“Until now, HTC has mostly made Windows Mobile smartphones, such as the Cingular 2125, 3125, 8125 and 8525 and the T-Mobile MDA and SDA. The HTC Shift, which PC Magazine had the chance to test, looks like a tablet, but fits in a large coat pocket. More specifically, it’s about the size of two DVD cases stacked on top of each other, and we estimated the weight between 1.5 and 1.8 pounds. The Shift operates on Windows Vista Business Edition and includes tablet extensions for writing on the screen with the included stylus. To place the Shift into Laptop mode, slide the screen back and tilt it up to a 75-degree angle.”
This might be the device I’m looking for.
Something small enough to fit in my purse/backpack but just big enough for me to touch type on.
Oh, and at least 3 hours of battery life would be awesome.
I like that the president mentioned that the new chipset allowed them to hit a low price-point. The fact that all this stuff is available so inexpensively sets up great network effects which will encourage people to sell software to really take advantage of these devices. I wonder, though, if the 1.8 lb device functions as a cell-phone. I suppose you won’t be expected to hold it up to your ear, but instead use a headset.
My life is too simple for such devices, though. Sometimes I wonder if people who buy these “smartphones” really get anything useful out of them. I don’t consider being able to check OSNews at random hours and places to be all that useful.
[q]My life is too simple for such devices, though. Sometimes I wonder if people who buy these “smartphones” really get anything useful out of them. I don’t consider being able to check OSNews at random hours and places to be all that useful.[q]
I work in IT (in the Jack-of-many-trades, expert-at-none field) – and I think I’ve probably used my smartphone’s browser to double-check DNS resolution more often than I’ve used it to browse OSNews
My first experience with telephony involved a rotary dial phone and a party line with our 3 nearest neighbours – so I used to have pretty much the same view as you do. But I’ve become a pretty devout convert after having a Treo 650 through work for the last year and a half.
The consolidation of telephony and PIM functionality just makes sense, I think. It seems like a natural pairing to me – using one device to both store contact info and to do the actual contacting. Especially with the Treo, where you can do stuff like type the first & last initials of the contact you want and immediately jump to the first match in the address book – then it’s just a single click of the “Phone” button call the number. It’s anecdotal, I know, but every person I’ve shown that feature to has responded with some variation of “That’s awesome – I sure wish my home phone worked that way.”
And there are lots of other little examples of clever ways that the Treo’s software ties related functionality together. E.g., any standard supported audio file can be set as a ringtone – either for all callers, or just for individual contacts. Or any supported image file can be set as the icon for a contact (and the picture is displayed when that person calls – makes it easier to see who’s calling at a quick glance E.g. while driving).
My job involves a lot of on-site tech support and the Treo has been hugely useful for that. I use the calendar app for recording mileage and basic time-logging, it’s also great for reminders/alarms, the memo app is handy for storing login info/notes/driving directions, etc.
The ability to use the phone as a “wireless modem” for my laptop has also saved me on a few occasions (E.g., getting a call about some urgent server problem while in the middle of a 7-hour drive). And while we haven’t bothered with true push-EMail where I work, we did sign up for a EMail-to-SMS forwarding service – and that has worked quite well as a emergency address (or for receiving notifications of new messages in our support ticket system, or new voicemail messages thanks to VoIP and voicemail-to-EMail forwarding).
I think that a large part of the disdain for “smartphones” stems from people’s perceptions of the devices and their purpose. It seems that many people perceive all smartphones as being just another “swiss army tool,” where a bunch of disparate functionality is thrown together with little thought to how well those features are integrated. I haven’t found that to be the case with the Treo, however – I think that Palm put a lot of effort into ensuring that all the included features works well together.
For me, the thing that’s most useful about smartphones in general is that they are less phones than they are general-purpose computing devices with phone functionality. Though I realize that’s overkill for someone who just wants a phone.
My life is too simple for such devices, though. Sometimes I wonder if people who buy these “smartphones” really get anything useful out of them. I don’t consider being able to check OSNews at random hours and places to be all that useful.
