....Caveats....

Continued from 'Smartphone Kudos….'….

Speaking of miniSD, the SMT5600 is also a solid audio, still image and video playback device. It showcased these capabilities long before ROKRs or video-capable iPods appeared, although unlike them it isn't able to leverage the content-rich iTunes Store. I've already written about its audio playback performance; at a 96 kbps Windows Media Audio bit rate, a 256 KByte miniSD card can hold around 5 albums' worth of content. And now that cost-effective 1 GByte miniSD cards have appeared courtesy of companies like Kingston Technology, I should be able to store as much video material as I can with my Sony PSP and its 1 GByte Memory Stick PRO Duo card; maybe even more, since the SMT5600's smaller screen allows for more aggressive (i.e. lower bit rate) Windows Media Video compression.

The news isn't all good, however. Email access works well, now that I've finally discovered the reason for odd behaviour that had long baffled me. I'd do a download of email headers, scan and delete those that were obviously spam, then do a full message download of those I cared about….and I'd get the wrong messages! Email access works fine on my Samsung SPH-A660 in conjunction with ReqWireless's EmailViewer, so I knew it was something specific to the SMT5600. Careful crafting of Google search terms pointed me to this solution.

Other marginalities include my opinion that the phone's camera, from both resolution (which, note from my earlier comments, the SMT5600's follow-ons bump up) and quality standpoints, is only practical for the most casual of still and video image capture scenarios. Then again, from past postings, you already know my bias when it comes to camera phones. I'm baffled why Microsoft's free ActiveSync program doesn't support backup of Smartphones (backup works just fine with Pocket PCs); Sprite Software's Backup works fine, but free is more palatable than $29.95. (Followup: according to this blog post, Microsoft apparently dropped backup for both Pocket PCs and Smartphones beginning with Windows Mobile 5/ActiveSync 4). GPRS is cheap but the bandwidth is molasses-slow; after getting used to DSL at the home office and EV-DO data cards, it's a bit painful to down-throttle to POTS dialup-like speeds. And the SMT5600 is a hit-and-miss modem.

From the not-so-goods, we now turn to the 'lousies'. Web browsing on the SMT5600 is a painful experience, for a number of reasons, beginning with T-Mobile. I mentioned the bandwidth issues in the previous paragraph; for some baffling reason, T-Mobile also sometimes blocks access to certain domains….like Google! Pocket Internet Explorer doesn't correctly render many sites, and it often doesn't have enough screen real estate to work with (an issue that Slashdot recently discussed). As mentioned in part 1 of this post series, the SMT5600's successors migrate to a higher-resolution screen, an evolution that improves the legibility but only to a point….when the individual pixels become too small to uniquely discern, the drive towards squeezing increasingly more information into the 2.2" diagonal screen turns counterproductive. This is fundamentally why, during his keynote at this year's CES, Bill Gates demonstrated placing a phone on a flat surface, which then transformed into a large, high-resolution display. Still, with all due respect to Mr. Gates, I'm somewhat skeptical of the concept of phones, coupled with external displays, satisfying the market need for cheap PCs (in part because I doubt that Mr. Gates will be interested in satisfying MIT's open-source software requirements!).

Opera's browser does a notably better job of rendering websites than PIE, but it's $29. And I can't find a way to make it the default browser for links, so when I see an interesting RSS feed in NewsBreak from a notoriously skimpy-with-RSS-info site such as The Inquirer, and I click on the link to read the full post, up comes PIE. And while I'm mentioning various applications, I'll point out that it takes 90 seconds to 'boot' the phone, and that many programs are also slow to load (keep in mind that I have several thousand Outlook contacts) although, once running, switching among them is tolerable. Boot time normally wouldn't be an issue; most folks leave their phones powered up in standby all the time, and periodically plug them in to recharge. But as I mentioned before, my home is in a GSM reception-poor 'hole', a situation that quickly drains a perpetually-'searching for service' phone's battery.

Continued with '….And Final Thoughts'….