Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

Last week I was comparing iMates and iPhones, and a few days later I pulled the trigger on the HTC P4350.

So far, it's awesome. The phone works (my #1 reason for a new device), the keyboard is great, the 2MP camera has a nice UI, and the P4350, or "Herald" being a WM5 device does most everything the JASJAR (aka the Qtek 9000) did. The shell is better, and the keys are more useful.

But my last device was the JASJAR, which is still the best device out there. There are inevitable sacrifices. The processor is about 200MHz on the P4350 vs. the 520MHz JASJAR. Built-in apps do run fast, but saving a Note takes a long time. I suspect a few ops will take longer than I'm used to. Most people will never care. If you're a gadget geek, you just might. If so, try the HTC TyTN instead.

The screen is smaller, 320x240 instead of 640x480. When I see a list of docs now, titles are truncated which makes it hard to tell what my notes are about when I use descriptive prefixes. There is no Infrared port, which I wouldn't miss except that it would be the easiest way to move a lot of data between devices that take different SD card formats. It came with USB headphones which I can't find a quarter-inch converter for -- I'd really like to plug this into my car stereo like I did with my old device, especially for listening back to recorded voice notes. There is no backslash (\) on the keyboard. Is this a Fench keyboard thing? It's the only frustration I can't find a workaround for.

And then there's the fact that I bought it in Paris so it has the French version of WM5. This would be no problem, if software developers only understood that applications will be used by cultures other than en-US. The built-in camera is great, it saw my 2Gb Micro-SD card right away and stores new photos there. The awesome Live Search can also use a storage card to cache maps and directions, but unfortunately it needs to be named "Storage Card." Mine is automatically named "Carte de stockage" so Live uses valuable on-board memory, and I can't configure it otherwise. Happily Live Search for Windows Mobile is still in beta so there's time for a fix. Yes, I've sent the team my findings.

I've found a number of ways to kludge the UI to display English instead of French, which I will post if time or demand prevails. But I have not sucessfully replaced the dictionary for the type-ahead, and can't find a way to force it to call my Micro SD card "Storage Card" instead of "Carte de stockage." Strangely, another developer flub worked in my favour - the on-board camera not only recognizes the French name for the card, but it found and uses "\My Documents\My Pictures" to store new photos. This is exactly why apps need user-configurable storage paths, and not hardcoded paths (if you agree, support my comment!).

Why not the HTC TyTN? It was about another $300 for the faster processor, a jog wheel and a few features I don't use, like a second camera for video calling. All that in a slightly larger, comparatively unattractive device. Otherwise, same 2 mega-pixel main camera, same memory, same connectivity (GSM/EDGE/WiFi/Bluetooth) similar keyboard, same WM5. I'm really happy with the choice.

[Update] I tried the "UME to 3.5mm" connector for Motorola Mp3 phones, and it does not work with HTC devices!

[Update 2] HTC Europe is taking pre-orders on an adapter (the snappily-named "HTC P4350 Y Cable - 11pin to 5pin +3.5mm", though I prefer "Item 145068") out of the UK for £10, or about $25CAD. Plus £23 to ship to Canada! Foiled. There's also a pretty cool (wired) remote control that has the headphone jack plus a lot more, it starts at £25 plus the £23 shipping for a grand not-worth-it price of about $75 CAD. Foiled again.

[Update 3] The web browser was submitting French as my preferred language, even after updating Regional Settings to en-US. That gets annoying on sites developed by people who know what they're doing. The IE Mobile Team helpfully let me know the real place to make the change is the registry: Look up HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International and see if there is a value called “AcceptLanguage”.  You can either update that value or delete it and it should fix the issue. Thanks! I use the excellent Total Commander for WM5 to edit the registry. 

[Update 4] Um, I don't have the value specified in the Update above, tried adding it, the jury's out until further notice.

There's been a bunch of praise and second-guessing around the unreleased Apple iPhone. Then it occured to me that I've had all these features and more in my iMate JASJAR (aka the HTC Universal) since the summer of 2005. In fact, I've worked it to death and it needs to be replaced.

