The Tilt and Mandriva 2008.1

Shortly before our California trip, my phone did a goofy thing and wouldn’t turn on. It took me several attempts to get it working. It worked fine through the trip and then started acting up again after returning home. Given I’m out of a contract, I thought I’d start looking for a new phone. This is the saga of the new phone and one of its consequences, an upgrade to Mandriva 2008.1. If you’re not into geekery, move on… 🙂

A while back (a year or two ago), I noticed that phone handsets were getting to be quite powerful. Their interfaces, though, aren’t user friendly for what you might call large-format work – nice size viewing of movies or documents, a touch pad or mouse, a full size keyboard, and an optical drive. But the guts of them were getting to the point they could do most everything a laptop could do (more than a traditional PDA). I began to be interested in trying something like that out.

When I needed to look into a new phone, I decided to check out the high end. Since my first observation of ‘superphones’, Apple came out with their iPhone. I thought it would be worth checking into, as well as some other handsets, including Palms (both running Palm OS and Windows Mobile), Blackberries, Nokias, and other Windows Mobile phones. I quickly discovered one thing that I had been pondering for a while: bulit-in GPS. Further, I discovered that there are a couple of pieces of aviation oriented GPS software that will run on Windows Mobile OS.

I compared specs for probably over a dozen phones. There were several strong contenders. Only one that AT&T offered had all the hardware and software I really wanted, the Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser). I did look at the iPhone, and considered one of the Blackberries, too (wrong OS and no camera, drat!). There was also a Samsung (similar to the Blackjack 2) that basically met my specs but AT&T wasn’t offering it so I would have had to pay full retail (AT&T discounts handsets ~$250 with a 2-year contract).

We took a trip to the mall and I was able to play with a real live iPhone and a real live Tilt. If you google reviews and read lots of them for both units, you’ll get a surprisingly accurate picture of how they both are for users. The Tilt definitely has some drawbacks (WM6 is slow… surprise surprise), but it won out for me.

The iPhone interface really is nice, but having a keyboard for typing longer messages was an advantage for the Tilt (despite the size and weight penalty). Also, the iPhone has no GPS, won’t run WM software (i.e. the aviation GPS stuff I wanted to try), and its battery can’t be changed by the user (only Apple could dream up something like that).

I’ve had the Tilt for a week now and can give a bit of a review. Because of my desire to use Linux, it became convenient to upgrade to Mandriva 2008.1 (I was running 2008.0 previously). I’ll focus on that at the end, comparing Vista with Linux as they relate to the phone. First, the phone itself.

So far, I’ve found its size and weight to be acceptable. At first, I was using the slide out keyboard almost exclusively because the Windows Media input software is, frankly, worthless. Fortunately, it’s possible to load additional input software. I found some that claimed to be like the iPhone, which I liked okay in the store. I wound up, though, with one that has several context-dependent profiles and a couple of different modes that has nice big on-screen buttons sized appropriately for my right thumb. I’ve grown to like the interface that is, I’d say, a touch-screen version of the Blackberry Pearl. It’s laid out in QWERTY fashion with two letters per button (and if you press and hold, a number or symbol pops up). Of course, that includes predictive text input and spell/entry check as well as the ability to select suggestions with the touch screen (try that, Blackberry!). Pretty dang slick.

Having reached input nirvana, I loaded up some GPS software. The Kaiser ships in some markets with TomTom. In the U.S. it ships with something else. I grabbed the TomTom cab which will work on the Tilt and installed it. It works exactly like you’d expect a TomTom to work and the best part is not needing additional hardware since the GPS receiver is built into the phone. I also got a scaled down version of an aviation GPS program which does a whole host of pretty slick things. I’m starting to think, though, that I may try out another one which might be even better (though not free). One problem I have observed is that it has difficulty receiving GPS signals in airplanes. I haven’t had a chance yet to try it in the DC-10, but hopefully I will soon. I’m not sure if it’s a signal reception problem (i.e. put it by the window) or if it’s a speed issue (it can’t figure out how to go 500 knots across the ground).

The Tilt also has WiFi. As a result, I went with a voice-only plan, which is what I had before. I’ve used the WiFi quite extensively and it works well. It will pick up hotspots and allow me to connect to the internet. I have yet to load a better (than Internet Explorer) browser, but I’m thinking I’ll get to that soon. I’ve heard from other pilots that I could actually access my schedule using Opera Mini (IE Moble doesn’t work). I decided against the data plan because WiFi is now so prevalent (I used it in Denny’s the other day) and the overseas data still isn’t unlimited (bah).

The phone also comes with a 3 megapixel camera. The refresh rate, which has been a gripe of some people, is, indeed, not so swell. The image quality is good, though, and having auto-focus is quite nice. There’s no optical zoom, and the digital zoom appears to only be available in certain modes (what’s up with that?). It’ll take movies, too, which the iPhone won’t do.

