The occasional scrivener

Enter the brick

Tre.se, the Swedish division of the Hutchinson-Whampoa UMTS consortium, are launching pay-as-you-go cards, and as a promotion I could buy a Motorola A925 + pre-paid card for 750 SEK, which is like, cheap. Especially as they throw in a Bluetooth headset. The fact that you get 2 batteries too is not a plus, it just means that the phone’s battery life is like the half-life of some exotic particle.

Anyway, the phone is now known in the Erikson household as the Brick, because it’s a huge phone, even compared to the none-too-svelte Taco. The difference is no more than a centimetre each way, but that extra centimetre makes the difference between a phone that fits in your pocket and one that threatens to drag your pants down your ankles.

Here’s a picture comparing the two phones:

But hey! It’s a UIQ phone for about $100, and that’s cool.

Tre don’t have a walled garden in the same way as Three.co.uk, you can install apps on the phone and surf around. I grabbed Quirc (found via Ewan’s excellent guide to UIQ freeware) and was soon riding the subway, chatting in #mobitopia with both a S60 device (the Taco) and a UIQ (the Brick). I was in nerd nirvana.

But, there are issues.

Let’s take the pros first:

• Symbian UIQ.

• Bluetooth, IR, USB interface.

• camera (this may not seem like a big deal, but unlike the rest of the human race, I didn’t have a cameraphone).

And then there’s some cons:

• The pen interface sucks. I agree with Russ, you should be able to use a phone one-handed. And if you think this conflicts with the first item in the pro list, bite me.

• The handwriting interface is hard for me to use. I’m used to Graffiti on the Palm, and felt that hard to use, but this will take some taking used to. But the predictive feature seems to help.

• There aren’t as many cool features as on the Sony-Ericsson P{8,9}00, like the jogwheel.

I’ll be spending some more time with phone, strictly for data. I can’t see myself carrying this around as my primary phone. But as a fast data terminal, it has possibilities.

Random tips

• You change the PIN code in the phone application, not in some central place in the operating system. Maybe pretty simple, but there’s no mention of it in the manual.

• Generally, the manual from 3 sucks. There’s no mention of the handwriting system, for example.

• Quirc started crashing randomly, so I emailed the author. He suggested deleting the P-java specific file C:\System\libs\quirc.dll, which seems to have solved the problem.

• Only for users of Tre.se’s PAYG card: the tariffs are confusing. This article attempts to explain (in Swedish).

Posted at 15:20, in the comm » mobile category. Comments [0]