The Connected PDA, Part 73
It has been a while since we talked (here, here 2, here 3, here 4, here 5 and.. here 6)
about my dreams for a useable mobile phone and PDA combo. When last we spoke, I expressed my love (lust?) for the Motorola Q, coming to a store near you in early 2006. That is a long time for any of us to wait, but I’m trying to restrain my impulses, yet I really want to Live a Better life Now.
Yesterday at lunch a friend of a friend let me fondle his Samsung i730. I used it to briefly read Cloudy Thinking while enjoying a bowl of hot and sour soup. It worked reasonably well. We do not enjoy the luxury of EV-DO in Santa Barbara, California, USA, so the over the air 1XRTT interface was a little slow, but useable.
The i730 a (very!) nice machine, but… in a semi-dark restaurant I could not see the keys worth beans! To save battery life they only backlight the keys during certain hours of the day! Give me a break. If the keys were backlit, it would have been usable. As it is, the low contrast between the legend and the key just plain SUCKS.
There’s more about the Samsung i730 to not like. My friend’s friend has discovered he must use an extended battery. I am not shocked, but that larger capacity battery adds a large bulge to the back of the i730. All devices with this size screen and aggressive mix of CPU and other gizmos will need lots of electrons, so Samsung may be not much worse than the completion. But the battery life metric could be a crushing problem for these wannabee Blackberry killers.
Another device on my wish list include: HP’s iPAQ hw6515 (see this PC Magazine review). It has GPS, the only device in this class to offer that VERY desirable feature. From the review, my impression is the hw6515 is not (quite) soup yet.
So I remain a sad and lonely Kyocera KX-414 candy bar, simple almost no extra goodies phone user. How pathetic is that?