My iMate JASJAR is a touch-screen Windows Mobile 5 device with a real keyboard, an SD slot and a tablet-style 640x480 flip screen. My 2Gb SD card is 3/5ths full after a year and a half. I carry 6 to 10 albums at a time, so it’s also my MP3 player. It even has a pop-up virtual keyboard which sucks worse than the iPhone’s, but it also does handwriting recognition and does Palm Graffitti-like recognition too, which is my favourite after the real keyboard. Jobs might think a stylus sucks but I have a choice between finger and stylus, and with these tools, I write faster than he can.

The JASJAR has Bluetooth and WiFi, and Skype comes pre-installed so I have free calling at home, work and hotspots. It has two cameras, one does 1600x1280 and another is for the video phone. And I can write or install 3rd party apps on it. There’s no reason the iPhone UIs can’t be duplicated or improved on WM5, and they will.

And here’s something - my Today screen (the default power-on screen) shows me Text Messages, To Do’s, my Daily Schedule, Birthdays, Weather, and my Contact list. I don’t need to drill into another app to see these. Sure it’s customized. But the iPhone doesn’t let me see these things on the power-up page at all, or allow the customization to make it happen. Not cool. What good is OS X if I can’t use it to do stuff?

What can’t the iMate do? iPhone does random access of voice mail - is it downloaded or is it a new Cingular service? Either way, it’s not a killer feature for me. The unified inbox is a great concept, I like it at my desk. But that’s what it is to me, an infrastructure service and not something I need my cell phone to do. Give me a back-end that unifies my Exchange inbox and my work voice mail (which should be on a VOIP system), and the functionality follows when I run Outlook from any PDA with sound, whether the iMate or a Blackberry device. And if the iPhone doesn’t have an Exchange story, it’s useless to me.

And the iMate doesn’t have the proximity sensor to turn the speaker-phone on and off, though the phone UI has a speaker-phone button that works and I never accidentally got blasted by putting the phone to my ear. The iMate also doesn’t let me resize photos with the scissor-finger move, it’s a great feature but I can live without it. Heck, WM5 needs a good image viewer.  to begin with.

If I hadn’t dropped the iMate a bunch of times and broken the talky parts (though I still carry headphones to listen to music), it would still be my only device. Sure it works with a Bluetooth headset, but after a few months of doing that, I dropped my GSM chip back in my trusty old Nokia that always just works. The same 4-year-old Nokia that I throw against the wall whenever anyone asks why I still use it.

This is what I want in a device: a GSM phone, camera, 640x480 touch screen, accelerometer, speakers, a real back-lit keyboard, microphone, an SD or mini-SD slot, headphone jack, microphone jack, 512Mb to 1Gb of System or Program RAM, the same for on-board storage memory, WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE, USB, a replaceable battery, and Windows Mobile 5. GPS would be nice but Bluetooth takes care of it.

The iMate JASJAR has all these except the accelerometer, microphone jack, EDGE, and less RAM (47Mb Storage / 43Mb Storage). Anyone meets those specs and I’ll switch from whatever I have and use it for the next 3 to 5 years. I have high hopes for the LG KE850 but it doesn’t look like WM5. A Zune with a phone and Bluetooth would be great but for sure bulky, and its OS wouldn’t likely work with PocketPC or WM5 apps, never mind that it may not ever exist. Nothing from Motorola, Sony, Nokia or Audiovox comes close.

How does the iPhone share up? GSM yes, camera yes (2 Megapixel), touch screen no, high-res no (320x480), accelerometer yes, speakers yes, mic yes, keyboard no, WiFi yes, EDGE yes, Bluetooth yes, USB no, headphone jack yes, mic jack no, expansion no, much RAM no (64Mb), much storage yes (4Gb / 8Gb), replaceable battery no, WM5 no, GPS no. Showstoppers: no third party apps, no keyboard, end of story.

Is it the HTC P4350 or HTC TyTN? Could be. I'm in Paris this week so a closer look at the TyTN might be in order. Why these devices don't hit Canada sooner is beyond me.

Conclusion, the iMate JASJAR is still my killer device. But mine’s a year and a half old and there’s nothing out there to replace it. I don’t want to re-invest in two-year-old technology, but unless I find something soon, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

[Update 2007-02-09] Thanks to Lee for pointing me at the super sexy (for a gadget) O2 XDA Flame, due sometime in the next couple months. Neat-o. Specs? "NVIDIA-powered VGA on a 3.5" screen, Bluetooth, 3G, EDGE, 520 MHz CPU, USB 2.0, WM5 or 6, 802.11g WiFi, IR, touchscreen, VGA out,  2 Megapixel camera, 2 GB ROM, Mini-SD port, and it's about the same size and shape as the Magician." Add a keyboard to that and I'm a happy guy. Oh wait, the Athena? Too big. If I wanted a Jordana I'd have bought a Jordana.

