Oh dear, 24 hours in, and things are not progressing well. I have a theory, there are two types of people; phone people; and PDA people. I’m clearly a phone person.
I’ve really tried to make this experience work, and the HTC touch should have been a persuasive device, but it fails for me on so many areas. I can’t fault the build quality or the look and feel. Its small too, surprisingly, smaller than my all time favorite the HTC Excalibur, and barely any thicker.
So why is it not right for me ? Well I think the most obvious thing is that for me, WindowsMobile Pro adds no value over the Excalibur’s WindowsMobile Standard, ie it doesn’t do anything more or substantially better. However good TouchFlo is, you can’t get away from the fact you need a stylus for some (many) tasks. The touch screen requires quite a hard press, disconcertingly hard in fact. I know the logic is to prevent accidental touches, but its preventing 1 out of 3 intended ones for me. This also has the unintended side effect of making the device feel really slow to use. A real shame.
The skin is not deeply integrated enough into the underlying OS, even just extending the theme a bit more would have helped. Some of the minor annoyances in the skin should have been fixed before release such as the weather module. Its most local point for me is London which is a hundred miles away, so its pointless having it other than my natural concern for the wellbeing of London’s citizens, I might as well set it for New York. This could be easily fixed by using a better provider. Detail, Detail, Detail.
So what does this tell me? Well WindowsMobile Pro is still not for me, which will mean the Apple iPhone is not for me either. I’m simply not PDA person despite wanting to be.
As a side note, I know I’ve said this before to many MS people, and through the CrossBow beta, but please, please, harmonize the UI terms between Standard and Pro. I still have to double take on which setting is which on each type of device which makes setting the Touch up from my i720 a constant translation of terms.
