I guess I love my Windows Mobile device...amagoo
In the past, I think I would have eschewed it. But I must say I have come to super-enjoy my Windows Mobile device.
(Although I wish I could come up with a better term than "device". It's like a Smartphone, but we have different OS editions for architectures called "Pocket PC Phone" and "Smartphone", and I'm using a Pocket PC Phone. I'm going to go with my brother's suggestion and just affix "-amagoo" to the end of it. "Deviceamagoo" it is.)
Anyway, I have a lawyer friend back in D.C. who's trying to move to Seattle... she prefers to remain anonymous, so we'll call her by her club name, "Staci"... who was constantly addicted to her Blackberry. She could not put the thing down, whether we were watching a ninth-inning rally at a Nats game or trying to polish off a bucket of Coronas. Ironically, I, James, being the computer scientist, preferred not to be tethered to e-mail and stuff; I like to be able to put the computer away and not look at it for a few days if I need to (not that I do that often).
But now that I work for a group (Windows Devices Core Device Management and Security... represent) that works on Windows Mobile, I have no excuse not to use the stuff. Especially since they up and gave me a Pocket PC device, the HTC TyTN (codenamed "Hermes"), a cool little deviceamagoo that comes with a slidey-out keyboard, touch-screen and stylus. Plus unlimited calling and data that's gratis (just one of the many, many nice perks of working here at Mister Softee). Needless to say, this comes in extremely handy when I have to attend to important business, such as last weekend when I was vacation in Victoria, Canada, and had no idea, while I was walking around, about the scores of the NCAA tournament games.
Seriously, despite the useful time-wasting features, it is remarkably convenient during the workday. I was home sick yesterday; while I was up late and unable to sleep, I fired up the laptop to set up a test plan review meeting for next week. It took a couple hours, partially because I had never synchronized my laptop's Outlook with work, and partially because the building I work in is extremely crowded and it's hard to find a conference room at the same time when everyone who needs to be there isn't otherwise occupied. I think Windows Mobile would not have been up to this particular task, simply because there are so many conference rooms I had to check, and almost all of them were full at the time I was looking for... I can see them in the company directory, but if I want to look at 25 conference rooms at a time, I think it makes more sense to do it in Outlook 2007. (Not a big deal, I just want to make sure I'm being a good corporate citizen and doing my best to use Windows Mobile when I can.) After that, it was super-easy to keep track of e-mails and meetings (and cancel items off my schedule if I needed to) with the deviceamagoo by my side. And I could fall asleep during The Price Is Right with a clean conscience.
I haven't run into any major bugs yet. I did somehow manage to get my device into a state where it was showing a camera image for the background, including replacing the text with the camera image... it was like some weird kind of peep show. I have no idea how I did that. This often happens to me... I'll get the thing I'm testing into some weird state, have no idea how I did it or how to reproduce it, and then it never happens again. At any rate, 6 seems stable, and hopefully the stuff I'm working on will work just as well when we're done.
(I'm at the end of the post without having worked in any really good pop culture references, so here's one to fulfill my contractual obligations. Robot Jox.)
