HTC TyTn II Windows Mobile

I’ve had my HTC TyTn II (aka Kaiser aka Vodafone V1615 aka HTC 4550) for a couple of weeks now – very impressed. This is almost the converged device I have been looking for (it is still a little too big to be perfect)…

• Wireless Networking 11g
• GPS
• Bluetooth
• GPRS / 3G / HSDPA
• 3MP Camera plus another low spec camera on the front !
• Full slide out keyboard
• Tilt screen

I have it set up for Exchange 2003 SP2 Direct Push email and I actually get the mails on my device a few seconds before they appear on my laptop (cached mode…).

The GPS is really good – it comes with TomTom and the ability to download one city (I chose London). I upgraded to all of UK. Start the TomTom application, it takes over the whole screen (including tool/task bars) and gives a very good 3D (or optional 2D) view of the surroundings. Route planning is very simple, mostly I enter the postcode and it finds an accurate match. I hooked it up to a universal mobile phone windscreen mount and am using it all the time.

With the Vodafone retail package you also get Spb GPRS Monitor which allows you to see how much data you are passing, allows charting of your usage by day, month, hour etc and allows you to set your tariff and get warned when you get to X% of your daily / monthly allowance.
So far even with my busy push email stuff going on I’m only at around 1MB per day.

Application I have installed / tried :

Agile Messenger – this is a pretty neat IM client that handles MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk and others. There is a 7 day free trial and after that costs $44.95 to register ( a bit costly). Actually I don’t see myself using this, instead I’m going for Windows Live Messenger for Mobile, this is actually a web app (so no install) but covers everything I need. The only bummer is that I have not yet been able to add a URL shortcut to my HTC Home Launcher plugin.

Diarist 2 – a freeware offline blogging client. Works with many services, and in particular dasBlog, so how could I resist. Also supports newMediaObject, so I can embed images etc no problem.

Kaiser Tweak – freeware application (manual install on the PDA) that tweaks a range of options on the Kaiser device – probably no use on other devices ?

MoDaCo NoData – another freeware utility, this allows you to turn off GPRS / data completely. Good for when travelling abroad and not wanting to get stung for ridiculous roaming data costs.

Google Maps for Mobile – not really used this in anger, not much need when I have TomTom already. The data requirements of this is pretty large but it is displayed to you as you use the application.

Plans :

Couple of things I’m planning on doing with this, the first is auto sending the GPS coordinates to a web service at regular intervals (every 5 minutes for example) – this is so that I can let people see where I am (obviously secured so that I can gives links to certain people only).
The other thing is getting a PocketIE URL into the HTC launcher screen- this normally only takes applications so it may require a small app that simply opens PocketIE and navigates to the chosen URL.

Observations :

It seems (maybe it’s just me ??) that I cannot turn off all notifications except the alarm clock easily, so using it as a bedside alarm is not an option

I have not made much use of the keyboard yet, mostly entered text via the stylus and onscreen keyboard.

After a couple of days on connecting to wireless access points (to save on the GPRS usage) I have now turned off the wireless feature, much easier to use GPRS/3G and the bandwidth used is not excessive.