Thanks to Graham for inviting me to present and to everyone who came out last Thursday, I had a great time and your questions and comments were terrific!

The topic was What ASP.Net Developers Will Love about SharePoint and was delivered in two parts. The main bit was to explain exactly what SharePoint is, to clarify the differences between WSS and MOSS, and to dive into how SharePoint and ASP.Net 2.0 relate. Then we got into the demos and a section that originated with David Gristwood at TechEd Europe. We didn't go all the way through that section because it gets away from ASP.Net and the message I was trying to get across (i.e. how ASP.Net development gets you a head start on SharePoint), it contains a fair bit of marketing, and you can watch it online anytime. If you would like to see more about Excel Forms Services, Forms Server, and Workflow, it's well-done and linked below. One topic it covers that deserves a whole session on its own is the Business Data Catalog. Look for this as a topic at an upcoming Toronto SharePoint User Group meeting.

Powerpoint: What Developers will Love about SharePoint 2007 (Download) (Right-click and select Save As)

Related and Mentioned Links:

SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007 - MSDN Developer Portal

Three SharePoint 2007 Object Model Posters (PDF)

Inexpensive WSS 3.0 Hosting from WebHost4Life

Top 7 Reasons Developers Will Love SharePoint (David Gristwood)

There are a few good MSDN entries with samples on using the Business Data Catalog, aka the ApplicationRegistry namespace.

BDC

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms563661.aspx

BDC - Using the runtime object model

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms568510.aspx

BDC - Get a LobSystem and an Entity

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms501019.aspx

BDC - Executing a Finder to retrieve a collection

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms560143.aspx

BDC - Executing a SpecificFinder to retrieve an item in a collection

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms545953.aspx

BDC - Call a method on an entity

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms559510.aspx

BDC - Building a BDC Search Web Part

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms558854.aspx

SDK

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.applicationregistry.runtime.aspx

Some parts of the SDK are incomplete, but this part is about done and it’s the main one to use.

It's a busy week indeed with two great user group meetings covering SharePoint in Toronto.

The first will be the Toronto SharePoint User Group meeting on Wednesday, January 10. Reza Alirezaei will be the featured speaker this week with a session on Site Columns and Content Types in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Reza is a great speaker with some great demos planned, I'm really looking forward to this one.

Next on Thursday I'll be speaking at the Metro Toronto .Net User Group meeting. The topic is "What Developers Love about Windows SharePoint Services 3.0" and it should be a fun one. We'll look at how to leverage the platform services offered by WSS 3.0 (which is a free extension to Windows 2003 Server) to build great applications, and see how Office SharePoint Server 2007 further extends this with some truly powerful data access and content management features. The user group meets Thursday at 6:00pm at 200 Bloor Street East in Toronto (Manulife Financial).

Also on the horizon is Toronto CodeCamp 2007 on March 31. Registration is now open, and last year all available seats were filled pretty fast so register today. The best part is that this mini-conference featuring over 20 speakers and thousands in prizes is absolutely free! Come on out and if you want to start getting involved in the community, volunteering at CodeCamp or your favourite user group is a great way to start.

People find it annoying that when accessing a SharePoint extranet, when you open a file stored in a Document Library, MS-Word will challenge you to enter your username and password again. It happens because the machine is outside the SharePoint domain, and your two desktop applications (Word and Explorer) are running as separate Applications, each of which needs to get its own Authentication token. Note that this doesn't happen over a VPN, which connects your machine as though it were sitting inside the domain.

The solution is found in Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006. If you're making SharePoint available externally you should already be running ISA. The trick is configuring the Listener of that external connector to allow persistent cookies. Go to Listener Properties, Forms, Advanced. Name your cookie and select "Only on Private Computers" for the second field.

It's also good to configure ISA to use Forms-based NTLM authentication, which even has extensions to supoprt third-party authentication providers like RSA. That way you can use most any browser to hit your external SharePoint site, not just IE and Firefox.