Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Here I chronicle my experience with PDAs and smartphones, a dimension of my adventures with personal technology.

In 1995 I got a Newton Message Pad while I was working at Apple Computer. I loved it. To this day it remains a favorite among all the mobile devices I’ve had. It lacked things now common—a color screen and built-in WI-FI, for instance. But it was great for simple spreadsheets and word processing, handling email, note-taking and keeping a calendar, to-do list and contacts database.

In fact, a main reason I was receptive to the Tablet PC platform in 2004 was that nearly a decade earlier I’d used pen input on the Newton and liked it.

The Doonesbury comic strip mocked the handwriting recognition on the original Newton, but in later models it was dramatically improved and became quite usable. I used the Newton’s HRW to write hundreds of entires in a personal journal. Most of them ran for several paragraphs, some for pages. In truth I found that inputting text with the stylus wasn’t as fast as keyboard input (and there was an external keyboard available for the Newton), but the novelty of HRW and the portability gained through the small device made me willing to use HRW often.

I also took lots of “ink notes” with my Newton, jotting down assignments, directions and all kinds of daily flotsam that required temporary retention. I found paper better for taking lengthy notes in class, but I used a Newton actively until 2000 and tracked my all-important first year law school grades on a Newton spreadsheet. I remember later jotting things on my Newton as I moved around New York City battling to find an apartment.

Once I started working in the law firm I set my Newton aside. I was too busy to indulge my interest in personal technology, and I didn’t really need a mobile PIM anyway; I was chained to my desk or in some conference room going through boxes of documents for due diligence. My calendar was in LotusNotes, and if I needed to check a phone number or calendar item when away from my desk I called my secretary.

I bought a Palm device but never really used it. Compared to the Newton it left me uninspired. It was smaller and less expensive than the Newton and added a color screen, but it had small ambitions—it was intended to be mainly a PIM, not a powerful mobile computer.

I didn’t use any PDA from 2000 till 2004. I had a series of mobile phones over those years, but they were just for voice telephony, not data. I suppose the phone numbers I stored on them were as close as I got to having a mobile PIM. I never synced any of those mobile phones with a desktop or laptop computer, though.

In October 2004 my tech addiction began to rage again, I bought an HP iPAQ 4705, then the top-of-the-line Pocket PC. The 4705 was impressive in many ways. It had a lot of capability but could be cradled in the palm of one hand or tucked into a shirt pocket. It had built-in WI-FI, so I could use it to surf the web and handle email. The screen was gorgeous—bright, sharp and saturated with rich colors.

However, depending on WI-FI meant I had to be near a hotspot. I wanted uninterrupted, ubiquitous coverage. So I bought a device from Sprint that allowed me to access their CDMA wireless network. It fit into the CF card slot on the iPAQ. It worked, though it required an ugly external battery.

Unfortunately, it turns out “Pocket PC” and “Pocket Word” are clever but misleading marketing names—those terms suggest smaller (more portable) versions of the operating system and word processing applications with which one is familiar. Actually, the functionality—not just the size—is dramatically reduced, too. With Pocket Word, for example, you lose a great deal of formatting capability. Pocket Word doesn’t support tables and footnotes. I bought an alternative Pocket PC word processor, but even with it I was unable to open the file containing a law review article I’d published—it was just too much for the Pocket PC to handle.

Another problem is that with a Pocket PC you can’t keep a lot of programs open at once and bounce between them. Typically I want to keep open an email program, several web browser windows, some software for reading and writing Chinese and perhaps a media player. That didn’t work.

Also, in trying to use my iPAQ with Sprint’s CF-format CDMA wireless networking card, I seem to have toasted something in the unit’s electrical workings, starting a series of rounds of sending it in for repair.

I spent huge amounts of time loading my iPAQ with software, trying to make it work as a laptop substitute. I added software so that it could display Chinese. I added software to convert currency and metric measurements. I added software so that it could show PowerPoint files. I installed an alternative word processor and web browser.

My conclusion is that if you need a laptop, get a laptop—a Pocket PC is not a PC in your pocket, and Windows Mobile is not a mobile version of Windows—to get the small size they’ve created anemic devices (in comparison to full-blown PCs), and trying to make one work as a laptop substitute will for most people (and certainly for me) not be worth the hassle.

Plus, nowadays most everybody carries a mobile phone. Adding a PDA means you are going to carry two devices. That seems silly.

