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first impressions of Microsoft Smartphone 2002

in the battle for the smartphone market, one thing microsoft seems to understand is that one size does not fit all. they see that some of their users prefer a full featured pda that also doubles as a voice and wireless data phone, and other users prefer a full featured phone that has aspects of being a pda. this suite of operating systems, now being pre-marketed as "windows mobile 2003" in the past has consisted of "pocket pc phone edition 2002" and "smartphone 2002" respectively. The pocket pc phone edition has been seen in north america on the t-mobile pocket pc, the samsung i700 sold by verizon, and the hitachi sh-g1000 communicator sold by sprint pcs - and in europe as the t-mobile mda and the o2 xda. the smartphone os, however, until very recently was only seen on the orange spv in europe and the uk, and now as HDC tanager via other channels.

i've been carrying around a pre-production developer version of a smartphone 2002 device provided by everlink wireless which has been labeled as the "red e sc100 smartphone". as it is a pre-production device, i will try to keep my comments on the smartphone os itself, and not on the device itself. there definitely were many times i had to reboot the device because of errors, and there were times i could not tell where to place the blame for errors and glitches, but suffice it to say the phone itself has been more than functional for my needs, exceeding expectations in some areas, although also dissapointing me in others. I tested using t-mobile us GSM service, with a GPRS connection provisioned on their internet3.voicestream.com gateway which allows outgoing access on all ports.

to those who are familiar with the pocket pc, or the pcoket pc phone edition, the smartphone will make them feel right at home. the home screen that exists on the other devices also appears here, but in smaller fashion. the icon bar fits 5 application icons, containing the most recently launched items, and appointment, message status, and profile all can be viewed, selected used to launch their associated application. the status bar shows the same message and GPRS indicators, as exist on the phone edition, which i had used before, so i already knew the meaning they brought to bear as the icons appeared and reappeared as i performed actions on the phone.

my use consisted of setting up an email account that would be accessed via GPRS, daily browsing, texting (SMS), making phone calls, and attempting to play games and MP3s. here's my observations with these activities:

email task:
for my use, i need my phone to connect to a non-microsoft-exchange email account to retreive my mail on a timely basis, preferably before i would have to "pull" it. in short, the blackberry sets a pretty high bar for email, and i would like to get as close to that experience as possible (can't wait to try the nokia 6800 with blackberry integration!).

evaluation:
as existed in the pocket pc phone edition, the smartphone os can't deal well with an imap server that isn't exchange based. mine is linux based running sendmail and u-dub imap, and the smartphone hangs trying to download all the other stuff in my home folder that isn't my mail, and there aren't any options to prevent this. so as with ppcpe, i was resricted to using POP. that aside, the email experience on the os is strong.you can view about 5 subjects at a time with the sender, and i say it's about 50% better than you can do on the sony ericsson t68 or t610. you can choose what to download, and reading and writing mail using the keypad is functional. the user can set the email client to autosynchronize from frequent as every fifteen minutes to once a day or never - which worked better than i have seen it on some other devices.

browsing task:
browse this weblog, along with mobile content provided by microsoft, and i few others

evaluation:
as far as the "mobile internet" goes - this is the best i have seen on a phone profile. the smartphone version of IE advertises itself as windows CE IE 3.x compatible, which is enough to browse many places without a problem. it has a "fit to screen" mode which does a fantastic job of rendering many sites readable without having to scroll to the right. mobile browser developers, take note - this is the right way to do it. if this isn't enough to convince the masses that WAP is dead, i don't know what is. the bookmark capability is easy, but the one thing that was a little annoying is that the "back" button tended to always reload the page from the network instead of cache. with a 256 MB SD card, i have plenty of room to cache some of the sites i browse often.

texting task:
text a contact, receive a response, and text again

evaluation:
this phone/os combo has t9, which i personally think is much more efficient than the pen based interface of the pocket pc phone edition. i found it curious that you could fill in a subject and body in your SMS, although you can send to multiple recipients, including SMS and email users in the same message. smartphone uses the "one inbox" approach to messaging. all email, sms, and mms (seen from demos) appear in one inbox. for some reason, this feels natural on the blackberry, but still a little unnatural on the phone. it didn't help that the incoming sms i received got sorted below the email i was receiving because of time differences on the source servers. either way, i think the messaging being agnostic to the bearing channel is an interesting approach we'll see more and more of, but i know i've certainly been trained by other phones to look in differnt inboxes for different media.

making a phone call task:
make a call! simple enough?

evaluation:
i like it when i get wowed with a usability feature. just start typing a name OR a number from the home screen and the smartphone starts presenting you with a subset of your contacts that match. as you keep typing, the list gets smaller but rarely does this require more than 2 keystrokes. everyone should emulate this. also, you can go to the calendar, notes etc while on the phone. speakerphone is supported, and worked well on this model.

gameplay task:
play solitaire and mini-jetfight

evaluation:
some innovation here. the platform does a great job of supporting keyboard based games by labelling all buttons with a keypad number shortcut. so instead of having to use the joystick to move around, they keypad can easily be used. for instance, in playing solitare, to move a card from one stack to another, you might press 6 then 5. mini-jetfight is a graphic intensive flying game that seems to support multiplayer server based play. i only tried the one player game, but although the game took forever to load, the results were pretty spectacular for a phone. almost as good as a sega genesis on a phone. it's not quite up to par with the 3d libraries supported on the sony ericsson p800, but it was a heck of a lot easier to play with a joystick than a pen!

task:
listen to an mp3

evaluation:
this particular phone comes with an SD media slot, so it was pretty easy to load up a bunch of mp3s onto the card and put it in the phone. smartphone 2002 comes with windows media player as you might expect, capable of playing music and video. as far as playing mp3s...not so good here. i'm not sure if it was the phone or the os, but the VBR ripped MP3s i took right off my music server were unplayable. the processor tried to keep up, but could not buffer enough to play them at all. stutter, stop. stutter, stop. i probably could have ripped them at a lower bit rate and been fine, but i'd never do that. i want the mp3s that play on my ipod to play here as well. i'd like to see how some other phones fared on this task.

future potential:
this particular phone provider didn't supply an MMS client, but i would expect the resolution of images and media play to be supported in an above average manner. i also didn't see bluetooth support but i'm sure thats coming down the pike. one thing that was encouraging was the SDIO slot that seems to be supported on all the smartphone devices. this is encouraging because it would seem to be a clear path to a combo wi-fi/GPRS phone using a card such as the
sandisk sdwifi card or a similar one made by Socket and the smartphone os does seem to support peripherals such as this...that is, networking is not tied to WAP/GPRS.

microsoft still has a long way to go to fend off symbian. verizon will soon be launching a motorola smartphone with a clamshell design in the US where symbian doesn't have an overwhelming foothold, but even in europe where smartphones have been released at multiple operators, the numbers pale in comparison to sales of devices running symbian. microsoft also has to address the younger market somehow to gain market share, which i don't see happening without a rebranding and repackaging. perhaps some cool games will do the trick.

my general impressions are very positive. the one negative i see is battery consumption, as i think is also a problem with pocket pcs i have used. microsoft states in their FAQ that the average battery life should be 2 days with constant use. in my tests where the email client was grabbing mail every 30 minutes, the battery lasted 8 hours tops, again under the caveat of beta hardware.

the bottom line is there are some impressive capabilities provided by the operating system, that if used right could gain a share of the expanding smartphone market for the business user.

Posted by Steve at August 26, 2003 01:09 AM | TrackBack