Deef's Net

Back in February, my Treo took a fall and more or less stopped working. Not completely, but almost nothing worked.

Eventually, I figured out that it was due to the right shift key being jammed in the depressed position, keeping most keystrokes from working, along with a lot of taps. A little surgery to insert a small piece of paper between the contacts of that key, and the phone was up and running again, minus that one key. Since the shift key is the one redundant key on the Treo, it could’ve been worse.

At the time, I was only two months away from Verizon’s “new every two [years]” promotion, so I figured I’d just wait until then and upgrade to another phone. So, in April, I decided to take the plunge and switch from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

After some research and brief contemplations about getting a smartphone instead of a PDA, I decided on the Verizon XV-6700, a.k.a. HTC Apache, a.k.a. UTStarcom PPC-6700 (this is a phone with an identity crisis).

XV-6700 First Impressions

The XV-6700 is roughly the same size as the Treo 650, though a lot boxier. Style apparently wasn’t ranking very high on the designers’ list when they put this device together — it looks like a rectangular hockey puck crossed with an Oreo.

Ignoring the fashion statement, the major selling point of this phone over its Windows Mobile competition is the keyboard. The front of the PDA only has a few buttons and a five-way knob, but the whole side of the device slides out, revealing a rather large keyboard. It’s actually large enough that you can do four-finger typing without too much trouble. The Treo, by contrast, is pretty much limited to two thumbs.

The XV-6700 also has built in WiFi. Major points for that.

Other nice features are the large rectangular screen, which can be run in either portrait or landscape mode, and the 1.3MP camera. I especially liked the built-in LED, which, while probably not all that useful as a flash, made for a very nice flashlight.

When I started using the phone, one of my first observations was that it lived up to the Windows stereotype — it crashed a lot. Over half a dozen times in the first day. I can see why the reset button is easily accessible, and not hidden in the battery compartment.

I was expecting this, though, especially on my first day or two of using it, while I was pounding the device to smithereens to find its limits. It would seem that Windows Mobile is more ambitious than the device is able to handle. After figuring out some boundaries, I was able to basically eliminate crashes.

XV-6700 Software

On the Treo, MyBible is a killer app for me. It’s ridiculously fast, and does most of what I want in a Bible program. Because of that, I immediately downloaded their equivalent program for Windows Mobile, PocketBible.

That didn’t go so well. Whereas MyBible is perfectly integrated with the Palm OS, PocketBible is, at best, clunky. It breaks the UI guidelines in a number of places, it’s slow, it crashes a lot, it doesn’t remember where you left off last time (usually because it crashed in the meantime), and it isn’t nearly as intuitive as its counterpart.

I really tried to acclimate to its quirks, but just couldn’t do it. I was finding myself bringing a paper Bible around to church and Bible studies instead, because the program just couldn’t keep up, and it would frequently crash and need to be reloaded, which is not conducive to a good Bible study.

In desperation, I downloaded OliveTree’s BibleReader for Windows Mobile. My experience with their program from several years ago hadn’t been very good, but it was better than this.

To my surprise, OliveTree has dramatically improved their product since the last time I’d looked at it, and it’s now positively pleasant to use. It used to take at least 15 seconds to pull up a verse in my old version, but it’s now more or less instantaneous, even when the Bible is on a memory card. Reference books work just as quickly, and OliveTree has really expanded their library to include all sorts of books. Such as Wayne Grudem’s excellent Systematic Theology, which is packaged with the ESV Bible translation. Perfect!

So, Bible software is taken care of with BibleReader. Internet Explorer works well — much better than Opera, Minimo, and another browser whose name is escaping me. Pocket Outlook does a good job with E-Mail, as long as you’re not using a UW-IMAP server (which I am, but POP3 works as an alternative). Contact management, tasks, and calendar both work fine out of the box. MP3-playback wasn’t a problem.

I definitely give Microsoft credit for including a very good package of applications with the out-of-box installation of their handheld OS. Would that they’d do the same thing with their desktop OS!

SSH took a long time to get straightened out, but I eventually found a program that worked and was cheaper than $80 (one SSH program for Windows Mobile would’ve cost more than my phone did!).

That’s nearly all that my PDA gets used for. Oh, and games. There’s no shortage of games for Windows Mobile. Some of them are even free. I tried several demos of the non-free ones, and they looked pretty impressive. In the realm of free games, there were a number of ports of old BBS games, and I enjoyed a much-too-long game of Space Trader on a flight to Orlando (and subsequent hotel stay, at least until I finished the game at the end of the first evening there).

