Smartphone Progression: Keyboard Inclusion, Bass Transgression

Back in the summer of 2006, I migrated from Audiovox’s SMT5600, based on Microsoft’s Windows Smartphone 2003 Second Edition O/S, to iMate’s SP5m running an early AKU of Windows Mobile 5. Time marches on, however, as does technology, and so it is that over the past few days I’ve retired the SP5m in favour of its successor, T-Mobile’s Dash.

Part of the reason for the transition was necessity. Of late, the SP5m has begun exhibiting the annoying attribute of randomly powering up with Bluetooth disabled, and of tossing a cryptic error message on-screen when I subsequently attempt to manually enable Bluetooth. A reboot (or a few) later, Bluetooth comes up fine. I’m not sure if this is a fundamental hardware-breakdown issue or related to some contending startup piece of software I’ve got installed. But given that I’ll be breaking California law as of July 1 if I use a hands-free-deficient cell phone while operating a motor vehicle, I needed to acquire robust Bluetooth connectivity sooner versus later (yes, I know I could have used a tangle-conducive wired headset instead…).

The SP5m has also never had robust speaker volume. And, as of late, its joystick has also begun acting flaky, which judging from Internet traffic is a frequent Achilles’ Heel of HTC Tornado-based phone designs. But the other reason for the migration is a bit of a surprise, given my long-standing stated preference for ‘traditional’ cellphone form factors. Per my conceptual exploration of the topic in a post a year ago, I’m finding myself more and more interested in using the Smartphone as a notebook PC supplement (or in some situations, replacement…i.e. enabling me to leave my laptop in the hotel room during a day’s worth of slogging through CES) for web browsing, email receiving-and-sending, quick-and-dirty memo creation and other functions.

In these expanded-usage situations, I quickly got frustrated with the SP5m any time I needed to enter data into an application screen, by virtue of the phone layout-defined necessity to multiplex four or more alphanumeric characters on a single button. The Dash, conversely, offers a greatly expanded keyboard…which also necessitates a thin-but-wide phone form factor. I still think I look dorky putting the Dash (or, for that matter, an iPhone) up to my ear, but in the looming hands-free era, that particular vanity factor will no longer be an issue. And to that point, the Dash may not reside in a pants pocket as inconspicuously as its predecessor, but it is quite at home in a shirt pocket.

All of the third-party applications that I previously ran on the SP5m’s portrait-orientation LCD seem equally well-at-home on the landscape-orientation Dash, and the latter’s LCD layout is much more user-friendly when doing expanded-usage tasks (such as web browsing and text entry) that have landscape-orientation PC display origins, as well as when watching video. To wit, I put DataViz’s DocumentsToGo on the Dash, mated with a Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard for even easier text entry, and the combo’s working great…so much so, in fact, that I’ve just unloaded my Pocket PC and its peripherals on Ebay. I’ve always wondered, though, why ThinkOutside-then-iGo forced users to install proprietary drivers for the now-defunct hardware versus leveraging the phones’ built-in Bluetooth HID software stacks, Via a program from Teksoft called BlueMouse, you can even mate a Bluetooth mouse to a Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone or Smartphone! I admittedly miss having the ability to automatically sync documents stored on the phone with their PC-based counterparts, since unlike its Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile Professional, and Classic) peers, the Smartphone (now Windows Mobile Standard) Dash doesn’t have built-in Office Mobile mini-apps. Windows Mobile 6 added Office Mobile (along with ActiveSync) support to the Smartphone platform, and some clever soul figured out how to extract and hack the apps so that they’d run on Windows Mobile 5, but for reasons I’ll shortly get into, that solution doesn’t work for me.

Speaking of third-party applications and keyboards, now that it’s not so painful to chicken-peck-type lengthy URLs, I’ve chosen to install most of the programs via CAB files directly downloaded to the phone from vendors’ websites (please fix your Over-The-Air links, SBSH!), instead of relying on Windows XP EXEs and the ActiveSync intermediary. Most of my web browsing occurs via the Java-based Opera Mini, which I’ve long happily employed and which the company recently upgraded, although I’m also re-trying out Windows CE-native Opera Mobile for the first time in a long time, now that it’s finally available in a Windows Mobile 5-supportive version. Alas, none of the browser options available to me (including Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer Mobile, formerly Pocket IE) support ActiveX, which EDN’s blogging tool requires, so for direct posting purposes I’ll still need to rely on my laptop. My Universal Devices home automation controller’s interface is also Java-based, which unfortunately none of the native phone browser contenders can comprehend, either. Since Gmail is my primary email repository, at least for the moment, I access it via Google’s Java-based client. My wife, who uses Yahoo! as her primary email provider, conversely runs the Yahoo! Go Windows Mobile-native application suite on her Verizon-based Motorola Q.

