Writing On Your... Smartphone?11 August 2003 Okay, I know that most of the folks that read the opening paragraph of this column thought, "Well, duh." But it's not as weird as it sounds. Keep in mind, it wasn't so long ago that the idea of writing extended text on a PDA was madness, madness I tell you! But now, almost every PDA comes with a word processor. Times and expectations change. Folks in Japan and Europe that communicate primarily through text messages now probably think nothing of thumbing out word after word. Just because it hasn't caught on here in the US doesn't mean it's not coming. I got a nice little surprise Wednesday morning of two weeks ago. I heard a knock on my door and when I went to answer it, I saw the Airborne Express truck driving away. There, at my feet, as a padded envelope containing my new (Möbius-branded) Microsoft Smartphone. It's the SPVx model, manufactured by HTC in Taiwan and sold in Europe by the wireles carrier Orange. It's GSM/GPRS-capable, with a 176x220 transflective screen and an SD slot on the side. I yanked the T-Mobile SIM card out of my XDA and popped it into the Smartphone, then turned it on. The first thing you notice is how nice the screen really is. While very bright (sometimes too bright) indoors, this is the first transflective screen I've seen that looks as good outdoors as a pure reflective. Even my Zire 71, with a screen widely thought to be one of the best transflectives on the market, is substantially dimmer in direct sunlight. The resolution isn't really great shakes, but then again, it's a frickin' phone. The phone boots up to a Today screen quite similar to the one found on the Pocket PC. In fact, Pocket PC 2003 users will find this device startlingly familiar, even down to the weird little gradient blue rule lines in the background of the stock applications. You get a line of recently used application icons across the top of the screen, then the time and network, then appointments, messages and finally the current sound profile. The home screen is XML-based, so you can customize it to your heart's content if your carrier allows such things. (See below.) The Smartphone is entirely keypad-driven. There is no touchscreen. There is no stylus. There is no pop-up keyboard. The device is controlled and text is entered via the 12-key phone keypad, the joystick mounted in the middle of the device and a few smart buttons. Pressing and holding on the * key will toggle between T9, numeric and alphabetic text entry. A quick tap on the * key acts as a capitalization shift. T9 works well for general vocabulary words. I have two problems with it that will probably prevent me from using it much. One is that I can't figure out how to override the default T9 choice when more than one word matches the numbers I've keyed in. I try to write "if" and I get "he" and I don't know how to tell it, "No, I meant 'if.' " This is probably correctable. I didn't get any documentation with the Smartphone (I'm not griping, it was free) so I'm sure I'm missing something. But considering I taught myself just about everything else on the Smartphone in less than a day via trial and error, the fact that I couldn't find this means the feature is probably buried deeper than it needs to be. The second thing I'm not crazy about is that T9 is completely stupid about words it doesn't know. If I'm going to use slang or worse yet, just make up words, there's no effective way to use T9. This problem isn't correctable, because it goes straight to the root of T9's predictive text recognition. It can't, by definition, recognize words it doesn't know, and it can't know everything. I could probably get by with it if I could type in unknown words via the alphabetic recognition and then add them to the T9 dictionary, but I can't figure out how to do that either. Fortunately, I'm gaining speed on the alphabetic recognition a lot faster than I thought I would. This is the same text recognition used by phones since, oh, the dawn of time. To type "cat", you'd enter "222(pause)28". It works flawlessly because there's no intelligence to the system. You get out exactly what you put in. Sometimes you have to put in over a dozen keypresses to type an average five letter word, but that's the price you pay for accuracy. This was cumbersome for me at first, but now I'm starting to understand how SMS-crazy non-Americans get used to it. The fact that it's a completely one-handed, touch-oriented system means it would be great for "writing" while walking, waiting in line at the grocery store (it's a bear to use a PDA and stylus and hold groceries all at the same time), etc. I'm already thinking of using the Smartphone for capturing quick ideas, emailing them to myself on the go, then filing them in WordSmith on the Palm after VersaMail pulls them in from Outlook. But writing a column, or diety-forbid, a novel? (This column, btw, was written entirely on my Palm Zire 71 in WordSmith via my trusty Stowaway. I don't care how fast I get with a phone keypad, a fully touch-typable keyboard is faster.) The Smartphone, not surprisingly, isn't really set up for that. While it's versions of Outlook, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are every bit as powerful as their Pocket PC counterparts (they ought to be, it's roughly the same code), there is no Smartphone version of Pocket Word or Pocket Excel. These devices are meant for light data entry, very light. SMS message light. Even an extended email message is pushing the limits, if not of the hardware, of the user interface. Phones are voice devices, first and foremost (and the Smartphone does have a halfway decent voice recorder). Long passages of text are just out of the reasonable expectations for the device.1 During my recent cable modem outage, forcing me to use T-Mobile's GPRS for my only Internet access, I had to switch back to my trusty XDA to read and reply to emails simply because writing replies on the Smartphone (or Smurfone, as one of my mailing list members took to calling it) led to brief, sometimes cryptic messages. This is reflected in Microsoft's choice of bundled applications. The Smartphone lacks even a basic text editor, although free ones that work pretty well are just an ActiveSync install away. Which brings me to... The biggest problem I see with Smartphone taking off as a dominating mobile computing platform doesn't have boo to do with text entry. The reason (well, one of the reasons) the original Palm took off the way it did, and one of the reasons why Windows CE took so long to get competitive, is the availability of third party software. There is plenty of software available for Smartphone. The fact that most of the underlying code between Smartphone and Pocket PC is the same ensures that existing Pocket PC developers can quickly become Smartphone developers. While I haven't seen a Smartphone port of µBook yet, it shouldn't be too hard and there are already two ebook readers available for the platform. But can you install them? Smartphone is caught between two standards, two expectations, two histories. On the one hand, it's a PDA running Windows Mobile and capable of running a rich selection of third party software. In a lot of ways, it's the tiniest Windows computer yet. On the other hand, it's a phone. Phones are usually closed systems, so closed that it never occurs to most cell phone users that the device even has an operating system. Carriers have established business models built on controlling the content on the handset, charging for things like games and ringtones. Carriers have a tradition of blocking the ability to add anything to the phone that they don't provide and profit from. On which side of the fence does Smartphone fall? Currently, it's stuck on the top of the fence. Carriers have the ability to "lock" phones and prevent users from installing unsanctioned applications to them. Orange has backed off on this a bit after an initial scandal, but the potential problem still exists. In order for Smarphone to take off as a computing platform rather than just an uppity phone, users have to be able to customize their phones with software that fits their unique needs. And for now... The Microsoft Smartphone is the best phone I've had yet. It's amazing what this thing can do. But for writing, it's limited at best. Writers looking at carrying the minimum possible should hold off and see what the Palm Treo 600 really looks like when it comes out this fall. The Treo's ability to run applications like WordSmith and the existence of a full QWERTY thumbboard rather than just a 12-key phone keypad will make it more compelling for text longer than a quick message. On the other hand, I'm starting to see what Microsoft sees in the Smartphone/Tablet PC combination. For a lot of people, a Smartphone is really the only mobile device they need to carry around in a pocket. For times when writing serious word count seems likely, a light convertible tablet like the Acer or Compaq units might just trump PDAs. We'll see... Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! 1With one exception. Orange sells a foldable keyboard desgned for the Smartphone, and that would allow you to type to your heart's content. |