I work in IT (in the Jack-of-many-trades, expert-at-none field) – and I think I’ve probably used my smartphone’s browser to double-check DNS resolution more often than I’ve used it to browse OSNews
My first experience with telephony involved a rotary dial phone and a party line with our 3 nearest neighbours – so I used to have pretty much the same view as you do. But I’ve become a pretty devout convert after having a Treo 650 through work for the last year and a half.
snipped a list of things…
The funny thing is, just about every thing you have listed here, could all have been done on mobile phones that are 4 years old, though it has to be said the glue that holds the features together has been becoming better.
I bought a Nokia 6820 about 4 years ago, and it supported, doing just about every thing you listed appart from.
i) Assigning any playable music as a ring tone.
ii) conveniance of searching for a contact (gota type the first name in, and it narrows down while you type).
Other than that, every thing else was supported, wirless modem, email client, web browser, etc etc etc.
Oh, and the battery lasted almost a week on light usage, some thing you just do not get from the new breed of phones.
I have just recently upgraded to the Nokia E70, and the fact that the glue is improved, has resulted in me using some of the functions a lot more, most notably the calendar, and due to screen size the RSS feed reader, but to be honest, with 4 years of development and technological improvement, I would have expected a hell of a lot more.
The treo is the first cell I’ve had, so yeah, it’s entirely possible that I’m impressed by things that are commonplace. But from what I have seen, there are still some significant things that set them apart.
– larger, higher-quality displays
– touch screen / stylus support
– some semblance of a proper qwerty keyboard
– greater amount of built in memory for running applications, which also means that the included software can be more sophisticated
– typically a greater degree of expandability, both in terms of hardware and software
The main reason I’d be getting a tablet PC is as a drawing tablet. One that small would barely be big enough for my needs.
It is well-designed, though…
However, the Shift doesn’t come without its shortcomings. There are only a few ports: a VGA out, SD card slot, and one USB port. A dock or port replicator might be available when it launches, HTC said.
Why bother with a dock? No seriously! Why bother with a dock when the issue is ports?
I’m still waiting for the day when one of the many laptop, tablets and HHPC manufacturers get a clue and begin building these things with a USB cable that turns the device into a portable hard drive and allows file transfers via Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager is used between OSes–this should be OS neutral).
You’d think it would be the obvious way to go, wouldn’t you?
Bah! I’m still waiting for a laptop or mobile device that can last longer than three hours on battery power too, so I’m not exactly going to hold my breath on this…. but it is telling they had to resort to using Windows Mobile just to get a usable battery life from the advantage, isn’t it? Not that Windows Mobile is such a hardship these days, although it would be nicer if more apps were free and OSS on that platform and not so many people expected the owners of such devices to be all business users…
–bornagainpenguin
PS: Yes, I know its gotten much much better than it used to be, but it’s still a PITA at times.
I believe Sharp used to sell an ultra-portable (Transmeta-based, IIRC) which worked the way you describe.
I believe I know which one you were talking about. I meant to buy one and then when I finally had the money saved up to get one they pulled it off the US market. At least if that’s the one I’m thinking of.
–bornagainpenguin
Yeah, it was either one of their Actius or UM* models.
Too bad Sharp seems to be out of the laptop game entirely these days.
“I’m still waiting for the day when one of the many laptop, tablets and HHPC manufacturers get a clue and begin building these things with a USB cable that turns the device into a portable hard drive and allows file transfers via Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager is used between OSes–this should be OS neutral).
You’d think it would be the obvious way to go, wouldn’t you? ”
Absolutely, I mean to get that functionality out of my laptop I have to um, switch it on and stuff. jeeez. I did hear about one research program for OS agnostic data transfer – it was called ftp or something like that…
-xx
Sure, and if you only have WiFi on the laptop for whatever reasons and simply want to transfer all the latest downloads from the laptop to the desktop?
FTP? Kind of hard without a network, and I was speaking about home users who probably aren’t the type to immediately think FTP, so thank you for making that special effort for usability!
Oh and burning everything gets really old and really expensive if all you’re doing is moving files from one place to another, not making backups for archival purposes.
But whatever, you sure showed me who was the Man, didn’t you xxmf?
–bornagainpenguin
If you need a cable you need a cable – it doesn’t matter whether its serial/usb or ethernet