Which handy for business?

Running a business as a one man show (one woman show in my case) implies that one must rely on performant material.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been using various handys for personal use and since one year, I’ve been looking for the “Saint Graal” of business handy.

Here is the list of handys I used for business and their pro/cons; Iphone, HTC Touch, Nokia E71 and Blackberry Storm.

Iphone 3G

Pros:

• the best UI ever designed. No user manual is required. Everything is simple.
• allows push for exchange
• big characters, easy to read

Cons:

• too big and heavy to suit in a pocket
• terrible battery life. Lasts about 8hours..unusable for work. Or with all features disables (3g, push, GPS, bluetooth..)
• one need to power on the phone to see missing phone calls and received messages. All other phones have led indicating that something happened
• hardly usable for business; impossible to search within emails/sms. No copy paste. No text editor. Minimal calendar functions (no invitations, user availability, sharing, ..)

The last two point coupled with a too high battery consumption lead me to the next one.

HTC Touch

Pros:

• small and lightweight
• excellent battery life (without 3G), about 4 days with daily usage and push
• allows synchronization with Exchange
• business usage of mails and calendar (search, sync, invitations)
• text and table editors
• HTC provide their own UI atop Windows Mobile’s, which is very convenient for common functions. Such as a dashboard, quick link to contact, dials, mails, etc.

Cons:

• windows mobile is out of date, really. The internet browser is completely deprectated, for instance.
• UI not user friendly. Out of HTC home made UI, one need a stylet (thus two hands) and good eyes to use the tiny buttons and read the (too) small characters

That is the last point that makes me looking for something else. I was loosing my nerves with the painful way of writing emails. Not to mention the scrolling and screen orientation and brightness that have to be set manually. It was my first choice before the Iphone came out.

Nokia E71

Pro:

• small and very thin. Suits in every pocket.
• best battery life ever! Almost one week in 3G and push!
• support Exchange
• offers all the search and text editing functions one need

Cons:

• Synbian OS. Worst UI ever. I needed the user manual to couple my bluetooth headset with the phone. I’m a *geek*, means than when I have to pull the user manual out, there’s something terrible wrong with the phone.
• configuring the phone isn’t trivial. For instance, I use “error and trial” to onfigure my Exchange server. I have the disturbing feeling that I’m using an OS meant for phone only with poorly written functions atop to make it match with the current market needs.
• external keyboard. I’m writting in both English and French (Swiss at that), I ended with the AZERTY keyboard and of course, forget about changing it. Besides, the tastes are too small, even for my woman’s fingers.
• terrible phone communication quality.
• unusable camera (terrible quality as well), but I don’t use it thus don’t care.

I moved away from the Nokia because despites its excellent quality, I was loosing far too much time looking for functions that are hidden under I don’t know which submenu.

Blackberry Storm

Pros:

• Same user friendly UI as the Iphone
• smaller that the Iphone
• good battery life (4 days in 3G and sync with BB server)
• all the business needs are filled: search, calendar, text editing, etc.

Cons:

• the touch function isn’t as good as the Iphone. Most of the time I’m losing my key target. I haven’t come to terms with the “pressure” feedback. Cannot decide if it irritates me or helps me.
• no possible sync with Exchange unless you have a Blackberry plan and they are pricy.

For now, I’m going on with the Blackberry. It’s meant and designed for business but there are no free fees coming with the Blackberry. Pay to sync with Exchange (or whatever your mail server is), pay a special plan with your carrier, pay for the volume data and so on.

In the next post, I’ll discuss about the online Exchange hosting solutions and how to configure a Blackberry for the Swiss carrier Swisscom. Stay tuned!