Here in the past year I joined the smartphone crowd by the university paying for my data plan. I am currently with AT&T and enjoy their coverage and speed for the most part. It seems to be faster in larger cities but College Station is special in the fact that we have extra capacity in the summer and a lack of capacity the rest of the time. We do have 3G here for AT&T and on a good day my Blackjack can load up most webpages in just a few seconds, of course I have been using just the Internet Explorer WAP browser that comes with all Microsoft Windows Mobile Phones. Although I can’t get full webpages like on other phones like the G1 or iPhone I have been rather happy with it for the most part, but I am ready for an upgrade according to my contract and my preference.
I am very sure that I want a Windows Mobile phone, even with the limitations of the OS. Lots of people complain that the OS is not built for touch and generally hard to use. Well the way Windows Mobile works makes sense to me because I have been using it forever. I bought a Dell Axim X5 Advanced the day they came out, and ever since then I have been sold. It works just like Windows, I just don’t understand how people can’t understand that just like every other Windows computer you go to the Start Menu to find your apps. Then again most people that buy smartphones never added apps until an App Store made it too easy to buy applications. I hate any app store that has rules about what they will and will not allow in because a carrier may not want it running on their network or that it might compete against an application that is builtin to the Phone’s OS. This makes a very slippery slope of soon you won’t be able to use the apps you want on the hardware or network you want to use it on. But that could be a whole other post, I am unhappy that the Microsoft App Store has so many limitations that help protect it’s sub par media player and other software.
Anyways, it isn’t the software that sells me, it is the WVGA touch screen with the slideout keyboard. I think it will be cool to see what developers will be able to do with a full sized screen on a mobile device. The keyboard also looks large enough for me to handle, the one on the Blackjack is a little small and I keep finding that I mistype things because my fingers are a bit too big. I defiantly do not want an onscreen keyboard. I’ve support iPhones at work and find them to have the most horrid keyboard ever, I have a hard time typing configuration information for the device and I can only imagine if I had to type on it everyday and how bad that would be. The other thing I don’t like about Blackjack is that I have a hard time getting to certain numbers and symbols that are much easily found on the Touch Pro.
With my mind made up, I am waiting for the HTC Touch Pro 2 to come to AT&T whenever that might be, I am hoping for sometime this Summer when Windows Mobile 6.5 finally comes available. So until then just behold in the glory of the Touch Pro 2.
