First Impressions of the HTC Wizard (Cingular 8125)

I’ve been using the HTC Wizard for about a week now.  I plan to record my initial impressions and how I corrected some flaws in the phone.  The Wizard is manufactured by HTC which is a Taiwan company.  It is private labeled by Cingular as the Cingular 8125. This isn’t a review; there are plenty of those.  Here is one of the best. I’m impressed by the hardware but less impressed and in some cases down right disappointed in the software.   Software issues are probably split between Microsoft which provides Windows Mobile 5.0; Cingular which provides various customization and additional software such as Xpress mail; and HTC which presumably added additional drivers to the mix.

My experience has been with a Windows Smartphone, the Motorola MPx220.  I’ve never used a PDA so it’s a new experience for me.  The reasons I wanted a new phone were:

• True push email
• Better internet browsing experience
• Wi-fi support of browsing
• VPN and Remote Desktop for emergency management of networks
• Software expansion such as mapping.

I had read that Microsoft had provided true push email in a service pack .  Because I didn’t adequately research this pack, I just naively assumed a end user just added it to the phone.  Instead, Cingular or HTC has to add it.  Cingular says they plan to add it in the first half of 2006.  Big disappointment, but I have only myself to blame.

Out of the box, I was kind of baffled by the Windows Mobile software; it seemed you needed to use a stylus everywhere.  It helped a lot when I realized you could or should remap the top two buttons to the start menu and to the ok action.  That let you use the navigation keys to move around and dramatically cut down on the need for the stylus.  Other people use additional software to add similar capability to the bottom keys by holding a key down for a second.

Because I had used ActiveSync with my previous phone, I was comfortable with syncing my contacts, calendar, and tasks over from Outlook.  However, Microsoft took a step backwards with contacts.  In versions of ActiveSync prior to 4.0, you could choose to move only the contacts which met a category criteria.  I used the category “Phone” to indicate that I wanted contacts moved over.  This was because I had maybe 600 contacts of which only about 100 would I ever conceivably want to call from my mobile phone.  In ActiveSync 4, Microsoft eliminated the ability to do this, meaning that the first time I synced, I got an additional 500 contacts I didn’t want. The only work around is to create two contact folders and put the ones I don’t want into a second folder.

One minor ergonomic thing that seems peculiar to me is that there is an ok button, but no cancel button.  Sometimes I would get part way through setting something up, realize I was on the wrong path, and there was no way out!  There’s no way that I have found to do this with the physical keyboard, the virtual keyboard, or the stylus.  There are not many places where this is an issue.

The phone has internet capability through Cingular’s GPRS system and I think it also will have EDGE capability when that is available.  It feels three or four times faster than the MPx220, which seemed to me to be about 2400 baud.  The HTC seems like dialup or maybe twice as fast.  I haven’t yet done any speed tests to see quantitatively how fast it is.  The phone also can use wifi which is a huge advantage, since even if you have unlimited data with Cingular, wifi should be quicker if you have cable or DSL.  It took a fair amount of messing with various crazy settings to get the phone to work with both Cingular and with Wifi.  I wonder if Cingular tried to make it more difficult to work with Wifi, since obviously they derive no benefit if you use another data provider.

Both at home and work we use encrypted wifi using the WPA standard.  The phone has settings for WPA but I haven’t gotten it to work.  We use a shared key approach to wifi security which means in each computer and the router you enter a 32 hexadecimal string as your shared key.  When I first tried to set this up, I opened the physical keyboard and started putting in the 32 character shared key.  I was presented with a string of asterisks.  *******   Because the keyboard is very limited, you can’t tell if you are putting a number, or a cap letter.  There’s no feedback.  This is one of the most ridiculous design decisions I have seen.  Showing you asterisks so no one can sneak up on you and see the 32 characters you are entering on a cell phone is just plain foolish.  So I decided to enter the string the way we do for any new computer in the office.  I copy the string into a text document on the computer and copy that file to the phone.  I open the document on the phone, select the string, copy it, and return to the screen where you enter the shared key.   Microsoft deliberately decided to disable “paste” on that critical field!   Whoever made that decision ought to fess up and apologize to me.  I am generally understanding when I run across bugs and flaws in software.  Since I’ve written software, managed its development, and used it for over 30 years, I understand that software involves many tradeoffs between time to market, quality, costs and so forth.  But here they apparently went out of their way to make it much, much more difficult.  I’ve entered my 32 character string about 20 times and have not gotten the WPA security to work yet.  I’m using the virtual keyboard since you can tell if you are entering a digit or a letter there.

I understand there is a registry setting which will tell you if you have the caps key or the option key pressed.  I haven’t entered it yet, but that will get around the problem of having no feedback as to the state of the cap key or option key.

I require in all our companies that the software users run as a limited user.  I personally run as a limited user.  I’ve taken this approach for a couple of years now and it makes it far much more secure and safe to operate a Windows computer.  See NonAdmin for why and how.  Microsoft recommends this and is moving to this mode of operation in Windows Vista.  Why am I am mentioning this in a post about a phone?   Well, apparently you have to be an administrator on your computer to install software on your phone.  The installation software you run on the computer tries to write to the activeSync directory.  This is all messed up because normally when you run across a problem like this you switch to a super user or an administrative account.   You can’t do that here, because the other account doesn’t have a partnership with the phone.  Sigh.   Perhaps I’ll work on this further and post later.

I have spent some time trying to get the VPN working to our office.  Here I’ve got to rant about the error messages the phone gives.  “It failed” is basically all it tells you.  There are about five or six fields.  Wouldn’t it be possible to say “I couldn’t find the host.”  “I found the host, but the host doesn’t seem to have VPN”.  “I found the host, but it wants a different protocol.”  I found the host but the password/user is wrong”.  I understand some of these need the server to respond and the server shouldn’t respond to blind queries, but it’s very difficult to debug these problems without adequate error messages.  VPN doesn’t work yet.

My previous phone did a good job of recognized voice tags to dial just by saying the person’s name.  However, when I started using a Bluetooth headset, the voice recognition wouldn’t work.  I cussed and cussed Motorola for having piped the Bluetooth audio into the phone after the voice recog circuitry.  Recently I found that Microsoft decided that they needed 8 kHz sampling and Bluetooth only allows a 4 kHz sampling rate.  So it was Microsoft’s fault in the MPx220 and it’s still Microsoft’s fault in the HTC Wizard and it’s been three years!  I’ve learned that there’s a registry setting that will allow the Bluetooth to work with the voice recog, but I haven’t had time to apply it.  I understand the quality of recognition might be lower with the lower sampling rate, but isn’t that a tradeoff the user should make?

While I’m on the subject of Bluetooth, another reason I wanted to change to a different phone was to listen to podcasts.  I copied over my first podcast and used the built in Microsoft Media player to play it.  I could hear it fine coming out of the phone, but not the Bluetooth.  If I hit the action button on the Bluetooth headset, I would hear the podcast for about 3 seconds and then it would quit.  How unbelievably frustrating.  You have to download a variety of small Bluetooth applications to get this to work.  You can find the applications here.

Conclusion:  I like the phone, recognizing that there are some tradeoffs that make it more like a PDA and less like a phone.  The reception is good.  The reported battery life is good and I don’t yet have enough experience to know myself.  The big remaining tasks are to:

• get the VPN working
• figure out the WPA security
• wait on the true push email solution
• Mess with the registry to fix lack of feedback on cap keys, time out on keyboard light, etc.
• Install mapping software.

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