dale lane

It’s fair to say that more than a few people have commented that my phone is a bit big, and that it is difficult to make a call with it without looking like a bit of a berk. 🙂

Not any more! If you’ve been following me on twitter, you might have seen me obsessively tracking my latest gadget toy from the U.S – an “LG Style-I” bluetooth handset. It finally arrived today.

It’s essentially like a bluetooth headset – except it has buttons, looks like a normal phone and you don’t have to strap it to your ear.

(Maybe it was just Doctor Who which scared me off bluetooth headsets? 😉)

If I don’t need to use my phone as a PDA, I can just leave it in the bottom of my bag. I can just have this in my pocket and use it like a regular phone (with the only difference being that it uses the Ameo in my bag for it’s cell signal).

The handset can make or receive calls – the display with show stuff like incoming caller-ID from the phone and as well as being able to dial numbers normally I can still use stuff like the voice command and speed dials. It looks enough like a phone that I imagine most people seeing it will assume it is a mobile. Which is all much more practical when out and about.

There isn’t really a big market for these things… unless you also have a phone the size of a textbook, you probably wont need it. But I still think it’s pretty cool. 🙂

I keep my PDA in my inside jacket pocket – so I can get to it quickly. For the same reason, I keep other things there that I need to grab in a hurry.

Like London Underground Travelcards.

Apparently they don’t work so well after sitting next to to T-Mobile Ameo PDAs. Or, to be more precise, the ridiculously strong magnet that is in the base of the Ameo to hold the screen to the keyboard. (See this animation if you are curious about how this works).

I ended up having to ask the nice Underground staff to let me through manually at every station I went through for the rest of the day, because my ticket was trashed.

Whoops.

Slightly worryingly, I had my credit card in there, too. I’m guessing that is probably trashed now as well. (So far, all the shops I’ve used it in since have used the chip rather than the magnetic strip, so I don’t know for sure.)

Lesson of the day – keep my PDA away from magnetic strips… 🙂

I’ve been using the T-Mobile Ameo for a couple of weeks now – so now I’ve given it a proper try I thought I’d post my conclusions. (And then shut up about it 🙂 )

Feature-wise, the Ameo is hard to argue with – it has pretty much everything that I might want. The question is more about whether it’s a good device to use, particularly considering it’s size. The answer – perhaps somewhat predictably – depends on how you use a mobile device.

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I just got a text message letting me know that I missed a phone call this morning. I’m new to T-Mobile (I’ve been with O2 for ages) and didn’t realise that they did this.

From their website:

Phones usually only track your missed calls when your line is busy or you don’t answer – that’s no longer the case now we’ve launched Who Called.

Who Called provides you – via text – with details of the last five unique missed calls you’ve had in the previous three days.

We send you texts with details of calls received while your phone was unreachable (out of coverage or turned off) – providing no voice message has been left.

With O2, if someone phoned me while my phone was out of coverage (not unusual here at Hursley, annoyingly) or switched off, I’d never know unless they left a message – something most people don’t do.

This is quite a neat idea 🙂

A quick tip I picked up for getting more out of your battery while using a smartphone away from a power source for a day or two. Set the network type to GSM only – ignoring 3G. If you’re not web browsing and are only relying on connectivity to periodically check your email inboxes, then you won’t notice any real difference. But you’ll get extra hours out of your battery!

In Windows Mobile you can do this from:
Start -> Settings -> Phone -> Band – changing the setting from Auto to GSM.

This particularly makes a difference if you’re travelling (like when I’ve been working this week on the train to London), or are in an area where the 3G coverage isn’t great. This is because having your phone repeatedly flick back and forth between using GPRS and UMTS really chews up your battery life.

When you get to where you are going (and are in an area with a decent 3G connection) you can always switch the setting back to UMTS and get the benefits of the faster connection.

I’ve been the proud owner of a shiny new T-Mobile Ameo (a phone/PDA based on the HTC Advantage design) for a day now, so thought I’d post my first thoughts on it.

Before I start, it’s worth pointing out a couple of things. Firstly, I’m on holiday this week so I’ve not used it in earnest yet. These are my first impressions from playing with it at home and setting it up. Secondly, this is mainly going to be in terms of a comparison with my last PDA (the O2 XDA Exec – based on the HTC Universal), which I had for about a year and a half, and loved. So this may not be very objective!

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