As you know, last week I was in Florida at the Orange Developer’s Camp in Cape Canaveral. After a miserable experience relying solely on the P1610, I took both it and my Dell XPS M1330 with me, to see how they fared. Most of the event was spent in sessions, where everyone (myself included) was taking notes on the speaker. Thankfully, Orange had equipped each room with 10+ power strips, enough for each person to have several ports, and this greatly helped with the utility of the P1610. In the future, I’ll certainly be picking up an extended battery for it, so I don’t have to hassle with half-brightness and whatnot.
This was also my first real adventure with Microsoft’s OneNote, which came with the P1610. This application is much like a digital notebook, and it works excellently. I’ve had access to it before, but always on a traditional non-touchscreen laptop, so the utility was completely lost on me.
I also took the Dell along to a few sessions, though I found myself getting more and more distracted with that, being tempted to blog, check email, or other multitasking during the presentations.
As for the phones, I found myself stuck on Old Faithful, the N95-3, most of the time. It’s really just a solid performer. The E71 is great, but I’m far quicker on the T9 keypad, as opposed to a full-on QWERTY, and find it easier to use without focusing on it. The 5800 is great, especially for movies on the flight, but as a primary phone, proved useless for me. I didn’t power the N800 on a single time throughout the event.
The real winner, clearly, is the P1610 + OneNote combination. It was the same as having a physical pad and paper, only a bit more geeky, and I now have them in digital format, and can automatically convert most of my scribblings into text, which I can then copy/paste. It’s also easier to keep up with and store multiple copies of.
Ricky Cadden 