I’m not asking for advice, in the sense of opinions about quality. I’m looking for factual information. I need to know if there are any smartphones on the market which have the features I’m looking for.
My Palm Tungsten E PDA died a few months ago. I’m looking for something to replace it. I don’t really need a cell phone, as the one I have works fine, but from what I see, no one makes plains PDAs any more. The only equivalent seems to be some kind of smartphone. But there are a lot of things about smartphones that I don’t like, and that’s why I’ve come to The Teeming Masses for help.
Among the features that I don’t like about the new smartphones is that they seem to be designed for - and dependent on - internet access. I don’t need YouTube or Facebook to keep me entertained. What I need is to be able to access my notes and other documents, and edit them, even when I’m not connected to the internet.
My phone service is with AT&T, so I went to their website to see what new Palm phones they have. The only ones they have are the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. From what I can tell, neither one has an easy way to edit text files, or to sync them with my pc. (They say there might be 3rd-party apps that can do it, but that’s another layer of hassle that I’d rather avoid.) I also don’t like the fact that their touchscreen is for fingers only. I hate the inaccuracy of that. I want to be able to use a stylus.
From what I can figure out, the best Palm for me is the Treo 680, which I can buy used on EBay, and just put my sim card in to use as a phone. It seems to come with DocumentsToGo just like my old Palm Tungsten did.
Here are the features I’m looking for:
I don’t care whether it is a phone or not, but it has to fit in my pocket, and that seems to rule out any sort of laptop or netbook. If you know of an exception for under $200, please tell me.
I don’t care whether it has internet or not. If it does, I probably won’t buy any access, at least for the first few months.
I need to be able to transfer files back and forth to my pc.
I need to be able to edit those files. I’m not too picky about the format. Doc files would be great, but I’ll settle for rtf or even txt.
I’d prefer a touchscreen with a stylus. I’ll settle for a trackball, but I’ve tried my wife’s iPad, and the inaccuracy of using my finger drives me crazy.
I’d prefer an actual, physical keyboard with buttons. An onscreen keyboard would be okay, provided I can use a stylus, not a finger.
I have never had to actually use a smart phone to edit a doc, but the rule of thumb tended to be that smart phones were best at viewing docs, but not editing.
I would say at the moment that the best possible solution is to simply go on craigslist or Kijji and or any other type service and simply replace the tungsten E with another one.
I have the HTC Desire. It is not very good for document editing. The virtual keyboard takes about half the screen so it leaves little space to view the text.
Also it is rather hard to type on a virtual keyboard. I make lots of errors and cannot type very fast. Word prediction does not work well enough most of the times.
Your best choice might be a smartphone with a sliding keyboard but there arent many of those available.
Sounds like you want a Windows Mobile phone with SoftMaker Office 2010 or Office Mobile 2007 on it. Something like the AT&T Tilt 2, with its big screen, physical keyboard, and stylus-based resistive touch screen.
That’s the phone I currently use and I do a lot of writing on it. It works out quite well.
Bizarre. The HTC Tilt2 on this page seems to NOT have have slide-out keyboard, only an onscreen one. But it’s out of my price range anyway. But I’ll ask at the store and be sure.
I don’t have any suggestions for phones, but this is going to be expensive to do. If you choose the discounted price for the initial smart phone purchase, they pretty much all force you into a 2 year data + voice contract. Sure, you can opt to pay full price for the phone, but from my calculations, it usually ends up being the same or more as just biting the bullet and getting the 2 year contract.
If you do end up having to do something that involves an Internet connection, I can heartily recommend Evernote. I’ve got an iPhone, an iPad, and 2+ computers. Evernote has been a wonderful way to keep important notes that I can access/edit from any of my devices.
Not quite what you seem to be looking for, but I got a little 4" X 8" bluetooth keyboard for use with my portable devices:This DSI model.
I use it whenever I need to do more than write simple stuff.
It beats the heck out of phone keypads, real or virtual, at the price of somewhat lower portability.
Yeah, I’ve come to the same conclusion and resigned myself to it.
So I went to one of the local AT&T stores, where I found a model (sorry, I forgot the name) which had a keyboard, and a stylus, and Office Mobile. But even though it would let me retrieve, edit, and save my documents, the only place to save them is in the Cloud. I don’t remember the name of whatever Microsoft is calling it, but if I understood it correctly, files cannot be saved on the phone itself, only somewhere on the internet. And I did understand it correctly, as the salesperson confirmed that I wouldn’t be able to get to my files if I was in a location where there was no internet service. He said (as I expected) that feature is available only on the older models; newer models are geared to internet service exclusively.
Can someone explain to me why the market is moving in that direction? Why are people willing to put up with having their files unavailable? I know that I’m not the only person who frequently finds myself in dead areas. I’m starting to believe the nuts who say that Microsoft wants my files specifically so that they can hack into them.
It’s not a Microsoft thing. Microsoft is actually a pretty late comer into the cloud computing world.
I’m no expert on it, but in my opinion, it’s being driven by a few things:
1 - Internet connections really are becoming ubiquitous. As you mention, it’s not everywhere yet, and that’s a problem. But it’s getting better, every day, and it’s not going to be too many more years before it’ll be rare to find a dead spot.
2 - More and more people have multiple devices that connect to the Internet. I now have 3 computers, a phone, and an iPad. It’s damn convenient to have stuff stored on the Web/Cloud/whereever, because I can access my stuff on any of my devices.
3 - More and more, people don’t want to spend money on computers. If you’re using web-based apps, your computer just has to run a browser pretty well, and you don’t have to buy Microsoft Word or Paintshop or whatever app you want to use. You just connect to Google Docs and use their tools. Google Docs requires an Internet connection, so you might as well just store your doc online too, since you gotta have a connection to even run the software.
Sounds like you’ve made a decision, but I was going to recommend an iPod Touch. You can buy DocumentsToGo with editing capabilities (which I assume i what you’ve been using on the Palm). There are some other options, including Apple’s Numbers, Pages and KeyNotes apps.
Even better, you can load in software to use RDC, VNC or other remote access tools, and connect to your home computer directly. This may not fit your non-cloud requirement, but it is the best option feature-wise. You’ll be working with the full-featured Office programs on the home computer, not just scaled-down limited versions like DocsToGo. I’m using an iPad this way myself - it’s basically just a thin client terminal to connect to my desktop and server computers.
You might look at Android phones, most have an SD card where you can save stuff. You’d need to make sure there’s an app that allows you to save the type of files you’re interested in rather than uploading to the cloud, but I’m pretty sure that will be easy to find. The hard part might be finding the specific type of phone you’re looking for.
edit: I just searched and the first free app I saw can view/create/save/edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and view PDF and CHM files.
Keeve, I have a bunch of phones like the Kaiser / Tilt / Fuze / Touch Pro 2 / Tilt 2 that I’m not using, all of which are great at editing stuff and all of which will run on your AT&T network. If you want one of them, no charge, let me know and we’ll figure out how to send it to you.