lucky that I'm not bothered by the T3 features that didn't make it to the TX. I never used the voice recorder, I just can't get agitated about the lack of an LED and I can live without a vibrating alarm. Others may feel differently, but for me the lack of a slider, Wi-Fi, longer battery life, non-volatile RAM and better screen are more than adequate compensation.
The final paragraph was going to read "This review written entirely on the palm using Graffiti 2 and posted using u*blog". Unfortunately, u*blog worked fine until I pressed the 'post' button, at which point it soft reset the TX. It doesn't have an export function, so the portion of the review that survived the crash (about 60% of it) had to be copied bit by bit (to keep under the clipboard limit) into Memos. Any suggestions for a Palm blogging tool that works on a TX?
Right, on to those impressions...
- The screen is really nice, bright and clear.
- Graffiti 2 still sucks (or blows goats, depending on your idiom preferences) but recognition seems better than the T3
- I've seen all the posts from people moaning about the lack of a cradle.I have a drawer full of cradles that I have never used so I am very happy to have a cable in the box.
- Wi-Fi - just brilliant. Easy to configure, performance is fine, just works.
- MP3 player - pTunes is fine, no frills but perfectly functional.The TX appears as a mobile device in WMP 10 so getting music on and off the card is really easy. I've only got a 256Mb card but now I've confirmed that the TX can do the business as an MP3 player I'll be ordering something bigger!
- Compatibility seems ok. Just one of my favourite programs fails to work - the freeware currency converter 'Currency' causes a soft reset every time I try to run it.
- Outlook synchronisation didn't work. I got a load of OLERR: errors and the Calendar synch failed. This happened with my T3 too, and after trying the various things in Palm's knowledgebase I took their suggestion and gave my money to Chapura for PocketMirror. This is actually a pretty major flaw, and I think it is pathetic that Palm's suggestion when their software doesn't work is to buy someone else's - just fix it for Gods sake! I do have six years worth of data in my Calendar and if I cleaned it up the problem might go away, but PocketMirror and the Intellisync software that came with my T625C work fine on exactly the same Outlook data so it clearly isn't impossible to make it work if you know what you are doing.
Despite the Outlook hassles, overall I think I'd have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the TX. Of course I'm lucky that I'm not bothered by the T3 features that didn't make it to the TX. I never used the voice recorder, I just can't get agitated about the lack of an LED and I can live without a vibrating alarm. Others may feel differently, but for me the lack of a slider, Wi-Fi, longer battery life, non-volatile RAM and better screen are more than adequate compensation.
The final paragraph was going to read "This review written entirely on the palm using Graffiti 2 and posted using u*blog". Unfortunately, u*blog worked fine until I pressed the 'post' button, at which point it soft reset the TX. It doesn't have an export function, so the portion of the review that survived the crash (about 60% of it) had to be copied bit by bit (to keep under the clipboard limit) into Memos. Any suggestions for a Palm blogging tool that works on a TX?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)