I’ve had a chance now to do quite a bit of playing around with the new phone and it is well worth the $199, plus some. The more I use it, the more I like it. I haven’t really found even one thing yet that was better on the i730 (although it does feel sad to relegate two perfectly good $500 phones to the "dead cellphones" drawer in the kitchen).

I’m impressed with WM6. It’s quick and responsive and I’ve not had a single freezeup as I occasionally did with the i730. I’m getting faster with the keyboard and now, instead of thinking "gosh, I hope I don’t need to reply to anything" when I check email on the phone, I almost look forward to typing on it.

I’m still a little miffed at whomever (Verizon or Samsung) left Sprite backup out of this one. But I guess I can live with having to reinstall Sprite if I ever have to restore the system; it’s just a little inconvenient. On the other hand, as stable as this OS seems, maybe I’ll never need to restore the system.

I really like Spb Pocket Plus and all the functionality it adds. Now I can have my desktop icons just like on my "real" computer. Here’s a screenshot:

One of the best things about it is that it causes programs to close when you press the X at the top of program windows instead of just minimizing (by default). If you only want to minimize, you can press and hold the X and you get a menu that lets you choose to minimize, close the program or close all the programs that are running. You can also add exceptions, so that if you have a program that needs to run in the background all the time (like my Photo Contacts Pro), you can configure the X to only minimize it.

Speaking of Photo Contacts Pro, I really like it, too. It lets you assign pictures to your contacts and put your favorites on the Today screen so you can place a call just by tapping the appropriate photo. Here’s what it looks like:

Because it requires a double tap to call, you’re not likely to be making calls accidentally, either. And when someone in your address book calls you, if you have a photo assigned to that person it will display the photo full screen so you know who’s calling with just a glance. Cool.

It also lets you assign individual ringtones to each of your contacts (or to groups), and perhaps most useful of all, it has a call management feature whereby you can specify numbers you want to block and exactly how to do it (whether to just hang up, send it to voicemail, let it go through but silence the ringer, etc.). It gets more sophisticated than that, though. You can set it up so that, for example, during the period of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. all calls are blocked except those from members of the Family group. And you can configure it so that during any time period that you have a meeting designated in your calendar, it will turn off the ringer and just vibrate. When the meeting’s over, the ringer automatically comes back on.

Another way to place calls (that doesn’t require any third party software) is with the voice command system, and it works great. I’ve had no trouble at all with recognition, and I have a Texas accent that throws some voice rec software for a loop. Just say "Call [name of contact]" and it calls. Or if that contact has more than one number, it will ask you whether you want to call the person at work, at home, on mobile, etc. Or you can circumvent that by just saying "Call [name] at home." You can also assign nicknames so you don’t have to say the person’s full name (e.g., "Call Tom" instead of "Call Thomas Shinder"). If you want to call a number that’s not in your address book, just say "Dial [phone number]."

Of course, you can just dial the number the old fashioned way, too. Here again you have choices. You can use the handy little physical number pad on the front of the phone (which doesn’t require opening the keyboard as the i730 did) or you can use the soft keys on the screen. The phone application is shown below:

As you can see, it displays the last few numbers that called or that you called, so you can call one of those back by just tapping it with your finger or the stylus, or by navigating to it with the wheel and pressing the center button.

Email works great, too. It was a snap to set up (much easier than on the i730):

The Mobile Office programs work fine, too. Here’s Pocket Word:

And the automatic change from portrait to landscape when you open the slider makes it a lot easier to view Pocket IE in widescreen mode, making it easier to read web pages:

Pocket Plus also gives you touch scrolling in IE, which makes web browsing a lot more fun. It’s almost like the iPhone (but unfortunately, you don’t get the "pinch and drag" ability for resizing web pages).

Of course, you can also view any other program in landscape mode too, and you’ll probably want to use it for actually creating or editing a Word doc, for replying to email, and other applications where you’ll be typing.

Oh, and as for how I got the screen captures: I actually tried three different capture utilities before I found one I liked. Ilium’s is very popular but I couldn’t get it to work. It installed okay, but no matter which button assignment I picked and which hardware button I tried, nothing captured. Then I was going to try one called Vito that displays the PPC screen on your desktop computer. It said it had a 14 day free trial, but when I installed it and tried to open it, it asked me to buy it and wouldn’t let me do the trial, so I uninstalled it, too.

Finally I found Capture Screen from Fann Software. It’s freeware, downloaded without a hitch and works great, and it has an on-screen soft key for capturing so you don’t have to worry with assigning a hardware button. If you need a screen capture program for WM 2003, 5 or 6, you can download it here:
http://www.fannsoftware.com/PpcSoftMain.html 
Click the "Freeware" link on the left side of the page.

All in all, I’m extremely pleased with the phone and all of the software I’m using on it. I’m glad we decided to stick with Verizon and Samsung. I’m sure the Tilt and AT&T fit many people’s needs, but this is working great for us.

deb@shinder.net