techarati

This week I purchased the Siemens SX66 Pocket PC to be used on Cingulars network. Many of you outside the United States know this device as the as the HTC PDA2K or iMate PDA 2K. The basic feature set is rich, and includes the standard organization fair: calendaring, address book, tasks, email, SMS, and MMS. The specs themselves are also impressive, a high performance 32-bit, 400 MHZ, XScale processor is shoehorned into a rather small slider package. After playing with it for the last two days here are my thoughts.

Screen:

The screen is beautiful, being a 3.5 inch transflective TFT LCD (backlit, of course). The colors are good and the screen resolution at 240 x 320 pixels is crisp, though only 64k.

Touch Screen:

One of the better touch screen implementation I have used, dialing is easy with big fingers, and I can easily close windows and open applications without using the wand.

Slide out Keyboard:

They should make keyboards like this for every device of this size, rather large backlit keys that are well spaced apart, and it is perfect for typing out long emails, word documents, or even this blog entry (I am entering this from the SX66).

Communications:

The SX66 supports nearly every protocol available today: GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB, in addition to a quad-band GSM/GPRS Phone (850/900/1800/1900).

Memory:

The SX 66 has 64MB of flash ROM, 128 MB of RAM, and is SD IO capable using the traditional SD/MMC slot. This last feature I like allot, it keeps me from having to buy new SD/MMC memory cards that I already have lying around for my digital cameras.

OS:

Unfortunately it is Windows, specifically, Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. Though there is a great selection of applications, menus and settings are buried deeply within the OS, accessing simple feature that should be easy to get to are more difficult than it should be, especially Bluetooth. The WiFi settings are confusing, even for an industry veteran like myself. It needs a simple and intuitive application to be included in the package to streamline finding and connecting to WiFi hot spots. Another aspect that was more dificult than it should was the screen modes, it allows you to switch the screen orientation between portrait mode and landscape, a nice feature, yet the setting itself to accomplish this is buried in the settings dialoged window - this should really be moved to the task bar.

Overall impression:

Surprisingly, I am impressed! The phone volume could be a little louder, the settings and menus could be easier to use, but it works well, seems rugged, and allows me to work via the internet and email effectively, without having to pull out my trusty PowerBook. Using software from Mark Space, Missing Sync for Windows, it communicates seamlessly with both of my Mac's (iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Address Book, and Mail.App using Apple's iSync).

Will a device like this influence me to consider Windows on the desktop, no, the user interface is just to difficult, but for my daily uses, it is just fine (it does make me wish that Apple would get off it’s collective rear end, and build a PDA phone and decent UI)