Orange SPV E650 AKA HTC Vox S710
September 3rd, 2007 Posted in TechI’ve had an SPV C600 for the best part of a year now and the other day a nice lady from Orange phoned offering me a new phone. The SPV E650 has been getting longing looks from me since its release so I was weak and said yes to a much reduced monthly outlay and a shiny new smartphone.
The main thing that attracted me to the C600 was its small size and ability to support Direct Push from an Exchange server so I could get my email, tasks and calendaring on the go. Like any smartphone, it had its drawbacks. The lack of wifi was the biggest hump for me to overcome in choosing it, but I really didn’t want a pocketpc brick since I haven’t the need of PDA type features.
So forward on 9 months and Orange have a couple of new SPV handsets to choose from. The E650 caught my eye because it supports wireless, isn’t much larger than the C600 and sports Windows Mobile 6. To top it all off; it has a sliding QWERTY keyboard which is very handy for those situations where typing using predictive text or tapping away like a lunatic (eg: entering email addresses or URLs) just didn’t cut it.
What made the whole deal better again was when I discovered MoDaCo.com and the SPV E650 de-Brand + Fix Pack which removed the naff theme and icons and restored the device to how WM6 should look. I’m liking this site a lot and think I’ve found a new hobby to tinker with! :p
I also discovered a handy program called BirdieSync that lets Thunderbird users synchronise WM devices using ActiveSync, it’s payware (€19.95) with a 21 day trial. If it does what it says on the tin, I’ll be investing in it because I prefer to use Thunderbird for my home email as I have a number of email addresses and a single IMAPS maildir which Outlook can’t seem to handle elegantly at all.
In order to sync calendar and task info there’s a choice of Mozilla’s Sunbird or the Lightning extension for Thunderbird. I also discovered Contacts Sidebar so the Thunderbird Address Book can be displayed in the, you guessed it . . . sidebar.
Obviously, there’ll be some quirks in the translation from Pocket Outlook to Thunderbird due to mapping the various fields for contacts, appointments and tasks but the software tries to mitigate these as best as possible (the program’s help file details this and suggests workarounds where appropriate).
It also seems to allow for some flexible category field mappings to let you define address books to automatically sync contact items to (eg: Seperate Home and Work address books with the contact’s category field marked respectively will get synced to the proper address book). The same goes for calendars. Items with no category field set can be handled seperately (ie: told not to sync. I plan to use this to keep my personal and work contacts seperated and synced to my home PC and Exchange account, and do the same for calendaring and tasks.
The only drawback was I had to unlock the phone so unsigned software could be installed in order to get the BirdieSync software installed on my device.
All told I’ve spend most of the weekend messing around with the phone and am enjoying the wireless support so I can sit and read news sites in comfort and I’m thinking RSS feeds could be the ticket for perusing on the restricted screen of such a device.
The next step is to get Live messenger and some means of establishing SSH connections would be great so I could get to my screen session and IRC. Mainly so I can goad and abuse my mates from the sofa while the football is on.