Year: 2007

The HTC Advantage Professional Edition (Pocket PC Phone Edition) is a very unique device in the Windows Mobile world. The first thing that strikes you is its 5 inch LCD display. Its fast processor and 802.11g (not 11b) WiFi makes it a great web browsing tool with that big display. And, of course, it is hard not to notice its big keyboard in various product photos. So, I was quite puzzled when I was able to play with one for a while because I couldn’t figure out where the keyboard. I thought it might pull out from the bottom or, perhaps, be a clamshell design with the keyboard covering the screen. As it turns out, it is neither though my second guess is closer. Its keyboard is a separate device that links up magentically. Click on the screen cap above to go to YouTube where I posted a short video demonstrating how it works. Very cool design.

The Windows Mobile Notes app never seemed to be able to fire on all cylinders from the very beginning. Despite its apparent usefulness, it seems like it didn’t get widely used by most Pocket PC users. For me the  main problem was that it didn’t sync reliably with Outlook Notes when I first tried it. And, other applications from a variety of 3rd party developers quickly overtook Notes by providing a lot more useful features and metaphors (think yellow sticky notes).
Notes lost the ability to draw but gained the ability to recognized inked text a few generations ago. Windows Mobile 5 restored the ability to draw in ink again. But, I just noticed that Windows Mobile 6 lost the ability to recognize inked text (it used to be in the Tools menu). It isn’t a big deal, I guess. But, I hate to see Windows Mobile 6 lose a feature. I guess Recognize gets added to the list of dozens of features lost by Windows Mobile over the years.

Microsoft keeps telling us design choices such as removing the Pocket PC bottom menu bar area, previously used to good effect by many applications, with the two giant soft keys is to make the user experience and software design experience of the Pocket PC and Smartphone closer. And, yet, as of Windows Mobile 6, they still haven’t given the Pocket PC (AKA Classic Edition and Professional Edition) one very simple and useful feature that has been in the Smartphone (AKA Standard Edition) for years: The ability to recognize any string that looks like a phone number as a phone number and make it a hot link dial-able object.

For example, if you create a Task in Outlook (on the desktop since you can’t create Tasks on a Smartphone… and what’s up with that limitation???) and type in a bunch of names and phone numbers in no special fashion, the phone numbers will appear underlined and can be used to dial the phone on a Smartphone. I hoped the Pocket PC (Professional Edition) would gain this feature with Windows Mobile 6. But, nope. So much for Windows Mobile feature convergence. Guess we have to wait and see what Windows Mobile 7 gives us.