The Mumbling Fernando

No, I’m not talking about the film company, I’m talking about the large piece of equipment I’ve been carrying with me for sometime now (no, not that either). My phone, known by many names including the HTC Universal, O2 XDA Exec, Orange SPV M5000, Vodafone v1640, T-Mobile MDA Pro, QTek 9000 and my favourite which sounds a bit like a cross between an Apple branded condom and a jamjar is the “iMate JasJar”. This device is based on the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform and one of those that claims to be able to do everything from making your coffee to… making phone calls.

Is it a truck, is it a brick…? No! It’s a phone…ish

That’s right, it’s not exactly a phone but a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) Phone. Which among many thing means that it’s BIG, the plus side is that it does a lot for how much it pulls down your jeans. I’ve been using mine for satellite navigation, ‘push’ email, VoIP (Skype), a replacement for my ageing iPod, MSN/Live Messenger, Web Browsing, writing the odd letter or article, a couple of spreadsheets, handling my calendar and even making some phone calls :-O.

So it can do a lot, but is it really that useful?

When I bought this phone about a year ago, I had grand ideas of having almost a fully functioning PC in my pocket and to some extent that has proven true. The high resolution touch screen is perfect other than for the fact a widescreen would have fitted in the package more neatly, same kudos goes to the ‘thumbboard’ which gives particularly fast typing speed and fast access to all those nasty characters like £s and /s that are pretty difficult to get to on regular phones.
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TomTom’s new satellite navigation software for Windows Pocket PC Mobile devices has been released. Many of the issues TomTom 5 users had, appear to have been bugfixed including a much improved installer that works on both PC and Mac (hoorah!). Previously TomTom was packaged seperately as ‘Mobile’ for Smartphones and ‘Navigator’ for PDAs, in version 6 they have emalgamated these into a single package which will certainly save the confusion of some users deciding if their device was a phone or PDA e.g. HTC Universal.
New features include a ‘buddy finding’ system, which appears to be a rather curiously useful way of finding another TomTom user. Both users require TomTom and Internet access on their device and this allows them to exchange location data as well as text messages. I’d imagine this would be useful when trying to get to an unknown place someone else is already at.

Most of the other new features appear to be refinements including better call and text message handling from within the TomTom software.

Check out www.tomtom.com or this press release