Smartphone Impressions

I've had my Smartphone for a few days and had a chance to mess around with the phone and the WindowsMobile 2003 Smartphone SDK.

I love this thing. Microsoft did a fantastic job on usability for the phone. I can access everything I need with my thumb and no need for typing. There are many little nice thoughts that show the attention to detail that went into this:

• You can dial or text-message directly from your outlook contacts
• During a call, the screen shows the person you're talking to. There are buttons on the call screen to pull up your calendar and contact info; if you're on the phone and somoene wants an appointment, you're right there.
• Wireless sync is easy to set up
• Performance is much better than I expected

I've actually used the data connection for "real world" things already. For example, I was out with friends Friday and we needed directions to a bar so having Pocket IE pull up Yahoo! yellow pages was useful. The speed of the data connection on the Cingular network is my only complaint so far.

The Smartphone SDK setup was as straightforward as it could be. Obviously there are some challenges to making an app usable on the phone, and I will post later about the multi-screen UI framework I came up with. The first time I ran my test app I got a security warning each time a new assembly was loaded. I need to look into what I need to do to get rid of this, maybe just signing will take care of it. I will say also that I have managed to "crash" the phone once after the compact framework installation. It doesn't seem like managed code should be able to do anything that would force you to reboot your phone to get sound back. Then again, I'm very good at breaking things.

As soon as I think of something useful I will try a connected app with some web services. Perhaps TechEd will give me some good ideas.