My faithful Palm Treo 650 has occationally been acting up so I decided to get a replacement.
I would wish to get the Palm Pre Plus or the Pixi but the price is on
the extreme end & it has not exactly come to the local shores.
Hopefully with the purchase of Palm by HP, they will bring it in at a
more affordable price.
Due to being accustomed to the convenience of a qwerty keyboard &
touchsceen of the Palm, my minimum criteria for getting a new phone was
those. This ruled out both the Iphone & the Blackberry. I also need
to be able to read & write in Chinese since a number of my contacts
have Chinese names & sometimes need to receive sms in Chinese.
So searching for alternatives led me to the Nokia N900. One of the
main reason that this made it attractive for me was the underlying OS
that is linux. Being opensource means more freedom to choose & free
software.
Shifting to the N900 takes a lot of getting used to. the qwerty
keypad has bigger keys & the width spans the length of the phone in
landscape mode so the thumbs have to move across more area. The texture
is a little rough so using the fingernails like I do on the Treo makes
the feel a bit weird.
Among the first things I need to do was to ensure that I got Chinese
support in so I can read & write with it. I installed
mscim-googlepinyin & I was able to enter the characters. The problem
though is that it conflicts with the virtual keyboard so I am stuck
with using the qwerty for the english input.
Once the chinese characters are working, its time to migrate my data.
on my Treo, I’m using KeySuite from Chapura rather the built-in
Contacts. KeySuite allowed me to sync the data to Microsoft Outlook
& the full range of data fields like 19 phone numbers & emails
plus personal details like spouse & anniversaries. Nokia on the
other hand uses PC Suite to sync Outlook with the phone. There is a new
alternative called Ovi Suite but it currently does not support the N900.
After installing PC Suite & syncing the data, I realized I have
big problems. A lot of the data are missing like Middle Names, Title,
Suffix, Spouse, Anniversry, children. These fields I’ve used to the
fullest on the Treo. To migrate, the least I have to change is to edit
the Middle Names & move the phone numbers around. Other those, I
won’t be able to access all the information I’ve collected over the
years. Also, it appears that the N900 does not even have a basic search
function for its contents. This is one nightmare for me since all my
data are stored.
Now I’m editing all my contacts just so I have the basic names and
still trying to find an alternative program that will allow me to have
all my data and be able to sync with Outlook. If you know one, let me
know.