And speaking of Bluetooth, I’ve so far mated four headsets to the phone, with solid success in all cases (including impressively rock-solid voice-activated dialing)…at least for voice call purposes:

• Ultra Products’ Mini Bluetooth Headset
• Aliph’s Jawbone
• Motorola’s Miniblue H9, and
• Motorola’s MOTOROKR S9

The Jawbone seems, from my initial experimentation, to have the best ambient noise suppression performance. On the other hand, I really like the H9’s unobtrusiveness; it doesn’t completely fit within the ear, as pictures might suggest, but it’s quite small and light. I also like the fact that it relies on a conventional mini USB-based charger connection, via an equally unobtrusive docking station intermediary that, since it also contains rechargeable batteries, can top off the headset’s own electron reservoir throughout a day of use. And my PR contacts tell me that both the Jawbone and H9 are based on Cambridge Silicon Radio’s eminent Bluetooth transceiver technology.

Since the Dash runs a newer Windows Mobile 5 AKU than its SP5m predecessor, it (among other things) encompasses support for A2DP two-channel (aka ’stereo’) Bluetooth audio. I tried A2DP out on the MOTOROKR S9s in conjunction with a diverse selection of music genres, and frankly I walked away quite unimpressed with Motorola’s implementation of the concept. Functionally, everything worked fine. But the bass performance of Motorola’s headset was abysmal, not to mention the fact that I’m not a fan of wrap-around headphones. The limitation isn’t inherently an A2DP fault, no matter how much apt-X might otherwise attempt to convince me. As I first mentioned in print eight years ago (yikes!), lossy audio compression schemes focus their frequency-lopping efforts on the high end of the spectrum range, not on low tones. And anyway, my past experiences with other A2DP headsets have also been more low frequency-encouraging.

The only notable setback of any significance that I’ve encountered so far in the SP5m-to-Dash migration involves Bluetooth connectivity for phone-as-modem Internet access. The SP5m supports the Bluetooth DUN (dialup networking) protocol, whereas the AKU3-based Dash dropped DUN in favour of Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network). My Windows XP SP2-based Apple MacBook (via Boot Camp) handles Bluetooth PAN just fine, as does (apparently, I haven’t tried it myself yet) the MacBook’s OS 10.4-based partition via the OS 10.4.9 patch. My Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, on the other hand, doesn’t support the Bluetooth PAN profile, and it doesn’t seem that there’s any official plan to rectify this particular platform shortcoming. However, a hack reportedly restores Bluetooth DUN to AKU3, and I may eventually try it out. Then again, I could just turn my Smartphone into a Wi-Fi router instead (the link to the software is currently dead, due to unspecified ‘legal issues’).

I could also solve the Bluetooth DUN deficiency by migrating the Dash to Windows Mobile 6 (which re-embraces the protocol), since a free upgrade is available which also rectifies the phone’s earlier-mentioned Office Mobile app omission. However, ActiveSync v4.2 isn’t Windows Mobile 6-compatible; I’d need to migrate to the newer ActiveSync v4.5 or, for Windows Vista, Windows Mobile Device Center. And neither ActiveSync v4.5 or Windows Mobile Device Center are compatible with Outlook 2000, which I’m stubbornly clinging to in part because it’s database-compatible with the Entourage email client in Microsoft’s Office 2004 for Mac suite, and I’m holding onto the right to potentially migrate my PIM to OS X at some point in the future. Outlook 2000’s PST format is admittedly fairly fragile, however; I’ve run into additional glitches in recent days. So I’ll eventually, probably, take the plunge and upgrade to a newer Office suite variant, at which time I may also migrate the Dash to Windows Mobile 6…Although, if I do, I’ll have to put away the Stowaway. Stay tuned…

Followup: Here’s a teardown of the T-Mobile Dash.