Replacing the laptop with a Smartphone

[Guest nick123]

I checked in my laptop years ago in favour of travelling with an iPAQ as the sole source of professional data storage, email correspondence and report-writing whilst on the road. I'm now in my second month of having chucked away the iPAQ to try out the same style of working using an Orange SPV C500 instead. Astonishingly, it works, given a few minor gripes that I'm sure will eventually be put right. Here's my account so far:

1. Type of work.....if you're heavy into Excel charts (even small ones) then forget it. You have no chance with the screen size, stay with your laptop. Otherwise, if you have already adapted to a PDA screen, it isn't a giant leap to go to the Smartphone. For emails, the inbuilt inbox on the WM2003 Smartphone system actually renders bigger text than that of the Pocket PC version!

2. You will have to buy a keyboard: text entry on the iPAQ was slow enough by any method except a keyboard, and the Smartphone is no different: even with "T9", you don't stand a chance. Chainpus's BK600 Smartphonemate keyboard (and its various clones, such as Proporta's 'Freedom' keyboard) is an excellent product and a MUST HAVE if you are seriously using a Smartphone as your travelling workstation. This particular keyboard will work with most PDA's and bluetooth-enabled phones, but it actually works better with a Smartphone: why? - because a PDA has a touch screen and some functions are not accessible except via the stylus: in contrast, the Smartphone can be operated competely "hands-off" with this keyboard.

3. Third party software:

a. email

The WM2003SE for Smartphones platform has a bug which leads to POP3 emails disappearing when you try to download attachments. I and other people have bitched about this in many forums, but I've yet to see any action from Microsoft. It's a big problem if you want to do serious emailing using a POP3 or IMAP account. As an alternative, I suggest ProfiMail, but you will need to first unlock your phone if it's an Orange C500 like mine: the other problem with ProfiMail is that it doesn't allow you to see the cc or bcc fields, and you can't "reply to all".......otherwise it is much more fully-featured than the MS Inbox software that comes with the phone.

b. viewing email attachments

For pdf, ppt, doc and xls files, as well as the common image formats, then you'll need Westtek's ClearVue suite. This is currently the only comprehensive program that allows you to look at newly-arrived email attachments; it has one big drawback: no reflow for pdf and doc files (no word-wrap), so you are constantly having to scroll around to read the text. It also curiously doesn't support the simplest text format, the "txt" file. However, ProfiMail comes to the rescue here: it includes its own explorer that opens doc and txt files in reflow mode. Even if you don't want to use ProfiMail for the email client, get the free trial version so you can use the Profi Explorer: after the trial version expires, the Explorer part still works!

c. Writing text

The easiest I've found is Syncdata's Smartphone Notes, and you've got the added plus of automatic synchronisation when you dock with your PC back at home or the office. For a two or three page report, this method works very well. All the software I have tried for text entry doesn't support shift/arrow highlighting and cut/copy/paste functions with ctrl X,C,V, which is a great pity. This works fine on just about any text program with the Chainpus keyboard linked to my iPAQ, so I think the problem must be some limitation on the Smartphone WM2003SE operating system. Can anyone out there help on this point?

Conclusions:

* Yes, you can replace a laptop with a Smartphone as long as you only need to do email correspondence and short reports: anyone currently using a PDA in this manner will find it easy to switch.

* Bluetooth keyboards work better with MS Smartphones than with Pocket PC's, at least this is the case with the Chainpus model.

* The smaller size of the Smartphone screen compared to a PDA isn't the big disadvantage that I thought it was going to be.

* The SPV C500 has a serious bug in the email client software - it probably also applies to other phones running the same OS (WM2003SE for Smartphone).

* I'm still waiting for some serious document viewing software: there is no reflow on the principle contender, Westtek's ClearVue suite. For the moment, supplementing it with ProfiMail's explorer program helps a lot.

* Text editing on a Smartphone, no matter what program you use, doesn't support highlighting/copy/paste with any input method...I don't know why, but I hope someone can put this right soon.

Good luck to those of you embarking on a similar method of working, and I really appreciate any help anyone can give in sorting out the current deficiencies and problems.

