Blogging from my PDA - not quite

I was quite excited to get an Orange SPV M5000 on Monday. ‘Work’ is trialling them with their pre- and post-sales techies, and the bundle we’ve got (at the moment) is particularly good. With WiFi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth (and IR) they promised to be really useful tools, allowing us to keep in touch with the office while we’re out an about quite easily.

The SPV M5000 is basically the same as the O2 Xda Exec, and runs Windows Mobile 5.0. (I think it’s based on an i-mate JASJAR).

Now I know that in the past I moaned about my old Orange SPV C500. This particular phone only stayed with me for a few days before I replaced it with a Sony Ericsson K700i (which was rubbish too), so I was a little dubious about getting these new devices.

Anyway, the M5000 handsets were delivered, and we all got set up fairly easily (once Orange were reminded to turn on the GPRS). The first thing that strikes you about the C5000 is the size. It’s BIG! I told myself that it doesn’t matter as I only need it during working hours, and that means it’ll be in my case or on my desk - never in my pocket (or on my belt!). However, you do feel like a bit of a wally when you have the thing up to your head.

Features

In terms of features, so far I’ve found the phone great. Basically, the Pocket Outlook is great, and finally seems to work correctly. It synchronises with MS Exchange Server perfectly from just about anywhere, and adding software like PocketPuTTY makes it useful for my personal stuff too (I still read most of my mail using mutt over an ssh connection to my mail server!). PocketPuTTY is a bit buggy, and not having an escape key on the keyboard makes using vi or vim a bit of a challenge, but a Ctrl-C - Ctrl-C seems to do the job.

One thing that disappoints me is the lack of a decent (any…) RSS aggregator for Windows Mobile 5.0. I’ve done a hunt around and the software I’ve found is either really buggy, or you have to pay for it. Anyone know of a good aggregator for these PDAs?

I’ve not been able to find a good tool for posting to blogs either. I did find some Java thing but it was rather flaky so gave up on it. You’d think there would be loads of software out there for this kind of thing, but no - or at least not that I’ve come across yet.

Thoughts

So what do I think about the SPV M5000? Well, even though the screen on mine went after two days (I’ve got a replacement now) I think the tool has loads of potential. Connectivity-wise it’s great, and even though it runs Windows I’m growing to like it a lot. For it to be perfect for me I need a decent (Free) RSS reader and some good blogging software for my WordPress blogs would be useful.

I think it’s too early to give a fully qualified conclusion, but I will no doubt post more on this topic as I have stuff to say.