With my 8 gig microSD card (yeah, baby), I’ve got plenty of room for whatever I can find to capture in pictures or movies. I’ve also got plenty of room for music. The Tilt can do stereo bluetooth and I got a stereo bluetooth headset (the Best Buy brand, Insignia). It’s just okay. I’ve noticed it doesn’t reliably pair (sometimes takes several attempts). Once paired, though, it plays the music in stereo, pauses when calls come in, and resumes it when the call ends. Goodbye iPod.

And while we’re talking headsets, one goofyness of WM6, the sound profiles, and Skype, is that Skype doesn’t forward its audio to the regular handsfree headset. With the regular (mono) bluetooth headset on, the sound comes out of the speaker on the back which renders Skype mostly useless. However, hook up the stereo headset, which directs all of the system sound to the headphones, and Skype works as it should, including using the built in mic. So now, I can Skype from my phone anywhere there’s a WiFi connection. Uber cool.

So what are the downsides then? It’s slow overall. Opening the keyboard changes the screen orientation from portrait to landscape with takes 3 or 4 seconds sometimes. The media player loads slow and doesn’t have playlist editing capability (leave it to Microsoft to give us something like that). IE Moble is slow and doesn’t do some things it should. Oh, and one really stupid downside is that the alarm feature, which is actually pretty decent overall, won’t over ride the sound when it’s turned off and ring audibly. It does warn you of that rather stupid behavior. The best workaround I’ve found so far is to turn the phone radio off (so I don’t receive calls or text messages) and leave the sound on, but then I miss my calls and text messages as they come in (no missed call log and incorrect text time stamps).

And what about Mandriva? Well, Mandriva has had a history of leading the way in consumer desktop ease of operation. They did it again (kind of) with 2008.1. It’s the first distribution that claims to be able to sync to WM5/6 devices out of the box. And, really, that’s a true statement, though it deserves some qualification.

I started out trying to upgrade my packages in 2008.0 and that didn’t work out (there are a lot of under-the-surface changes). So I decided to upgrade since I had already downloaded 2008.1 and was just waiting for a convenient time. There were some other bugs with 2008.0 that I was hoping to be rid of, too (some of which, in fact, are fixed). I read the directions … kind of. I have to take a big chunk of the blame for my own frustration in getting my phone to sync under Linux. Having said that, the directions were a tad vague in a couple of areas and I skipped one critically important step (adjusting the firewall). Oops.

Backing up a hair, though, I had to get my contacts off my old phone. Getting it to even power up was quite a production but I finally managed. It’s software is proprietary and far uglier than ActiveSync (which is what the new phone works). I managed to get my contacts into Vista in the Windows Address Book. It’s worth noting that Outlook is *not* the Windows Address Book, the Windows Address Book can only export to CSV and vCards, and ActiveSync only syncs to Outlook. Thanks, Microsoft. It turns out, I’m not the first person to experience the frustration of this setup.

Instead of merely syncing contacts using ActiveSync, I had to load every contact manually with a separate vCard into my new phone. I exported them from Windows Address Book to vCards (~160 of them) and transferred them as files using ActiveSync. Fortunately, that didn’t really take *that* long (2~3 minutes of clicking the screen twice for each contact).

Once I had the data on the new phone, I went back to Mandriva to get the contacts into Kontact (the KDE mail / addressbook / calendar app). I’ll spare the mostly-self-induced frustration, but I did finally get it to work. And once I got it working, it really worked, which is more than I can say for Vista. Synce-KPM / KitchenSync will allow for installing programs (just like ActiveSync), and syncing of contacts, tasks, and calendars (like ActiveSync, but better because it actually works). What it won’t do is transfer files. I discovered a piece of software, though, that I can load on the phone that will allow the memory card to appear as a USB mass storage device. That works under Linux. I have to give a shout out to Adam Williamson at Mandriva for 1) making Mandriva the first (and only) out-of-the-box sync capable Linux distribution, and 2) pointing me to the mass storage trick. And the rest of 2008.1 is a further improvement from the already pretty darn good 2008.0. I think I’m as happy as I’ve ever been with my OS now. 🙂

Even so, I can’t forgo the ‘fair’ reporting of the bad stuff. A bug I submitted quite a while back (truly minor) in Kmail still isn’t fixed. I’m still not totally happy with the WiFi networking driver / software arrangement with 2008.1. And, darn it, Sun has sat on 64-bit Java webstart applets for 5 years now. Shame on Sun. Because I use 64-bit Firefox, I can’t use Java. Dirty buggers. My old solution was to install 32 bit java and use Netscape 32-bit (that worked). I’m probably going to look for a new solution now that Netscape has become no more (pout).

Even with the drawbacks, I’m able to do everything with Mandriva that I need to do (except my taxes, only because I choose to use software v.s. web-based), and I enjoy a far more reliable, stable, and less frustrating environment than any of the Microsoft OS’s (XP or Vista).

Now with all that done, I can get back to blogging! 😉

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