No crackberries at the office

At ISOutsource, we all had Blackberries as our primary e-mail tool and that always-on, always-ready access to e-mail got really addicting. My new company does not use Blackberries but they do support Windows Mobile devices. I was curious about why they only did Windows Mobile and it turns out the Blackberry support in Asia is pretty limited. The low-pixel count screens that the Blackberry uses (which give it such a good battery life) do such a horrible job of displaying Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters that they just aren't popular. Also, the company wants to only have one set of infrastructure.

But Windows Mobile hasn't caught on much in Japan and was only really just available last year. The various cell phone providers don't seem very interested in them and the phones are kind of expensive. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to the Blackjack that is available in the states. The phone they gave me is from a hardware manufacturer called HTC. It's a slider style where the keyboard slides out the side. I snagged this picture from the HTC site:

It works fairly well but there is one irritation that you can't tell from the photo. The brick is amost 3/4" of inch thick. So the face plate is quit a bit narrower than a blackberry but that thickness makes it really awkward to carry around. for all intents and purposes, you can't put it in a coat pocket. The belt clip/pouch thing that comes with it is pretty bad, too - almost unusable. I leave it by my laptop bag, instead, but that doesn't work for the weekend.

The screen is really good, though. I've installed Microsoft Reader and copied over a bunch of free e-books from the Baen Free Library and read them on the way to work. That nice, bright screen comes with a price, though. I rarely can go more than 24 hours on a battery charge. I do have a spare battery but that is something else to carry.

Access to e-mail is pretty smooth, though. The screen is wide enough to read and write a reasonable e-mail. The full access to the company e-mail is pretty nice, of course, so that satisfies my crackberry addiction.