I do like my Samsung Epix, but I am starting to wish I'd just gotten an iPhone instead.I ended up hard resetting my Epix a couple days ago, after barely 3 weeks of operation. Then I started the process of syncing with my laptop at work. The next day, for whatever reason, my organization decided to ban the use of all removable media and demand we scan our computers, and leave them connected and turned on. Even if we take them home with us, we were told to leave them for the rest of the week unless a mission critical reason exists. I'm not sure what the big deal is, but apparently it's organization wide (this is a very, very large organization). OK, I'd gotten tired of all the hassles with synchronizing a Windows Mobile device with 2 computers, but even though I had a good sync at work, I had to delete that relationship and sync at home. Of course, in the process, a whole buttload of appointments duplicated, but to top it all off, a bunch of my tasks deleted themselves.
I'm going to work on decentralizing my workflow away from Windows Mobile and Microsoft Outlook so that the next time I get a phone, I don't have to talk myself into a Windows Mobile device again. I've used every version of Windows Mobile from 2002 to 6.1, and the amount of progress on this platform is not impressive at all. Yeah, I know, the iPhone got a non-recessed headset jack, 3G, and GPS along with a Stalinistic app store, but at least you don't have to hard reset the darn thing every 3 weeks.
One feature I'd love to see in Windows Mobile is the ability to backup and restore. I have a BlackBerry 7130e that was issued to me from work. It came with BlackBerry OS 4.1. I found out 4.2 was available. Get this, while upgrading, the BlackBerry desktop manager BACKED UP all of my information, so that when it upgraded the OS, everything was back where I left it! I got my iPod Touch (32 GB) around my birthday in March. I've been through several updates to it since that time. There was a 1.x upgrade or two, then the 2.0, then 2.01, then 2.02, then 2.1. I have NEVER lost a single bit of data from my Touch. I went on a business trip to Maine in May. I went on another trip and stayed at that same hotel in September. Would you believe that after at least 3 firmware upgrades, the Touch STILL had the hotel's wi-fi network in it's memory? I took it out in the lobby and it connected right away. It didn't bother asking me. Wow.
OK, so how am I going to decentralize? Well, I'm starting to move my Outlook notes and a lot of my OneNote notes (especially OneNote Mobile) into Evernote. I also considered Google Notebook. Both have advantages. Google Notebook doesn't apparently have a limit on total amounts of information, while Evernote Free is a 40 MB a month limit. However, Google Notebook does seem to have a limit on the size of notes that can be captured. I've clipped some humongous web pages into Evernote without complaint, while Google Notebook will decide that a note is too large and truncate it. I'm also thinking about moving into Google Calendar, but I'm not sure what the best way to do that is.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my workflow recently. I came to realize that just like our military sometimes spends a lot of time training to fight wars from far in the past (I was in while the Navy was switching from Russian to Persian Gulf tactics), my workflow was largely based in the past when I had a device without a thick pipeline to the internet. Now that I have a 3G data plan, I should be able to use some of the free and highly useful services online.
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