Paul's Down-Home Page

A simple idea, brilliantly executed: Cooking for Engineers. (Special for Julie: the lead article at the moment is a test recipe for giblet-pan gravy. Mmmm, giblets….) The preparation diagrams are very, very useful, at least to a cooking n00b like me.

I have re-enabled comments, with the added requirement that you use TypeKey (which, fortunately, is free). As soon as I can get MT-Blacklist to work properly, I’ll enable unregistered comments, but for now you’ll need to sign in before commenting. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Well, the move isn’t 100% complete; I still have to install MT-Blacklist, tweak the CSS, and do a few other things of that nature. However, I’m well on schedule to give pair the boot by month’s end.

Amazon is offering the Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone for a net payment of $25, e.g. you get a new phone plus $25. I played with one of these for a few minutes at the AT&T store in Ann Arbor last week, and it’s a very impressive device. The screen is brilliant and crisp, and the phone is much smaller and lighter than my trusty 7135. It also features Bluetooth, which would be extremely useful for wireless headsets and for tying to my laptop. (It also has some other cool features, like Windows Media Player 10, that I probably wouldn’t use). I have a few concerns, though.

First, I’m very used to entering text with a stylus; I’ve had a Palm for about seven years now. I don’t do a lot of text entry– mostly just appointments and such, so I think (but am not sure) that I’d be OK with using T9 on the phone keypad, but I won’t really know that until I have a chance to try it.

Second, I’ve been very satisfied with Verizon’s wireless coverage, both here and when I travel. I don’t know how good AT&T’s local coverage is, because I don’t know anyone here who has it, but (at least to me) it doesn’t matter how good the phone is if I can’t make or receive calls when I want to.

Next, it would mean going back to Outlook for syncing, instead of Entourage. That’s a problem because I often use Entourage to create notes and tasks while working, and Entourage can’t sync them with my Exchange server. That might be a deal-breaker. There are at least two Mac sync utilities for Windows Mobile devices: Missing Sync (which explicitly says it doesn’t support the SMT5600) and PocketMac (which, I’ve been told, has stability and support difficulties).

Finally, I’d have to replace some of the applications I now use. This probably isn’t a big deal, since most of them are games, but there are a few (like TikTok and Directory Assistant) don’t seem to have Windows Mobile counterparts. I’m also comfortable with the way DateBk5 integrates calendar and to-do data, and I don’t know if the mobile version of Outlook has similar features. In fact, it’s not even clear to me if you can install third-party apps on these devices; it seems to vary by carrier.

So, if you’re reading this and a) you use AT&T, b) you have an SMT5600, or c) you work for the MacBU, feel free to leave comments answering the above points 🙂

Update 1: turns out that Windows Mobile doesn’t natively support Outlook notes anyway. There’s at least one third-party app (SmartphoneNotes) that does, but I don’t know if it works on the AT&T phones.
Update 2: Two of my 3sharp coworkers wrote to say that AT&T coverage in our Redmond office is poor, so that’s a minus. On the other hand, the Windows IT Pro people want an article on Exchange ActiveSync, for which I need a device, so it looks like I’ll get one and take advantage of AT&T’s 30-day trial period. I found solutions for managing tasks and notes on the Smartphone, so if I can resolve the sync difficulties I should be golden.