I tried a Blackberry. The business school where I work gave me one. With it I learned that a thumb QWERTY keyboard is surprisingly useful—it’s one of these things you don’t really appreciate until you try it for yourself. Unlike my iPAQ it didn’t need any extra hardware to access email virtually anywhere (not just near hotspots), and like millions of others I found that to be a “killer app.”

In Hong Kong in January I bought a Pocket PC mobile phone, thinking I’d sell the iPAQ and not carry both a PDA and phone. I got the O2 xda II mini (also sold as an iMate JAM). It was much smaller than my iPAQ even though it added in phone capability. But the screen wasn’t as brilliant as the iPAQ’s, and it lacked WI-FI. I abandon it after a few months because 1) its screen was just too small for web surfing and 2) as a phone it wasn’t well designed for one-hand use, which I found to be a significant problem—that made it unusable when driving and generally inconvenient at other times.

While being dissatisfied with the O2 mini, I read glowing reviews of the Palm Treo 650. From prior experience I knew that I wanted something I can carry with me everywhere that can be a phone, handle email, and in a pinch let me surf the web. My brother is a Treo fan, and I thought it’d be nice to use the same gadget as him so we could trade tips.

I was already expecting to move back to China, so I didn’t want a long-term contract or a phone locked to a US carrier.

On eBay I bought an unlocked Treo 650, saving about $100 from the cost of buying an unlocked phone directly from Palm.

I adored it in many ways. I found the thumb keyboard even better than the one I’d liked on the Blackberry.

I got GPRS service from Cingular. It was too slow for surfing, but I loved having mobile email.

Alas, I dropped my Treo and had to send it in for repairs. Here the $100 I had saved by buying it on eBay came back to haunt me. Apparently, the vendor I bought it from on eBay had originally gotten it from Cingular—it arrived with Cingular branding, though it was described as brand new and appeared to be when I received it. The serial number linked it back to Cingular when I sent it in for repairs, so the bastards took my unlocked phone and returned it to me locked! Arggggh!

Calls to Cingular were useless; they gave me a long run around but never gave me an unlock code. I cancelled my service with them in frustration.

A variety of vendors sell a service that unlocks your phone, but to use them you need the USB sync cable. Because I used the 650′s Bluetooth capability to sync with my laptop, I hadn’t remembered to pack the sync cable when I came to China. I couldn’t find anybody selling a Treo 650 USB cable. Thus I had no way to unlock my 650 until my next trip back to the US.

Our office had not been opened, and I needed to be in touch with staff as they ran around the city trying to get things set up. So I went to the Hai Long computer bazaar (in Haidian’s Zhongguancun high-tech zone) to get a temporary phone. I found that an unlocked Palm Treo 600 cost about what I’d have to pay for other mobiles I’d want, so I bought a 600 (the model that preceded my 650). I used it quite happily until I was finally able to re-un-lock my 650.

For most purposes the 600 works as well as the 650. The screen on the 600 is inferior—lower resolution and much less bright, and the camera on the 600 is abysmal whereas the one on the 650 is merely awful. The 650 has some interface improvements, too. But I am sometimes tempted to sell the 650 and just keep the 600 . While I mull this issue I’m keeping the 600 as my backup phone.

Here’s my conclusion from my experience with PDAs and smartphones:

Mobile voice telephony (a mobile phone) and mobile email are each incredibly compelling. Once you get either you don’t want to live without it. But to become truly “untethered” you need more, including 1) ubiquitous access to the web, 2) any applications you routinely use (typically MS Office, but everyone’s list varies—for me the list of important apps includes some photo software and Wenlin) and 3) an input method that’s sufficiently “transparent,” which for me means a QWERTY keyboard, and if I’m going to write “pages” (not just sentences or maybe a few paragraphs), I want a keyboard for all my fingers, not just my thumbs.

This year will be an interesting one for the evolution of mobile devices. Several new QWERTY keypad smartphones will come to market, including the Nokia E61, Motorola Q and Palm’s newest devices. Plus, there’s the DualCor cPC. Apparently it will resolve the problem of a phone or Pocket PC not being a full-blown Windows device. And Microsoft’s Origami project is stirring everyone’s interest.

Thus there will be lots of temptations ahead for us gadget addicts. But I plan to stick with my Treo 650 (or backup 600) and Fujitsu P1510 as my “mobile kit” for the time being.