On Thursday after getting back from the show in Birmingham which went really well, I went into my local Orange store to upgrade to my first PocketPC Phone. It’s worth noting at this point that pretty much every geek I spoke to told me to stay away from them as they are PDAs with the phone functions tacked on at the last minute and also as I am a Mac user there can be some difficulties with installing software. Feeling slightly nervous I still went ahead and upgraded to the SPV M3100 which is actually an Orange branded HTC Hermes device. Here’s some photos.

It’s a PocketPC device running Windows Mobile 5.0, it has Bluetooth and WiFi (b&g), a 1Gb Mico SD card, 2MP Camera and a secondary low res camera for making video calls, it’s 3G and with all those bells and whistles and me playing with it so far the battery seems to last a day and a half.

The first thing I noticed about it was that it doesn’t seem as big after you’ve used it for a while. Obviously it is considerably larger than the K750i I was using previously but it does have a full qwerty keyboard and a much larger screen. I was also impressed with how simple it was to use, I switched it on, pressed the Comm Manager button, switched on WiFi and it connected to my network straight away. The software that comes with it is fairly unexciting, the usual office programs, pdf viewer, windows media player, outlook, internet explorer, solitaire and bubblebreaker. They all work fairly well, although I’m rediscovering the joys of IE’s hit and miss rendering of sites.

Unfortunately Orange have neglected to include MSN messenger, apparently as they are launching their own messaging service later in the year. I found a few guides for how to get it back on your phone officially and unofficially but they all require a windows PC, which I currently don’t have regular access to. So I installed Agile Messenger and Skype instead which give me access to all of my IM’s and allow me to make phone calls for free as long as I have access to an open wireless network.

Other software I’ve installed include a program called Batti (no laughing at the back!) which is a far better battery monitor than the one built into Windows Mobile 5.0, along with Pocket HTML .Net which is a HTML editor that I’ve yet to really experiment with, TCPMP which handles pretty much all of the media types I can throw at it and finally a program I had previously never heard of called ShoZu which allows me to upload images and videos taken with my phone instantly to flickr or this site. On the Mac side of things I’m continuing to use The Missing Sync as I used to use it with my GPS and I was unimpressed with PocketMac after having paid for both.

Now the main downside of using a Windows device on a Mac. Software for PocketPC is generally released as either a CAB file or an EXE file; CAB files are transferred to the device and then you run them to install the software, EXEs are run on a Windows PC and then use Activesync to install the program to the device. Unfortunately the EXE files seem to be the more prevalent format of release which make very little sense. Why not just release all software in CABs? It seems that everyone would gain from releasing solely CAB files as developers can then sell their software in a format that everyone can use independent of their OS. It also means that with the abundance of unlimited data tarriffs that users can browse the developers site from their handheld device, download and install the software without the need for a computer at all.

Overall I’m very impressed with the device, I love the way it deals with SMS and Email as being separate accounts within outlook and it’s very satisfying sliding the keyboard out and then typing out a reply without the need for predictive text. The physical buttons are quite well laid out and it can be fairly easily used with one hand once you find out what all the buttons do mainly thanks to the scroll wheel on the top left of the device. I have ordered a bluetooth GPS module and I’ll update this review with how I get on with TomTom once it arrives.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.