verbosity

Windows Mobile 5 Usability Concerns

There may be clever workarounds, non-obvious methods, third-party software, or other solutions to the below annoyances. However, that's not relevant to this entry. This is about basic functionality that the average Joe buying this phone would expect, functionality that your technically-inclined host can't unearth from this phone. Keep in mind that I'm using a BlackJack, currently one of the most expensive phones out there, and thus presumably one of the most advanced. It's also running Windows Mobile 5, which should indicate a certain level of software maturity.

1. The user interface is slow. I'm not a teenager who can dual-thumb 80 words a minute, but I can still type an email or text message faster than the interface can accept, resulting in omitted letters. Ridiculous. A free phone from Grandpa's Mobile Reseller is faster.

2. Calendar appointments entered on the phone don't allow alarms to be set at anything but a few pre-defined intervals. Want 90 minutes? Too bad. You can set it in Outlook, sync it to your phone, and it'll show up as "Custom" and work fine. If the phone honors user-defined alarms, let me enter them, by Jove!

3. You can't adjust the ringer volume without going through quite a few key presses to edit the "profile" currently being used. Heck, you can't even switch profiles that quickly. If it weren't for a one-button toggle between the "Normal" and "Silent" profiles, this would be the worst ringer control of any phone I've ever used. No, wait, it still is.

4. Organization. Or lack thereof. Where's the calculator? Try "Start->More->Organizer->Calculator." Don't check "Applications"; it's not there. Rinse. Repeat.

5. The busted email client that I've already complained about.

6. You're expected to use the "Back" button to exit out of applications instead of hitting the "Call End" or "Home" buttons. Otherwise, the application keeps running. Never mind, it often keeps running anyway. I can't find the logic on how the system terminates applications, or how the user is expected to under normal circumstances, but I did find the task manager and was able to shut them down manually. Woe to the user who finds his memory exhausted and doesn't know how to proceed.
   

HELO WM5

The SMTP client in Windows Mobile 5 (which my BlackJack phone runs) is broken. It only sends "Inbox" in the HELO command, which my tightly configured Postfix instance rejects :

Mar 10 15:19:24 laconic postfix/smtpd[29738]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mobile-166-137-250-181.mycingular.net[166.137.250.181]: 504 : Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=

To be fair, the Treo email client is broken in a similar manner. Postfix config excerpt:

# remove reject_non_fqdn_hostname so that my treo can send

How does this software pass QA? Does nobody read RFCs anymore?

You may also notice that there are no WM5 configuration options for alternative mail port numbers, which is a problem if you're a good mail administrator and run your submission service on a port other than 25, such as the recommended 587. Solution: append ":587" at the end of your outgoing mail server name. Example: "mail.your.host:587". Be aware that some implementations are buggy (my Blackjack for example) and you may have to delete your email account and reconfigure from scratch to get it to use the alternative port. It was being silently ignored when I modified my existing account.