Wednesday, February 02, 2005

SmartPhone review

The folks at eWeek just did a review of the Motorola MPX220 that I was so hot for a while back (they also reviewed one Palm and one Blackberry device).

One interesting note from their review was the following: "we'd love to see smart-phone hardware and software vendors license SureType from RIM for inclusion in their products—the technology represents one of the best new ideas in mobile device input that we've seen in some time."

As I indicated in my last comments on the SmartPhone platform, the key hurdle is user input. It sounds like Blackberry has come up with an advance in that area. Most phones use the same letter to number key assignment as a house phone, which requires anywhere from two to four keypresses to obtain a single correct letter. The Blackberry keyboard uses a standard QWERTY typewriter layout, with only one or two letters assigned to each key. That makes it much easier for the predictive software to guess which letter you are trying to type.

By the way, I also mentioned in that last article that the Audiovox SMT5600 I'm now using and the Motorola MPX220 both use the mini-SD card rather than a standard sized SD memory card. Well, if you're as unfamiliar as I was with the mini-SD card at that time, you may not realize that the mini-SD card comes with an adapter that will allow it to work in a standard SD slot. Pretty slick.

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