Over the past few years, I’ve had a few phones. I’m not obsessed with having the latest model, feature or brand; but I will decide to get a phone because I like one specific thing it has. But, more than anything, I like the phone to be usable, for example, I kept my last phone for 2 years as it had a light… It was very useful.

Every day my phone wakes me up, reminds me what I’m to do in the day, keeps me connected and occupies me. I never like the thought of carrying a mobile phone worth £100s of pounds around with me as firstly, if I ever lost it I’d be annoyed at myself for months. Also, I wouldn’t want to give any pickpocket such satisfaction by stealing such a phone.

I sometimes buy old PDAs and phones on eBay, so I’ve had a chance to play with windows mobile and to play with a variety of phones. I’ve used phones like the HTC TyTn II (AT&T Tilt), Apple’s Iphone and Palm Tungsten phones, but I’ve still I’ve seen no reason to change from my Sony Ericsson K750i. I know the Iphone is widely loved, and I will admit, it is no less than stylistically perfect. But for me, as long as I don’t despise the aesthetics, I’ll use almost anything if it has the features and functions I use. I might add, the exception to this is the Nokia Communicator series, which is very feature rich, but I could never see myself using one as my personal phone. They’re just huge.

Unfortunately, I realize by now this is going to be quite uninteresting for anyone unfamiliar with model names of phones, for that I can only apologise and try to balance out with a picture of the following. As now I have found a suitable replacement, the HTC S710 (Pictures: http://tinyurl.com/crw46w), my first windows mobile Smartphone.

I don’t know anyone that has this phone (actually I know nobody who has a phone running windows mobile) though that’s probably as I go to college and a windows Smartphone, is not the ‘coolest’ thing out there. But I don’t see why. It’s a phone, it’s small but with a reasonably big screen and is able to utilise all the methods of wireless communication you could possibly think of. Isn’t that what everyone wants? I wonder, if it were a Nokia phone, running Symbian OS, if it would be popular. The communication the phone supports, it’s processing power and memory is down to the phone hardware and therefore, the phone manufacturer, so if the phone is physically like any other. Many other people have phones that do less,  the only main difference is that it runs Windows Mobile.

There are problems with the Windows Mobile software, but there are also many problems with normal mobile phones. With my old phone, there was nowhere to write documents (then again, there was no keyboard) or even a document viewer, pictures couldn’t be edited and there was very little support for emailing; something Pocket PCs have been able to do since Pocket PC 2000 was released. I think the amount of features that have been packed into Smartphones is incredible, such that a phone no longer exists only to make calls. It’s an entire computer, but even smaller than a laptop. Smartphones will comfortably fit in your pocket and be ready to use instantly, whenever you need them. It is this that made me change from my old phone to a Smartphone. And me being me, I have to have Windows Mobile.

- Chris Pomfret – chris@terfmop.co.uk – 5/4/09 -