Some Comparisons with the O2 XDA II mini

I know my posts have been, well, mighty sucky lately. Sorry about that. Again!

Not only have the posts been rather scarce on the ground but they've probably lacked the kind of useful tips, etc., you're all seeking. Who needs nothing but bitching, eh?

Unfortunately, I am mired in a rather hellish mix of personnel management, systems support, systems development, web development, network/desktop/server security work, Linux servers, hosting services, IP domain management, SSH, tunneling, PGP key pairs, Apache/Cocoon/Lenya/Forrest, CSS/XML/XSL(-T, even!), etc.

I've been taking some pretty heavy technical incoming and it's not a pretty site. Though not outright bleeding, the edges are, well, a bit too close for comfort at times.

Did I mention I have to develop a complete, new end-to-end production/deployment/delivery intra/internet "solution"? Yeah, and that's while I'm trying to keep the heaving, seething, sighing, steaming, smoking, crackling and popping mass of cable-spaghetti, musty'n'dusty old desktops/servers running an assortment of half-assed OSes and "enterprise applications"!

Legacy issues? Not really. Legacy issues might be what you'd get if you were trying to maintain secure, relioable trans/international banking systems using TRS-80s, 2400 baud modems and cleartext logins.

I live/work/sleep/groan/repeat in a land that could have written the book on Heath Robinson, if the world wanted nothing more than a Heath Robinson comic book, that is. When did you last see a 12-volt, 3.5 inch case fan screwed to the heatsink of an early-era Pentium processor, for the sake of Peter?

Sometimes I wonder if my office could more usefully run PDP-9s or something. At least some 80s Texas Instrument programmable calculators would suffer fewer hard reboots.

So that's me, mired in the digital mud. Dug in, with a withering fire of "operator error" raining down around me, just trying to make myself as small as possible, while tasked with building the as big as possible.

Despite the minor combat fatigue setting in, I finally got a chance to mess about with my friend's O2 XDA II mini. I owed him some money and Arsenal were playing (yeah, they lost. again. boo sux).

Here are some initial (and, by the way, hardly expert-) observations.

Yeah, the full PDA version of Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 SE is a lot closer to the "user experience" I'm looking for and seems to be a bit more polished than the Smartphone edition I'm, err, "running" on Xphone II, but it's still too clunky. I find it rather insulting that we users should pay for stuff so poorly engineered. I would be embarassed to sign off on sofware so poorly considered, under engineered and buggy.

Still, it quite clearly beats the Smartphone edition. Which would be ok, if they MADE IT CLEAR before you invested exactly what you get for your dinero.

For sure, the PDA version of Windows Mobile 2003 SE has more of the tabs n stuff WE NEED, but it's still got some clunkier than a 50s Soviet submarine nuts, bolts n steam pipes. The Soviets did it like that because those submarines were less prone to failing under the EM spike of a nuclear detonation.

What's Redmond's excuse? Huh?

I needed to perform some "critical cross-platform" tasks, ie., transfer some of the corny 80s movie-quote audio files I use as ring tones to my mate's XDA so he can bore a whole new bunch of people with stupid cinema tricks.

What a palaver! Man oh man is Bluetooth seek n find slow! It must be modelled on the US seek n destroy of Bin Laden. Again, I have no choice but to compare and contrast the experience against my old data transfers over IrDA between my Nokia 6310i and Palm Vx. That was SO darn easy!

Ok, IrDA between from the Xphone II to the XDA II mini isn't so hard but it's nowhere as easy as the old skool. So I thought I'd give Bluetooth a blast so at least I could leave one on the bar and fart about with the other but, alas, every single time you want to transfer a file, the Xphone II has to wait while it checks for available BT devices, etc.

It's not elegant, it's not fast, it's really not the way OMNI and Asmivo probably envisaged 21st century computing, and bottom line, again, is it's not good enough, given the cost of these technologies.

Whelp, the bugler is sounding the attack and I have to go over the top again. Sorry, it's been so brief but I can't unload TOO much on the XDA II mini's OS because I have not used it enough yet and it wouldn't be completely fair. More later. Just wanted to give my initial observations.

BTW, the [OMG - what a brain fart, I initially originally posted "Men at Work"] Masters at Work/L'il Louie Vega Latin Jazz Dub mix of Elements of Life is wicked. As is Nu Tone's Breathless.