Requiem for a TyTN

Why is this man smiling? Because he’s the proud new owner of 2006’s smartphone of the year!

Three and a half years ago I was cheeky enough to take money out of a friend’s pocket in exchange for a colour Treo. This time ’round I’m a feeling a little more charitable, especially in light of Ray’s recent eBay misfortune…

I bought my TyTN only last December, partly as a Christmas gift to take with me to Korea and partly to erase the memory of a horrible, horrible directing experience. It made for a fine breakfast companion at my hotel in Seoul but I quickly grew to dislike the slide-out keyboard, particularly in cramped quarters like a bus or streetcar. In Bermuda I discovered that it was all but useless in bright sunlight, and its fate was ultimately sealed when I moved back to my old PowerBook from my Lenovo Windows laptop.

What I’ll miss:

1. The TyTN was my first true world phone, barely batting an eyelash before connecting to the super-advanced UMTS networks in Japan and Korea, where other smartphones would power down in shame.
2. The unbelievable wealth of third-party software — you can use Skype on it for chrissakes!
3. Sync and push email over the air with mail2web’s Microsoft Exchange Server, as close as you can get to the auto-magic OTA sync on my old hiptop.

What I won’t:

1. Windows Mobile and all its trappings, including Windows Media Player, an absolutely awful contacts manager and a UI that takes its design cues from Windows 95.
2. The touchscreen, requiring a stylus for use and 100% unreadable outdoors.
3. Having to reboot the device to make a phone call. Okay, the WiFi was on but still…
4. Having to use a Windows computer as its desktop counterpart.

BTW, if you’re at all curious how my mobile life with BlackBerry is going let’s just say that there may well be another requiem post soon!

My HTC TyTN: Two Months In and Back in the Box

In the week-one review of my HTC TyTN I wrote of my concern about the device’s short battery life, particularly when its advanced features like WiFi and Push Email were turned on. Now I’m happy to report that these issues have been solved.

How’d I do it? Simple, I turned it off, took out the SIM chip and put it back in the box.

The HTC TyTN is one of if not the most advanced handsets that money can buy. It works anywhere in the world with a super-quick data connection, has an amazing on-board camera that takes high-resolution stills & video, and as a Pocket PC brings the power of Microsoft Windows to the palm of your hand.

But brother, it ain’t no hiptop…

That’s right, my lowly hiptop 2 with its mere VGA stills-only camera, plodding GPRS data speed and mere 32 MB of built-in memory has come out of retirement and taken centre stage as my sidearm of choice.

The handset itself is only half the story — the other half is the Desktop Interface, or as Fido calls their version, the Jump Page. All of my appointments, contacts, email and to-do’s are at my beck and call on any internet-connected computer anywhere in the world. This beats BlackBerry’s Internet Service hands-down — in fact, the only product that can rival it is a hosted Microsoft Exchange server, exactly what I’ve been using for the past month with my TyTN.

And it sucks.

First off, like your typical Windows product it’s not the prettiest thing to look at. More importantly, it only has 100% functionality in the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and even that’s debatable. The online address book, for example, is almost unusable — whatever underlying technology used to present a person’s contact info on screen doesn’t even let me copy their email address or phone number into another program like Skype or Thunderbird.

But with my hiptop Desktop Interface I can copy and paste to my heart’s desire. And with the Skype Web Toolbar for Firefox I can merely click on a phone number and have Skype do the dialing it for me. I did this a lot during my recent vacation to Seoul, and was grateful that I hadn’t cancelled my hiptop service before I got there.

Back to the devices (and still on the subject of phone numbers) the hiptop benefits from lots of little touches that make using it a pleasure. For example, even when I enter phone numbers for new friends in faraway places like Korea or Africa my hiptop auto-magically formats them with proper dashes between the country code, area code and number without me having to worry about it.

Such attention to detail is everywhere on the hiptop, whereas the TyTN — or to be fair, Windows Mobile — stinks of being designed by engineers with little, if any, regard for usability.

For instance, I’ve often found myself tapping out an email or text using the stylus and on-screen keyboard, but usually when the virtual keyboard pops up it covers the very area of text that I want to edit. Sure, I only have to scroll down a bit to continue, but I shouldn’t have to. A smart phone should be smart enough to know what I’m trying to do and help me do it, rather than get in my way.

The other big reason I’m going back to my hiptop is the unlimited data service that comes with it. With a little work I set up my TyTN to maximize my connectivity while minimizing data charges, but constantly worrying about going over my monthly allotment of bytes ultimately got in the way of enjoying this high-level communicator.

With my hiptop I can Google to my heart’s content, send email while on the toilet (though I never, ever do that!) and even chat with strangers on AOL, and as long as I’m in Canada, I’ll never have to worry about paying more than $20/month for the power of the internet in my coat pocket.

Beyond the Canadian border is an entirely different story, of course. Because my hiptop is persistently connected to the Internet I can rack up hundreds of dollars in roaming charges just by leaving the data connection on. So I’ll be keeping my TyTN for travel, but the hiptop’s desktop companion, usability tweaks and unlimited local data have made me come crawling back.

And if Fido will just come to their senses and offer the hiptop 3 to Canadians you’ll be able to get one for yourself!

Receiving in Seoul, Loud and Clear

Fido welcomes you to Korea (South). Call +1 514 925-4590 to reach Fido Customer Service. Enjoy your stay!

With this one text message, received while still taxiing to the gate at Incheon Airport, my trip was a success before I even set foot on foreign soil. Now I can be connected anywhere on the planet… As long as there’s a digital signal and I can afford the roaming charges!

It’s a big difference from when I came to Hong Kong in 2001 with my first world phone and spent twenty international roaming-rated minutes trying to get access to my voicemail. But so far my winter vacation has also had a lot in common with my first comedy tour of Asia…

For starters, I’m pretty sure that I took the same flight to San Francisco that we took barely a week after 9/11 — on the first outbound aircraft from Toronto’s International Airport, if I’m not mistaken. In 2001 we had to be at Pearson long before the sun came up, as there were still lots of travellers stranded from the shutdown of North American airspace, forming a long snaking line to the United Airlines check-in counters that hadn’t even opened yet.

Five years later not much has changed. I had to be at the airport at 4am for my 7am flight and the line-ups were just as long, though this time filled with miserable holiday travellers instead of solemn September 11th refugees.

Five hours later I arrived at SFO to connect with my overseas flight, which coincidentally left from the exact same gate as our plane to Hong Kong in 2001 (G102). I can say this with some certainly because I have a very vivid recollection of someone complaining that Business Class passengers were boarding the aircraft through the First Class entrance. I really hope that dude has gone bankrupt since…

This time around I was stuck in Economy, and though I was further comdemned to a dreaded middle seat, the 13 hours in the air was made bearable by a personal LCD screen right in front me and twenty channels of movies at my command — just like in Business Class to Hong Kong! By the way, did I miss something crucial in the first five minutes of Lady in the Water, or was it really that bad?

Any similarities to that Asian tour of 2001 ended when we touched down in South Korea and I fired up my TyTN, instantly able to send and receive my precious email even after a continent-wide telecom disruption. And unlike Hong Kong which is always brutally humid, right now Seoul is freezing cold, colder perhaps than back in Toronto. But no snow yet…

It’s now very early Friday morning, and I’m up writing this from my fantastic room at the Koreana Hotel, which I got for super-cheap because it faces the back rather than these Christmas lights across the street at City Hall… I think I can manage!