I recently bought a new phone called the HTC 6800 from Sprint. It’s a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone, also known as the Mogul (by Sprint) and Titan by other mobile providers. Even though I’ve just had it for one month it’s already changed how I work and relax.What I love about the phone is that it’s a multimedia device. And I love multimedia. It can play MP3 and WMA music files, plus it can do some streaming media with Windows Media Mobile. It’s not a great solution (I can’t view every video on the Internet with it), it at least gives me some basic mobile streaming capabilities.
On the work side, it has a slide out keyboard for easy typing and texting and comes with Mobile Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus Adobe Reader. So theoretically, I can download any Word file and work on the go. I say theoretically because I haven’t really tried to open some of the more complex Excel or Word documents that I use in my work. But it definitely works great for most normal documents. It also comes with a voice recorder, so I can quickly record a voice memo or record a conversation quickly.
But the main reason I’m writing this post is because of the problems I’ve currently having to get my new phone to do exactly what I want it do.
Here is what I want my new Mogul to do:
Play YouTube videos in Flash format. My Mogul can stream some video with its built-in Windows Media Mobile player, but there’s a lot it can’t do. For example, I can’t just log on to YouTube with a WM6 device and watch any video. YouTube has to convert the video to a mobile-friendly format in order for it to be playable on my device. And unfortunately, YouTube takes some time to convert videos and does so for only the most popular videos. I’ve searched the Internet and found some promising leads on how to install a Flash-friendly player on my phone, but so far I haven’t gotten it to work.
One E-mail Inbox. I have lots of e-mail accounts. There are web mail accounts, POP and corporate email accounts and I don’t want to check each one individually. I don’t want to synch e-mail with my home PC and worry if a message was read or deleted off the mail server. That’s too much of a headache. I want the universal e-mail inbox, but that doesn’t really exist yet. But I have found the next big thing. Gmail! You can check POP accounts and consolidate everything into one account that I can check using my phones web browser. Plus Gmail does IMAP e-mail which automatically synchs my messages no matter if I read them on my mobile phone, desktop work PC or where ever. I’ve switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. And it rocks!
Add MMS or PictureMail. My Sprint HTC 6800 phone doesn’t have the ability to send picture mail. Isn’t that crazy? I can take photos with my phone but have to send pics via e-mail instead. So I did some research and found a program I installed that added support for MMS picture mail. The bad news? It’s clunky; I have to manually type someone’s mobile number every time I want to send picture mail. Unfortunately I don’t memorize many phone numbers anymore so this is a huge step back from my old cell phone. Why can’t Sprint add support for PictureMail on my phone? I don’t know. Other phones have it. I had to find a work-around that sorta works, but not quite the way I want it to.
Close Application Windows. Windows Mobile 6 is famous for taking up lots of memory. That means that your phone and applications can slow down considerably. Mostly, it’s because you have to shut down an application otherwise it remains in the background sucking up valuable memory. And if you remember to hit the X button on the toolbar, WM6 doesn’t really close down the application. It just closes the window. The application keeps on running in the background. So I downloaded an application, which makes the X button actually close the application, not just minimize it. As a result, my phone runs a lot better and faster.
Record Phone Calls. As a journalist and analyst, I use the phone a lot for interviews and teleconferences. I would love to be able to record a phone call with my Mogul smartphone. In fact, I even downloaded software that said it could do this. But after doing intensive searches, I discovered that most smart phones in the U.S. don’t allow phone recording because of legal issues. So I spent all that time finding software, installing it and trying to figure out why it doesn’t work. Only to find out this isn’t possible. Oh well.
Threaded Text Messaging. I do lots of text messaging so I like the iPhone’s ability to keep a chat-like record of text messages. Treos have this option too, of course, but iPhones really make it look nice. Unfortunately, my Mogul didn’t come with threaded text messaging–each text message came up as a separate message, and there was little organization. So I installed this awesome threaded messaging software on my phone, which now lets me keep track of messages in a IM-style window. And it keeps track of time and date of each message, separate by different users.
Sirius on WM6. I’m a subscriber to Sirius satellite radio, mostly because I like to listen to Howard Stern. Plus, having the option of tuning into their music stations is a great way for me to learn about new music. It’s totally replaced my terrestrial radio in my car. As a subscriber, I can log in to the Sirius.com web site and listen over the Internet. However, I’d love to be able to listen to Sirius on my phone. It has an EVDO broadband connection after all. And a pretty good browser. But trying to log-on to Sirius and listen doesn’t work. There is software written by some intrepid Sirius fans for the Windows Mobile platform, but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Guess I’ll keep hoping and searching for a solution. In the meantime, I downloaded Last.fm’s WM6 application and can listen to that while on the go.
I just hate how I have to spend so much time hunting down work-arounds and changing settings simply to get my phone to how I want it to work. I wish I could buy a phone off the shelf that could do everything I want it to do. But I guess I’ll have to piece it together myself.
Technorati Tags: Sprint, Mogul, HTC 6800, HTC, mobile video, Sirius, iPhone, MMS, YouTube, smart phone, Treo, EVDO, mobile TV
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