Nick,

Paris, France.

[Guest mcwarre]

* The SPV C500 has a serious bug in the email client software - it probably also applies to other phones running the same OS (WM2003SE for Smartphone).

I have never had a single problem with email on my SPV (I use GMail, orange.net and my own domain mail servers)

* Text editing on a Smartphone, no matter what program you use, doesn't support highlighting/copy/paste with any input method...I don't know why, but I hope someone can put this right soon.

I thought you could with some progs. Can't remember which; I shall have a dig and let you know....

PS Welcome....

[Guest nick123]

I have never had a single problem with email on my SPV (I use GMail, orange.net and my own domain mail servers)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi,

I've got three pop3 accounts installed and any of them can occasionally give problems. The symptoms are always the same:

* your receive an email with an attachment, or a long email that's been truncated

* you click on "mark for downloading"

* when it's done, the body of the email changes and repeats the text of the preceding email, or sometimes it just disappears completely.

* the only way to access it is to use another email client or use another pda/PC/phone

Other people have had the same problem. When I'm on the road I get around 20 emails per day, about one-third having attachments; this problem doesn't happen too often, but it's a damned nuisance when it does.

I thought you could with some progs.  Can't remember which; I shall have a dig and let you know....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks, I would really appreciate this: I heard that X-Bar can somehow give copy/paste functionality, but there is no trial download to assess it, and I don't want to pay for something only to find out it doesn't do what I expect. (In fact, I wouldn't buy it on principle now - after you install X-Bar, unless you buy the registration code it blocks the phone: this is a nasty trick and I don't appreciate sofware designers with this sort of attitude).

Cheers,

Nick

[Guest]

Hi,

I've got three pop3 accounts installed and any of them can occasionally give problems. The symptoms are always the same:

* your receive an email with an attachment, or a long email that's been truncated

* you click on "mark for downloading"

* when it's done, the body of the email changes and repeats the text of the preceding email, or sometimes it just disappears completely.

* the only way to access it is to use another email client or use another pda/PC/phone

I've had the same thing happen, though I don't think it relates to whether there's an attachment or not.

I remember digging on here for more info, and I think the advice was to do another send/receive before doing the "mark for download" thing.

Not ideal, but it may be worth a try.

HTH,

Pete.

[Guest nick123]

I remember digging on here for more info, and I think the advice was to do another send/receive before doing the "mark for download" thing.

Not ideal, but it may be worth a try.

HTH,

Pete.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Many thanks for the tip, Pete. I don't think I can trust myself to remember to do this each time, but I'll give it a try.

More & more I'm finding Profimail a more practical solution for 'heavy' email traffic: yesterday they released a new version that now has a cc and bcc field for new mails, but it still doesn't show the addresses of copyholders or co-addressees, and still has no "reply to all" ability.....I will switch 100% to Profimail once they fix this, as in all other respects it's so much better than the MS version. It's not a particularly cheap program ($26 after you've paid the tax), but considering the extras you get (storage card memory indicator, GPRS counter, reflow doc viewer, txt viewer, html pages fully rendered) and the functionality (handles multiple attachments for sent mails, easy to switch automatic email box update on/off, ability to check all email accounts in one sweep, progress bars to tell you what's going on, easy removal of mails from the server, integrates well with Contacts & Wesstek ClearVue for reading attachments), it's worth it.

Nick

[Guest 35fan]

Wordpad 2.9 supports copy/cut/paste functions. So, it's possible - other softwares just need to implement the same functions. It also uses pagination for word wrap. Supports txt and html editing.

Free software.

http://www.smartphone.net/software_detail....teid=279&id=836

For reading only, try Orneta Reader, also free.

[Guest nick123]

Thanks 35fan,

I tried this program, but it has the same problem as the others: you can't highlight the text using shift/arrow from a keyboard, you have to first choose "select mode" from the menu options.

I think the problem must be somewhere in the OS of WM Smartphone 2003, as a keyboard connected to a regular WM2003 PDA supports shift/arrow highlighting with just about any text program.

Thanks anyway,

Nick