The memo program was nearly the only disappointment out of the built-in software. Each memo is a separate file in the filesystem, and they’re a royal pain to work with. For one thing, there’s no apparent way to categorize them. I have a lot of memos, and this was a problem.

There was a third phone on that list…

I might have been able to find a workaround for the memo problem, but there were a few things that became showstoppers in the meantime:

• Phone quality. The XV-6700’s speaker isn’t loud enough for use in any but the quietest environments. In addition, the microphone is much too sensitive and omnidirectional.

• Too much stylus. The Treo has a keyboard that’s always accessible. It’s smaller, true, but it means there are 31 more hotkeys available before you need to pull out the stylus. This is huge, and it became increasingly frustrating not to have that capability, especially since most of the hotspots on the screen were too small and too close together for a fingernail-press to work reliably. Pulling out the keyboard to execute a command is more cumbersome than I’d like.

• Battery life. This is really what killed the deal. In Boston and Orlando, it worked fine, but in West Lebanon, which is not a pinnacle of cell phone reception, the XV-6700 would barely make 10 hours on one charge, and that was with no use at all. My 2-year-old Treo easily lasts several days, even with moderate use.

Enter the LG vx8600

After about a month of using the XV-6700, I’d had enough of poor phone quality and not being able to make it through the day on one charge, and decided to add another line. This served a few purposes:

• Since we don’t have a land-line, this would give us a back-up line and phone in case one went dead for some reason. It could also become a separate business line, if need be.

• I could turn the phone off on the XV-6700, just use the WiFi most of the time, and have the battery last for several days. The LG phone would be my phone, and the XV-6700 would be my PDA. Bye-bye convergence, but it could be worse — the LG phone is extremely thin, and easily fits in a pocket, so I could still carry both of them.

• It gave me a web-capable cell phone, in case I ever get around to programming some mobile web stuff.

The LG phone is pretty nice. As a phone, it does very well. Sound quality is excellent, and it’s easy to use. It has a good feature set, plus nice bonuses like a 1.3MP camera, MP3 player, and alarms. The vibrate and ringing settings are rather flexible, and you can set it to “sound on alarm only”, which is a great little touch (usually sound is either all on or all off).

The Get It Now and VCast features are much-touted, but I’m not at all interested in them, so I can’t offer an opinion as to whether or how well they work.

The web support is, in a word, terrible. I think the phone’s web support is probably decent, but Verizon has crippled it beyond redemption. They’ve locked out the ability to set a home page, and force you to go through their advertising-laden, useless menus. Even going to a manually-entered URL has to be done through a proxy web page, which means it takes well over a minute before you can get to the site you want. It’s usable, but you’d have to be pretty desperate. Especially when compared to the XV-6700’s web support, which is stellar for a handheld.

The phone’s reviewers talked about getting good battery life, but again, it seems like they live in areas where reception is better. This phone will usually give me 18 hours per charge, though, which will get me through most days.

I tried wearing both the LG and XV-6700 phones, which lasted for approximately 15 seconds. I was very quickly reminded of why I didn’t get a cell phone until I could get one that combined a cell phone and PDA — wearing more than one thing on my belt just feels ridiculous.

After that, I tried wearing the XV-6700 and keeping the LG in my pocket, and alternated that with just wearing the LG, to see which one I would prefer.

So, which phone is on Deef’s belt now?

After alternating that setup for a couple of weeks, I finally settled on… the Treo 650.

Yep, right back where I started.

With a clean install, upgraded firmware, and a better memory card (snitched from the XV-6700), the Treo is now positively zippy. I kept the upgraded (unlimited) data plan and decided to try a new set of software, and I’m very pleased with how well it’s working.

I’m hoping that my 650 will last until Verizon starts offering something equivalent to the 755p, at which time I’ll replace it with that, so as to have more RAM, faster wireless data, and bigger memory card support.

The LG has gone to Christine. I’m not sure if she’s going to keep it yet, or if the battery life is going to be a problem for her — she seems to be getting less life out of a single charge than I did. The XV-6700 is on the other line, and serves as a handy WiFi device, along with a good test environment for mobile web development.

I was going to give reviews of some of the new programs I’m using on the Treo, but this is already more than long enough, so I’ll do that some other time. I’ve definitely come back into the Palm OS fold, though, after experiencing Windows Mobile for a month and a half.